Office 365 for IT Pros (2021 Edition): The Best Guide to Mastering Microsoft’s Cloud Office System

Released: 1 July 2020. Subscribers can download monthly updates for this eBook

Intensely practical and offering the most up-to-date coverage of its topics, Office 365 for IT Pros (2021 edition) is essential reading if you want to maximize your use of Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud service. Office 365 for IT Pros (2021 Edition) is the only book covering the management of Office 365 that is constantly refreshed and updated with new information. Until the next edition is published, your subscription allows you to download updated content to keep pace with developments in Office 365, which means that Office 365 for IT Pros continues as a valuable reference for you long after you first read it.

You can always download the latest files from your Gumroad account or by clicking the link in the receipt issued after you bought the book. For more information, see https://office365itpros.com/faq. Full details of changes made to the book are in our change log at https://office365itpros.com/change-log/.

Tracking Developments Inside Office 365

Originally published on July 1, 2020, Office 365 for IT Pros (2021 edition) is updated monthly to make sure that content stays fresh. Over the last few years, Microsoft has made thousands of changes to Office 365. That’s a lot of information to track. We made 200 major chapter updates to the 2020 edition over the 11 updates released to subscribers.

Written by a team of highly experienced Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs), Office 365 for IT Pros (2021 edition) is a practical, hands-on reference, based on experience gained by working in 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we keep an eye on what Microsoft does inside Office 365, you don’t have to worry about making decisions based on outdated material – we do all the work for you.

The Massive Scale of Office 365

Companies are migrating to Office 365 at increasing speed. In April 2020, Microsoft reported 258 million paid seats of Office 365. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calls Exchange Online “the gateway drug to the cloud” because email is usually the first workload to move from on-premises servers into the cloud. But as you’ll learn in Office 365 for IT Pros, there are plenty of new and exciting advantages to be gained from using the wide breadth of functionality that exists inside Office 365.

Office 365 for IT Pros (2021 edition) covers essential business productivity features such as Teams, Microsoft 365 Groups, Stream, Planner, Flow, PowerApps, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Yammer, and OneDrive for Business. You’ll learn about Office 365 data governance, compliance, and eDiscovery, and how to exploit the Office 365 audit log to understand what’s really happening inside a tenant. A chapter on Microsoft Information Protection teaches you how to use Office 365 to protect sensitive messages and documents with rights management and encryption.

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 like Delve and MyAnalytics that were 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.

Chapters (Main Book)

Office 365 for IT Pros (2021 edition) includes in-depth instructions (including over 1,000 examples of using PowerShell) for provisioning, exploiting, and administering the many different services and features that exist within Office 365.

The chapters in Office 365 for IT Pros (2021 edition) are:

1. Introduction to Office 365 – What’s Office 365 all about, what are datacenter regions, how are services delivered, understanding service level agreements, and the success of Office 365 in reaching hundreds of millions of users.

2. Adopting the Cloud – How to plan moving to the cloud and running a successful adoption project.

3. Identities and Authentication – How Azure AD and authentication works for Office 365 tenants. .

4. Managing Office 365 – Mastering the many administrative portals and methods (like PowerShell) to manage Office 365 user accounts, applications, and licenses.

5. Exchange Online and Mailboxes – All about Exchange Online and why the cloud version is so different to on-premises Exchange. Includes an in-depth look into what’s in mailboxes.

6. Manage Shared Mailboxes and Distribution Lists – Even more about Exchange Online as we learn how to manage objects that are still extraordinarily useful.

7. Mail Flow – Getting messages in and out of Office 365 and what happens to make sure that spam and malware doesn’t get through

8. SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business – Making the most of the document management services within Office 365, including how to control sharing

9. Microsoft 365 Groups – Understanding how the Groups membership and access model works and how to create groups.

10. Managing Microsoft 365 Groups – Managing Groups once they’re created using Azure AD policies and PowerShell

11. Understanding and Using Teams – Exploring the architecture and structure of Teams to understand how the basic components work, including the interaction with other parts of Microsoft 365

12. Managing Teams – Mastering the day to day management of Teams through policies and settings.

13. Managing Teams and Groups with PowerShell – And when you need to automate group and team management, you’ll want to do this with PowerShell, leveraging the many examples included here.

14. Teams Calling and Meetings – Making sure that the voice side of Teams is handled correctly so that users have the highest-quality calling experience.

15. Tasks and Planner – Exploiting Tasks across Office 365 to manage projects more effectively.

16. Stream – All about the Office 365 video platform, including recordings of Teams meetings and calls.

17. Managing Mobile Devices – How to manage the mobile devices that connect to Office 365 apps.

18. Managing Office 365 Clients – How to manage other Office 365 clients, like desktop and browser apps.

19. Office 365 Data Governance – Understanding the Office 365 data governance framework, including how to plan and deploy retention policies and labels.

20. Content Searches and eDiscovery – How to find information in Office 365 repositories using content searches – and how to run eDiscovery cases.

21. Reporting and Auditing – Using the events captured in the Office 365 audit log to understand what happens inside Office 365 workloads and solve “who did what when” questions.

22. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) – Deploying Office 365 DLP policies to prevent information leakage from Exchange, SharePoint, and Teams.

23. Automating Office 365 with Power Platform and PowerApps – Building flows and apps to automate common Office 365 user and administrative scenarios.

24. Protecting Office 365 content – Using rights management-based protection and sensitivity labels to protect your most sensitive information stored in Exchange Online and SharePoint Online.

25. Sponsor Content by Quest Software.

It might take you more than 30 hours to read the 600,000 words in Office 365 for IT Pros (2021 edition), but those hours will save you so much time in deploying and managing Office 365 that the effort will be well worthwhile!

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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 2021 edition is superseded by the 2022 edition. We anticipate that this will happen in July 2021. At that time, we will make upgrades to the 2022 edition available to current subscribers at a reduced rate.

For more information about Office 365 for IT Pros, see our web site at https://office365itpros.com or visit our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/Office365itpros/.