Subscribers Can Download Files for Monthly Update #117 Now

The Office 365 for IT Pros author team is delighted to announce the availability of the March 2025 update for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2025 edition) eBook. This is monthly update #117. Readers can check the update number of the book on the inside front cover. Details of the update are available in our change log.

This update also includes update #9 for the Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell book, the most complete and comprehensive coverage of using PowerShell to create solutions based on Microsoft 365 data. Despite the recent quality problems for the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK, we still have strong faith in the usefulness of the PowerShell SDK and the ability it gives tenant administrators to access and use data across a wide range of workloads.

Subscribers can download the updated files from their Gumroad account or by using the download link in the receipt they received by email following their original purchase. The link in the receipt always accesses the latest files. See our FAQ for more information about how to download updates.

The Demise of Skype

The flux within the Microsoft ecosystem was dramatically illustrated by last Friday’s announcement that Microsoft will close down the Skype service on May 5, 2025. While the only impact on Microsoft 365 tenants will be the retirement of Skype interoperability with Teams (MC1019985, 28 February 2025), the demise of Skype is a sign of the ruthlessness that can happen when large corporations seek savings to invest elsewhere. Anything that doesn’t generate a good return is likely to be canned, which is what happened with Viva Goals late last year.

On a personal level, I don’t think I shall miss Skype too much. The app is installed on my PC and phone, but I don’t think I have made a Skype call in a year or more. Microsoft wants people to move to Teams personal (aka Teams for free), which I also have. However, I don’t use Teams personal for calling either because of the ubiquity of WhatsApp and the easy availability of low-cost data eSIMs around the world.

Some have pointed to the $8.5 billion price paid for Skype in 2011 and wondered if Microsoft got value for the purchase. I think that they did. The challenges of scaling up Teams to deal with the demand for online meetings when the pandemic happened were huge, and the experience of running the Skype backend was invaluable (according to Rish Tandon, who ran Teams engineering at the time). It can be argued that the pandemic made Teams and propelled its development to a point where it now supports 320 million monthly active users (the latest figure from October 2023). Without the success of Teams, would the Microsoft cloud now be at an annualized run rate of $163.6 billion? In that light, the investment in Skype seems like a rounding error.

Microsoft 365 Security for IT Pros

We are often asked about updates for the Microsoft 365 Security for IT Pros eBook. The facts are that we have nothing to do with this book. After sharing some of our processes and procedures to help the author team get up and running for the original edition in 2020, we have had no interaction with the book since. The latest edition appeared in 2023 and it seems like some difficulties have occurred in keeping the material updated.

We understand the book update challenge very well because publishing a monthly update takes a lot of time and effort. Muscle memory makes the task a little easier after 117 updates, but it’s still not as easy as some might think.

On to Update #118

Heading into March, we have started work on update #118. This will be the ninth update for Office 365 for IT Pros (2025 Edition), so it’s time to start thinking about the next edition. We typically publish a new edition on July 1 each year and I don’t anticipate any change to that cadence. But the writing team will get together at the Microsoft HQ in late March for the annual MVP summit and I am sure we’ll have a chat about the next version then. Stay tuned!

Stay updated with developments across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. We do the research to make sure that our readers understand the technology. The Office 365 book package includes the Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell eBook.