Office 365 for IT Pros (2023 Edition): The Ultimate Guide to Mastering Microsoft's Cloud Office System

$35
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Why buy separate books to learn about Microsoft 365, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, OneDrive for Business, Microsoft Teams, eDiscovery, Information Protection, Compliance, and PowerShell? Office 365 for IT Pros covers all these topics and much more.

Reduced to $35 as we have reached the end of the updates for the 2023 edition. Office 365 for IT Pros 2024 edition is now available and comes with monthly updates until June 2024. Subscribers to the 2023 edition can upgrade to the 2024 edition at low cost.


Intensely practical and offering the most up-to-date coverage of its topics, Office 365 for IT Pros (2023 edition) is essential reading if you want to maximize your use of the Microsoft 365 cloud productivity service.

The Main book was last updated on 1 June 2023. The Companion Volume was last updated on 17 February 2023. Subscribers receive monthly updates for the main book and updates for the companion volume as we release them. We're currently at monthly update #96, so we think we've mastered this process!

Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, acknowledges that Microsoft ships hundreds of updates for Office 365 apps every year. When you take Azure AD and other Microsoft 365 components into account, an Office 365 tenant administrator might have to cope with five hundred individual changes annually. Office 365 for IT Pros is the only book covering tenant management refreshed monthly with updated information as changes appear in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Planner, Teams, Azure AD, and other important components. Until the next edition is published, your subscription allows you to download monthly updates to keep pace with developments in Office 365, meaning that Office 365 for IT Pros continues to be a valuable reference long after you first read it. To give some insight into the volume of changes we process, the Office 365 for IT Pros team processed over 350 major updates to chapters for the last (2022) edition. Each monthly update we delivered to subscribers was essentially a completely refreshed up-to-date book.

Subscribers can download the latest files from their Gumroad account or by using the link in the receipt issued on purchase. For more information, see https://office365itpros.com/faq. Full details of changes made to the book are in the change log at https://office365itpros.com/change-log/.

Tracking Developments Inside Office 365

Written by a team of highly experienced Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), Office 365 for IT Pros (2023 edition) is a practical, hands-on reference, based on experience gained by working on real-life projects with a range of customers since the introduction of Office 365 in June 2011. Because we keep an eye on what Microsoft does inside Office 365, you don't have to worry about making decisions based on outdated material - we do the work for you. We explain how the technology works and why it works as it does. And because we’re always up-to-date, Office 365 for IT Pros is totally unlike any printed technical reference you’ve ever used.

The Massive Scale of Office 365

In April 2023, Microsoft reported 382 million paid seats of Office 365 (enterprise plans). Office 365 for IT Pros (2023 edition) includes in-depth coverage of essential business productivity features such as Teams, Microsoft 365 Groups, Stream, Planner, Power Automate, Power Apps, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Yammer, and OneDrive for Business. You'll learn about data governance, compliance, eDiscovery, and how to exploit the audit log to understand what's really happening inside a tenant. A chapter on Microsoft Information Protection teaches you how to protect sensitive messages and documents.

Two books are included in this package. You'll get PDF and EPUB versions of the main book and the companion volume. The companion volume covers topics that used to be in the main book (in previous editions) together with other information that we can’t fit into the main book but still consider interesting and valuable. Many of our readers convert the EPUB version to MOBI to read the book on Amazon Kindle devices.

Chapters

Office 365 for IT Pros (2023 edition) includes in-depth instructions (including over a thousand examples of using PowerShell and the Microsoft Graph) for provisioning, exploiting, and administering the many different services and features that exist within Office 365.

The chapters are:

1. The Microsoft 365 Ecosystem and Office 365: Outlining the role Office 365 plays in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, how Microsoft’s data centers and networks serve users, and the commercial success of the service.

2. Embracing the Cloud: Discusses the factors surrounding the movement of work to the Microsoft 365 cloud, the issues that might occur, and how you mitigate any potential problems to ensure a successful deployment.

3. Managing Identities: Without an identity, no one can access or use a Microsoft 365 service. This chapter dives into the role of Azure AD, including hybrid directories, and authentication, exploring topics like conditional access policies.

4. Managing Tenants: Covers the basics of managing an Office 365 tenant within Microsoft 365.

5. Managing Users: A deep dive into how user accounts work within an Office 365 tenant and how to manage them over their lifecycle.

6. Managing Exchange Online: Exchange Online is one of two core workloads within Office 365. This chapter covers details of how to manage Exchange Online and the differences between it and its on-premises counterparts.

7. Managing Mailflow: Office 365 processes a huge volume of inbound and outbound email. This chapter covers how to manage mail flow, including malware protection and detection.

8. Managing SharePoint Online: SharePoint Online is the second core workload delivering a document management service to Office 365 apps like Teams, Planner, and Yammer. It also encompasses OneDrive for Business, a part of Office 365 that’s seen huge growth recently. This chapter also reviews important components associated with SharePoint, like Search, Syntex, and Viva Topics.

