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Office 365 for IT Pros Update #82 Available Now
The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce that the April 2022 update for the 2022 edition is available for download. This is the 82nd update we’ve produced over eight editions in a series going back to May 2015.
Subscribers can use the book link in their Gumroad account to download the updates EPUB and PDF files. Alternatively, use the download link in the Gumroad receipt issued for the book purchase. For more details about downloads, see our FAQ. The updated files are also available for Amazon Kindle.
The Azure AD PowerShell Transition
We want to bring a massive change that’s coming soon to your attention. Microsoft is deprecating the Azure AD and MSOL PowerShell modules. The first effect will be felt on August 26, 2022, when the license management cmdlets stop working because Microsoft moves to a new license management platform. Microsoft will cease support for the remaining cmdlets in the two modules in late 2022 or early 2023.
The effect on Office 365 for IT Pros is massive. The book chapters feature hundreds of examples of using Azure AD cmdlets to get work done. Years ago, we dropped the older MSOL module where possible (introduced in 2012) and replaced the examples with Azure AD (introduced in 2015). Now we’ll go ahead and update all examples to use cmdlets from the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK. We’ve started this work already and you’ll see a lot more coverage about effective use of the SDK in the coming months, starting with a huge revision to chapter 14 in the April 2022 update. It will take us time to work through all our code, just like it will take you time to inventory and update scripts which use these modules.
Usually, we would wait for a new edition to introduce a change of this magnitude. However, the need to move away from the Azure AD and MSOL modules will have such a large impact on scripts that we thought it best to start now and work through all chapters over the coming months. This is where being an exclusively electronic book helps. Printed books are great, but they can’t deal with the kind of change experienced inside the Microsoft Cloud.
More Cloud Change
Change isn’t just happening in PowerShell. Updates continue to flow across all workloads, and we made many other changes across chapters this month, including coverage of Azure AD B2B Direct Connect, Teams shared channels, changes in the certificates used by Microsoft 365, new Exchange Online settings to control plus addressing and send from proxy addresses, Operator Mobile Connect for Teams, and a rewrite of some sections of the Mail Flow chapter. We also made minor changes in a bunch of places to chase down spelling or grammar errors, fix hyperlinks, and everything else that can go wrong in 660,000 words.
Please take the time to download the updated files so that you can take advantage of the updated text. You’re paying for up-to-date content, so you should use it.
Companion Volume
We did not update the companion volume this month. We might do so next month by transferring examples of PowerShell using the Azure AD module to a chapter so that people still have access to this content. After all, the cmdlets will continue working, even when they move to an unsupported state
Thanks for your ongoing support for the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook project. We look forward to doing the hard work to track the changes in April and deliver update #83 in May.