The writing team is thrilled to announce that the fourth edition of the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook is now available. We have been working on this book for the last three months and it is great to see everything come together.

You can’t simply announce a new edition without a reason to create it. We set out with four goals:

• Restructure, rationalize, and improve flow. When we started out on this project, the focus was on Exchange Online. Now we cover all of Office 365. We took a hard look at the structure and flow of the book and made changes that we think produce a better book.
• Introduce new material. Office 365 keeps on changing, so we have much better coverage in this edition of topics such as InTune, Skype for Business, and the new Office 365 Data Governance framework. We are very happy that Ståle Hansen joined the team to write the chapter on Skype for Business.
• Expand coverage of key areas. We think that the third edition offers good coverage of many parts of Office 365, but we wanted to do better. We have worked over the coverage of Office 365 Groups, Teams, and many other points to make the text clearer and more content-rich.
• Remove obsolete content. After two years of writing about Office 365, we could lose some pages that were not as relevant as they once were. We removed coverage of Exchange Online and SharePoint Online eDiscovery as all the focus is now on Office 365 eDiscovery.

The fourth edition of Office 365 for IT Pros breaks the 1,000-page barrier. We added roughly 120 pages of new material and removed about 70 of old. It’s a big book, just like Office 365 is a big cloud suite.

The fourth edition is not complete. This is a living book and the June 1 release is the starting point for updates that we will apply over the next year. We already know of some important features that are coming soon and the Ignite conference next September will bring a flush of announcements that deserve coverage, once the related code appears.

You can expect to see us release weekly updates for the fourth edition of Office 365 for IT Pros over the next few weeks, although we might take a break for a couple of weeks in summer.

At the same time as we have been working on the fourth edition of Office 365 for IT Pros, we have been pushing out weekly updates for the third edition. The last update for the third edition appeared on May 25. You can check all the updates issued for the third edition on the change log.

We strongly believe that the issuing of updated books is only way to document an ever-changing cloud service like Office 365 is through frequent updates, which is why we release these updates. During its time, the third edition grew from 800 to 950 pages, so although we corrected errors, typos, and the like, we also added a lot of new material over the year.

Upgrades

If you subscribed to the third edition through Practical365.com (previously ExchangeServerPro.com), you will receive an email with details of how to upgrade to the fourth edition for $12.50. This entitles you to receive all future updates for the fourth edition until it is replaced.

New Purchases

New purchasers can buy the EPUB/PDF version of the eBook from Practical365.com. Again, once you buy a copy, you have access to all future updates for the fourth edition until it is replaced.

Kindle

The Kindle version of the fourth edition is in the process of publishing on Amazon.com and its global network of country-level sites. Unfortunately, Amazon does not allow us to offer upgrade rights to readers. If you want a copy of the fourth edition, you must buy it.

The third edition of the book will stay available on Amazon until the end of June to allow people who bought a copy to refresh with the last update. After that, we will retire the Kindle version of the third edition.

Our Sponsor

We could not afford to dedicate the number of hours put into Office 365 for IT Pros without the support of QUADROtech, our sponsor. QUADROtech makes some great software for PST, archive, and mailbox migrations. Check them out if you’re considering moving any data to Office 365.