Monthly Update #125 Now Available for Download

The Office 365 for IT Pros team is happy to announce the availability of the November 2025 update for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2026 edition) eBook. This is the 125^th monthly update. We’ve also published an update for the Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell eBook (now at version 17.3).

Subscribers can download the updated PDF and EPUB files from Gumroad.com. The link in the receipt you received always fetches the latest files. See our FAQ for more information about downloading updated, and our change log for details of what’s changed in update #125.

Hype, BS, and Misunderstandings

Some of the commentary that appears on the internet is in a state of outrageous ignorance. Two recent examples involving Teams come to mind. The first was the revelation that attackers could extract and reuse access tokens from the local state file that Teams uses to track cookies and other metadata. The security researcher was very excited by this finding but quite forgot that an attacker needed physical control over a workstation to carry out the exploit.

The second was the hubris around the upcoming change to add automatic location updates so that when people come into the office, Teams will update their location to “Office” instead of the user doing so manually. This was interpreted as an example of employee surveillance, an assessment that rapidly fell apart once anyone with an ounce of sense and some knowledge about how Teams works looked at what actually happens. The sad quality of the material some publish in the pursuit of web page views…

Microsoft’s FY26 Q1 Results

Microsoft published their FY26 Q1 results on October 29, 2025. The Microsoft Cloud is now at an annualized revenue run rate of $196.4 billion (at a 68% margin) and the number of Microsoft 365 commercial seats seems to be around 446 million based on a 6% year-over-year growth (slowing gradually). No number was provided for the Teams user base, so we’re still stuck at the 320 million stated in October 2023. However, we did hear that Entra ID now has one billion monthly active users.

Apart from those numbers, there wasn’t much to get excited about from a Microsoft 365 perspective. All the vibe at the market analysts meeting was about how happy Microsoft is with Copilot’s progress. In reinforcing this impression, Microsoft misses no opportunity to push out data snippets that seem impressive but are pretty worthless.

Satya Nadella said: “Just nine months since release, tens of millions of users across Microsoft 365 customer base are already using Chat.” That seems good, but he didn’t specify how many of these people have licenses and how many use the free Microsoft Copilot Chat. The statement that “first party family of Copilots now has surpassed 150 million monthly active users” is similarly light on detail. For instance, what constitutes an active Copilot user?

Nadella went on to say that “Adoption is accelerating rapidly, growing 50% quarter over quarter, and we continue to see usage intensity increase.” That 50% growth appears impressive, but is the growth for free Copilot or the $360/year version? And without a base to measure against, it’s hard to know if Copilot grew from 40 to 60 seats or are millions of seats involved. Finally, the assertion that “more than 90% of the Fortune 500 now use Microsoft 365 Copilot.” is another example of Microsoft’s undoubted skill at obfuscating market numbers because no one knows how many seats are involved and if the Fortune 500 are seriously implementing Copilot or just kicking the tires.

Microsoft cited three customer examples of customers buying over 15,000 seats, one customer deploying 30,000 seats, and PWC with 200,000 seats. That’s not a lot to justify the $34.9 billion of capital expenditures in the quarter “driven by growing demand for our cloud and AI offerings.” I guess that spending so much to beef up datacenters for AI doesn’t matter so much when Microsoft is throwing off $45 billion cash flow in a quarter.

I loved the assertion about “16 billion Copilot interactions audited by Purview.” Purview certainly captures audit events for Copilot interactions, but that’s not auditing. Unless you need some faux statistics, of course. And of course, a Copilot interaction usually generates at least two audit events (prompt and response), so the big number isn’t quite as impressive.

Knowing How Technology Works

What all of this proves is that reading news published on the internet and taking everything on face value creates a certain impression. Reading the same news and knowing how Microsoft 365 works means that you’re not going to be caught out and impressed by bogus news or over-hyped data. The mission of Office 365 for IT Pros is to spread knowledge based on hard experience and expertise. Now on to monthly update #126.