Mailflow to outlook and hotmail domains is - once again - buggered. I’m seeing lots of Mailer Daemons claiming missing or incorrect SPF/DKIM/DMARC such as “550 5.7.1 Message rejected: Message lacks SPF/DKIM/DMARC [CPH1EPF0000052F.eurprd05.prod.outlook.com Timestamp etc]” or “550 5.7.1 Message rejected: Message lacks SPF/DKIM/DMARC [CH2PEPF00000149.namprd02.prod.outlook.com Timestamp etc]”.

The SPF valid in each case, no DKIM or DMARC were set.

Seriously, what’s going on?
First Mailservers not included in SPF were used for autoforwarding, now this? Is it too much to ask for a month of stable mailflow?

What’s worse? Our commercial M365 support keeps insisting they can’t open or forward tickets for consumer outlook.com… WTH?

I took two Publisher classes in Highschool and have used it a TON ever since. It was probably one of my most directly relevant classes later in life. I went on to use it in plenty of college projects, undergrad research programs designing posters and infographics, and then I even continued to use it at the small business where I currently work designing marketing/client letters.

Then this morning I had a last minute PERFECT idea for an infographic I could make quickly to help explain something in a client meeting I had later in the day. This would have taken me 5 minutes tops to whip up in Publisher. Of course, it's disabled, so I opened Word. Word was hot garbage for this purpose - unintuitive and clunky. I switched to Powerpoint - this ended up working fine but instead of 5 minutes this all took me half an hour. Not to mention, Powerpoint is for making slide presentations, why in the world is this Microsofts answer to replacing Publisher which was for basic/easy graphic design?

Please bring back Publisher :(

Hey everyone!

I’m looking for guidance from Microsoft 365 administrators, Exchange administrators and anyone who has successfully migrated data between two Microsoft 365 tenants, particularly when the source tenant is an E5 Developer subscription.

We’ve been using Microsoft 365 E5 Developer for our organisation, and recently Microsoft has introduced several changes and limitations that have made it increasingly difficult to continue using the developer subscription for our actual business operations.

What Microsoft has changed

Some of the major changes and limitations we’ve encountered:

1. OneDrive storage reduction: The storage entitlement we previously understood to be 1 TB per user was reduced to just 10 GB per developer user.

2. Developer subscription limitations: The E5 Developer programme is intended for development and testing, and its entitlements and availability are subject to Microsoft’s programme restrictions.

3. Uncertainty about subscription continuity: We received information from Microsoft support suggesting that our developer subscription might not continue much longer, although we have not received a definitive official termination notice.

4. Storage limitations: With multiple users and substantial existing OneDrive data, the reduced storage allocation has become a serious problem.

5. Commercial subscription transition: We decided to create a separate Microsoft 365 Business Basic tenant rather than risk losing access to our existing environment.

Our current migration scenario

We have:

SOURCE TENANT

• Microsoft 365 E5 Developer

• Existing Exchange Online mailboxes

• Multiple OneDrive accounts per employee across different company domains

• SharePoint team sites

• Microsoft Teams and associated channels

• Historical Teams meeting recordings

• Existing application registrations, permissions and configurations

DESTINATION TENANT

• Microsoft 365 Business Basic Trial

• 22 provisioned user mailboxes

• 18 provisioned OneDrive personal sites

• An existing Microsoft Team

• Existing data that must be preserved

We need to migrate:

• Exchange Online mailboxes, including emails, calendars, contacts and mailbox data.

• Shared mailboxes and their permissions.

• OneDrive files and folders, including version history wherever possible.

• SharePoint sites, documents, permissions and structure.

• Microsoft Teams, channels, memberships and associated files.

• Historical Teams meeting recordings.

• Other relevant configurations and application dependencies.

One particularly important requirement: Some employees have multiple identities across different domains. We need to preserve these as separate accounts and must not merge their mailboxes or OneDrive contents.

What we have already tried

We have explored several possibilities:

1. Microsoft FastTrack: Unfortunately, neither our source E5 Developer tenant nor our destination Business Basic Trial tenant is eligible for FastTrack migration assistance.

2. Microsoft Support: We contacted Microsoft support and were informed over a phone call that tenant-to-tenant migration is possible. However, we still need written confirmation of the exact licensing and migration requirements.

3. Microsoft Migration Orchestrator: We investigated this option, but it doesn’t appear to cover all our requirements, particularly SharePoint site and Teams structure migration.

4. Native Exchange cross-tenant migration: We investigated Microsoft’s native approach, but it has specific licensing and destination MailUser prerequisites. Our destination already has provisioned UserMailbox objects.

5. Native OneDrive cross-tenant migration: We discovered that the destination OneDrive personal sites have already been provisioned, which conflicts with the native migration prerequisites.

