Monthly Update #112 for Office 365 for IT Pros eBook

The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce that files are available for download for the October 2024 update of:

Office 365 for IT Pros (2025 edition) in PDF and EPUB formats.

Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell in PDF and EPUB formats.

Subscribers can download the updates files using the link in the receipt emailed to them after their original purchase or from the library in their Gumroad.com account. We no longer make a Kindle version of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook available through Amazon. It proved too difficult to release updates to readers through the convoluted Amazon process. The Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell book is available through Amazon in Kindle and paperback versions. The paperback is our first attempt at delivering a printed book and the response has been interesting. It seems clear that people still like to have text on paper for reference books.

See our change log for information about the changes in the October 2024 update and our FAQ for details about how to download updates.

Notable September Changes in the Ecosystem

To ensure that the book content is updated and remains current, we spend a lot of time tracking change within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Three issues that we discussed during September are:

The role of OneDrive for Business within Microsoft 365 and why it’s practically impossible to disable the app. Why does this matter? It’s all about where people store information. No really important files should be in OneDrive for Business because of the issues around access and visibility when people leave an organization. Another concern is how governance and compliance works when essential data is scattered across individual users’ OneDrive accounts instead of being organized in SharePoint Online. Much the same governance issue occurs when people discuss topics in Teams chat and never move the result of the conversation to a team channel.

Managing user profile photos across Microsoft 365 has been a mess for a long time. Microsoft has started to build a new foundation for this task by creating Graph APIs to replace the Exchange Online cmdlets used to add photos to accounts. Now they have a photo settings policy to control who can update their account photo. However, the new policy isn’t very granular and has other issues. Let’s hope that Microsoft develops the policy further to give tenants more flexibility.

A big change to the Teams client UI is coming as Microsoft continues to tweak the interface in ways that sometimes people can’t understand. One of the things that’s happening in Teams is to hide inactive channels automatically. This would be fine if users had control over how Teams hides channels, but Microsoft hasn’t described how Teams identifies inactive channels. In addition, when channels are hidden, Teams suppresses notifications, which means that people might miss important messages from channels used for corporate news (which are often marked as inactive because people don’t tend to post in these channels).

Other stuff is happening too – and all the time- but these are three of the current topics that arose in September that I suspect we’ll hear more about in the future.

On to Update #113

There’s no rest for the wicked and the Office 365 for IT Pros team is already working (or so all the writers tell me) on the Halloween update (#113), which we anticipate releasing on November 1. No doubt lots will happen between this and then to add to the rich tapestry of constant change inside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.