August 2025 Update Available for Subscribers to Download

The Office 365 for IT Pros team is delighted to announce the availability of monthly update #122 for Office 365 for IT Pros (2026 edition). This is the first update since the publication of the 2026 book, and it includes a bunch of changes covering new information unearthed or researched over the last month. You can see more details about the updates in our change log.

Subscribers for the 2026 edition can fetch the updated files using the link in the receipt emailed to them from Gumroad.com after their purchase. The link is personalized to the subscriber and always fetches the latest files. See our FAQ for more information.

Many previous subscribers have renewed for the 2026 edition. We are humbled by the level of support we receive from the technical community. If you are a previous subscriber, you should have received email from us with instructions about how to extend your subscription at a heavily discounted rate. Because we became tired of Gumroad.com emails being blocked as spam, we sent individual emails to thousands of previous subscribers. I believe every subscriber should have received a note from us by now. If not, please contact us at o365itprosrenewals AT office365itpros.com.

Microsoft Cloud Keeps on Growing

Microsoft released their FY25 Q4 results on July 30. One of the eye-popping figures was a big leap in Microsoft Cloud revenue to $46.7 billion (up 27% year-over-year). That’s $21 billion more in a quarter than Microsoft earned in FY23 Q1 and represents an annualized run rate of $186.8 billion. Microsoft 365 continues to grow strongly with its revenue up 16% year-over-year. Seat growth is slowing and was 6% year-over-year, mostly in SME and frontline workers. Slower seat growth is inevitable given the size of the installed base (over 430 million, according to CFO Amy Hood when discussing the Microsoft FY25 Q3 results). The growth in revenues is due to upsell to more expensive licenses, including Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Speaking about Copilot, in the best traditional of misleading figures given out during results briefings, Satya Nadella said “Our family of Copilot apps has surpassed 100 million monthly active users across commercial and consumer.” The number claimed sounds impressive, but what everyone really wants to know is how many Microsoft 365 Copilot paid seats are in active use. It was followed by the assertion that “Purview is used by three quarters of Microsoft 365 Copilot customers to protect their data.” Again, no real data to measure anything against.

Interestingly, once again Microsoft didn’t give an updated number for Teams users. The number remains at the 320 million monthly active users claimed in October 2023.

Speaking of numbers, Microsoft reported a 99.995% performance against the Microsoft 365 SLA for the second quarter of 2025. That might come as news to any tenant that experienced a significant outage between April and June, but the result is unsurprising given the number of tenants and seats. It takes a massive outage involving tens of millions of seats over several hours to budge the SLA needle slightly. Outages happen all the time, but none at the level of severity necessary to impact the SLA

Update for the Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell eBook

As is our practice, we released an update for the Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell eBook earlier than the monthly Office 365 for IT Pros update. The PowerShell book is included with Office 365 for IT Pros, so subscribers should see 4 files when they access the update on Gumroad.com (PDF and EPUB files for both books).

The PowerShell book is available separately, but Office 365 for IT Pros subscribers do not have to purchase it. If you want to read a physical copy, you can buy a paperback version from Amazon.com. I haven’t actually seen the paperback yet, but I plan to get some author copies for delivery to the TEC 2025 conference in Minneapolis at the end of September. Come to TEC and you might get a signed copy! If not, you can still attend TEC sessions delivered by Tony, Paul, Brian, and Michel.

On to Monthly Update #123

Microsoft 365 doesn’t stop changing and we don’t stop analyzing and documenting the most important technical information for Microsoft 365 tenant administrators. It’s what we’ve done since 2015.