9. Managing Microsoft 365 Tasks: Tasks span anything from personal tasks created with Outlook or To Do to group tasks created in Planner (and maybe even Project). Microsoft 365 treats tasks as a common object type supported by multiple apps, so we dive into the creation and management of tasks in Planner, Outlook, and Teams.

10. Managing Video: Office 365 has long boasted a video portal. Today, Stream is in the middle of a transition from its first implementation (which replaced the original Office 365 video portal) to Stream 2.0 (aka Stream on SharePoint). The earliest sign of Stream 2.0 is how Teams meeting recordings use OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online to store its MP4 files. All covered here.

11. Managing Groups: Microsoft 365 groups is a core identity and membership service used by apps like Teams, Planner, and Yammer. This chapter reviews how the Groups service works and covers details of other groups used by Office 365, including distribution lists and dynamic groups.

12. Teams Architecture and Structure: Now with more than 270 million monthly active users, Teams is the poster child of Microsoft 365. Teams consumes services drawn from across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem to deliver its mixture of messaging, meetings, voice, video, and app services. This chapter describes the architecture and structure of Teams and the fundamentals of how Teams works.

13. Managing Teams: Nice as it is to have everyone collaborating and connecting in Teams, the app needs to be managed, especially in large deployments. This chapter discusses the essential management tasks needed to keep Teams in good working order.

14. Managing Teams Voice: Many organizations use Teams and the Microsoft Phone system as the foundation for their voice and calling infrastructure. This chapter covers how Teams voice works and how to select, deploy, and manage devices used with Teams.

15. Managing Clients: Looks at the different clients used by Office 365 applications, including Microsoft 365 apps for enterprise, Teams, and mobile clients.

16. Managing Devices with Intune: Microsoft Endpoint Manager and Intune allow organizations to manage devices connected to Office 365. This chapter covers how to approach mobile device management.

17. Managing Compliance: Compliance is a big topic. Office 365 E3 and E5 plans (and various Microsoft 365 licenses) allow tenants to use data governance and classification functionality to manage information created by users. This chapter covers retention policies and labels, and Exchange Online mailbox retention policies.

18. Managing eDiscovery: Once information is under control, it’s nice to be able to find data when you need it. This chapter covers how content searches, core eDiscovery, and advanced eDiscovery works.

19. Managing Data Loss Prevention: Information leakage is a terrible thing. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies help users inadvertently share confidential or sensitive information when they shouldn’t. This chapter explains how DLP works in Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and Teams, and how to build custom sensitive information types for use within Office 365 compliance features.

20. Managing Information Protection: Since 2016, Microsoft has invested heavily in building out an information management framework to allow Office 365 tenants to protect email and documents with rights-management based encryption. We explain how sensitivity labels and Office 365 message encryption work and how to use labels for container management.

21. Managing Reporting and Auditing: In any reasonably-sized tenant, users generate tens of thousands of actions daily, most of which are captured as events in the Office 365 audit log. This chapter discusses how the audit log works and more importantly, how to retrieve and make sense of the audit events found there to answer questions about who did what and when. Microsoft Cloud App Security for Office 365 is also covered along with lots of recommendations about how to generate reports about user activity.

22. Managing Power Platform: The Power Platform is a great way to automate common user and administrative operations. Although designed to work without anyone needing to write any code, Power Automate needs to be understood. We explain how here.

23. Managing Tenants with PowerShell: Much, but not all, of Microsoft 365 can be managed using PowerShell. This chapter reviews the different PowerShell modules used to manage anything from mailboxes to licenses. It also dives into details of the Microsoft Graph API and how to use Graph API calls in PowerShell scripts to achieve even better automation.

24. Sponsor content: Quest Software sponsors Office 365 for IT Pros. As a major independent software vendor (ISV), Quest has many products designed to help Office 365 administrators. We explain some of those products.

It might take you more than 30 hours to read the 660,000+ words in Office 365 for IT Pros (2023 edition), but those hours will save you so much time in deploying and managing that the effort will be well worthwhile. After all, hiring a consultant to explain any of the topics covered in Office 365 for IT Pros will likely cost you twice what we charge for the book, so subscribing is really a great deal!

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Note: This is a subscription service. When you buy this book, you receive a subscription covering the current version of the book plus all updates we issue until the 2023 edition is superseded by the next edition. We anticipate that this will happen in July 2023. At that time, we will make upgrades to the next edition available to current subscribers at a reduced rate.

For more information about Office 365 for IT Pros, see our web site at our web site or visit our Facebook page.

This product is not currently for sale.

Two books: the main Office 365 for IT Pros eBook plus the companion volume. Both books are in EPUB and PDF formats

Technology
Office 365
Technology
Microsoft 365
Technology
Exchange Online
Technology
SharePoint Online
Technology
Microsoft Teams
Technology
PowerShell
Technology
Microsoft Planner
Technology
OneDrive for Business
Technology
Microsoft Stream
Technology
Yammer
Technology
Microsoft 365 Groups
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Techology
Microsoft Graph

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$35

Office 365 for IT Pros (2023 Edition): The Ultimate Guide to Mastering Microsoft's Cloud Office System

91 ratings