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Monthly Update #120 Now Available for Subscribers to Download
The Office 365 for IT Pros team is delighted to announce the availability of monthly update #120 for the Office 365 for IT Pros (2025 edition) eBook. Updated PDF and EPUB files are available for the main book and for the Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell eBook (previously released last week). The files can be downloaded using the link in the receipt subscribers received when they bought the book or from their Gumroad accounts. See our FAQ for more information about downloading updates and the change log for information about changes made in this update.
This is the last monthly update for the 2025 edition. We plan to release the 2026 edition on July 1, 2025, and begin a new cycle of monthly updates (#121 to #132) to bring us to June 2026. We’ll let subscribers know when the 2026 edition is available and it is our sincere hope that you’ll all join us for another year of constant change across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. As is our normal practice, anyone who buys the 2025 edition at full price during June 2025 will receive a free upgrade to the 2026 edition when it is available.
Seeking a Million Prompts
As we prepare for the new edition, we keep our eyes open for news that we might like to cover. One interesting item that won’t make it into the book is the news that Shoosmiths, a UK-based law firm will share a £1m sterling bonus among its employees if the employees clock up one million Microsoft Copilot prompts in its new financial year. Presumably, the prompts will be counted using the aiInteractionHistory Graph API or audit records.
Shoosmiths estimates that the target will be achieved if each employee uses Copilot “4 times per working day.” That target shouldn’t be too hard to meet. Law firms are prolific users of documents, so the automatic summaries generated by Copilot in Word will go a long way to achieving the bonus (which might not be what the Shoosmiths bosses anticipated).
Microsoft 365 Gets to 430 Million Paid Seats
I usually write about Microsoft’s quarterly results but failed to do so for the FY25 Q3 announcement. The reason is simple: the data shared by Microsoft is great from a financial perspective (revenue was $70.1 billion and increased 13% (up 15% in constant currency)), but poor in terms of Microsoft 365 news. Where once it was common for Microsoft to report growth in seat numbers and other details, now it’s all about spending on artificial intelligence and the growth of agents.
A couple of things did stand out from the transcript of the quarterly results meeting with analysts.
First, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said that paid Microsoft 365 commercial seats grew to “over 430 million,” a growth of 7% year-over-year. She also observed that Microsoft 365 seat growth in the current quarter would see “moderation given the size of the installed base.” In other words, Microsoft has signed up so many customers that adding a few extra million seats each quarter barely budges the needle.
However, Hood said that she expected Microsoft 365 revenue growth of 14%. The gap between seat growth and revenue growth is accounted for customers buying upgraded licenses, including moving lower-level licenses to Microsoft 365 E5 and buying Microsoft 365 Copilot.
The quarterly results didn’t mention Teams, the poster child of Microsoft 365 for the last few years, The last number given for Teams users was 320 million in October 2023. If growth in Teams usage had matched Microsoft 365, that number would be around 350 million now. Instead, CEO Nadella chose to emphasize the growth in Power Platform, saying “We now have 56 million monthly active Power Platform users, up 27% year-over-year, who increasingly use our AI features to build apps and automate processes.” He also said that Copilot usage increased three times year-over-year, but that’s a useless statistic without knowing the baseline.
Office 365 for IT Pros Enters an Agentic World
Obviously, there’s a lot of people using Power Platform (about 13.25% of all paid seats). Some of that growth probably comes from Copilot agents. Microsoft doesn’t have a great story about management of agent lifecycle, deployment, and access across a Microsoft 365 tenant, and the announcement that Entra ID will deliver some agent management capabilities in the Entra admin center is a good step forward. Technology keeps on changing, and we keep on tracking that change through updates to Office 365 for IT Pros. Onward to the 2026 edition!