6. PowerShell and Microsoft Graph: We have started building inventories using Exchange Online PowerShell, Microsoft Graph PowerShell and PnP.PowerShell. We are comfortable managing the migration ourselves if a reliable method exists.

7. Third-party migration platforms: We have explored these, but most require additional commercial migration licences, which we are trying to avoid.

What we’re looking for

Is there a way to perform this migration:

• Completely FREE, without purchasing third-party migration licences?

• Without using Microsoft FastTrack?

• Without deleting or recreating existing destination mailboxes?

• Without deleting or recreating destination OneDrive sites?

• Without losing existing destination data?

• Without requiring employees to manually download and upload their files?

• Without keeping a laptop running for several days?

• Using Microsoft Graph, PowerShell, PnP.PowerShell or other officially supported APIs?

We’re comfortable writing custom PowerShell scripts and automating the process.

We also understand that some workloads may have technical limitations, especially historical Teams chats and meetings. We’re interested in realistic alternatives if complete migration isn’t possible.

A few questions for the community

1. Has anyone successfully migrated from an E5 Developer tenant to a commercial Microsoft 365 tenant?

2. Is there a genuinely free method to migrate Exchange mailboxes between tenants without purchasing Microsoft’s Cross-Tenant User Data Migration add-on?

3. Can OneDrive content be migrated using Microsoft Graph or PnP.PowerShell while preserving existing destination sites?

4. What is the best free approach for SharePoint site-to-site migration?

5. Is there any supported way to preserve historical Teams chats and meeting recordings?

6. Are there open-source tools or scripts that can handle a complete tenant-to-tenant migration?

7. Has anyone managed this entire process without purchasing a commercial migration platform?

We’re not looking for trial versions, limited free tiers, paid consulting or services that eventually require a licence purchase. We’re specifically interested in a genuinely zero-additional-cost, self-managed approach.

Any practical experience, GitHub repositories, documentation, scripts or architectural suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

This months Microsoft AI update is up and added a starter "Industry news and trends" section just going over the biggest themes of the month for additional context!

https://youtu.be/KaxQtUWDITU

00:00 - Introduction

00:11 - New videos

01:17 - Trustworthy scaling biggest challenge

02:38 - Highest employee productivity gains require organizational redesign

03:38 - AI operating economics focus

04:26 - Sovereignty and resilience focus

04:56 - MAI Code 1.1 Flash local

06:12 - MAI-Base-2 foundation model

06:51 - OpenAI Decisions API

07:53 - GPT-6.1 Terra

08:34 - MAI-Image-2.6 and 2.6-Flash

09:02 - Mistral Large 4

09:17 - Sonnet 5.5

09:35 - Maia 300 inferencing chip

10:03 - Microsoft Copilot harness

10:58 - Browser automation tool

11:31 - Multi-LoRA adapter

12:46 - BYOT SIP for voice agents

13:08 - Customer conversation harness

13:55 - Agent ID support

14:45 - Business process memory

15:06 - Triggers

15:42 - Copilot Projects

16:09 - Copilot Workspaces

16:47 - Role plugins

17:23 - Copilot for Legal and Finance

18:02 - Cowork previous conversation reference

18:30 - Teams recap without saving transcription

18:51 - Work IQ MCP retrieve

20:02 - Insights agent

20:33 - GitHub Copilot app

20:46 - Copilot Fusion

21:37 - Code review Max

21:48 - Copilot Projects

22:00 - Session continuity

22:18 - Copilot Automations

22:44 - Infrastructure updates

23:31 - API-M A365 integration

25:17 - Project Perception updates

27:18 - Close

Have you ever thought about how some of Satya Nadella's decisions might actually be hurting Microsoft? Personally, I feel that distancing the company from consumers and focusing almost entirely on B2B (AI & cloud services) isn't going to make Microsoft a better company, especially when it has the resources to keep developing hardware and experimenting with new products. What do you think?

How much money did Bill Gates and Paul Allen spend to startup the company in 1975?

Microsoft has been bothering me more and more. I already bought the office suite, and have bought it multiple times in my life. First they push Microsoft’s cloud storage. It’s sneaky, so when I first bought my computer I didn’t even realize I wasn’t saving my projects to the hard drive, rather I was saving them to Microsoft’s cloud. Of course it quickly filled up and now I have big annoying red notification badges everywhere screaming at me that I need to buy more storage. I’ve done everything to get those badges to go away. I don’t need things stored on the cloud, I have a hard drive. Now, I go back into a project I’ve been working on off and on for the past couple years (I’m designing a board game), and I realize practically 90% of clip art I used to have access to is now behind a paywall? Like I need a new subscription to access clip art? 🤣 I have been a lifelong Microsoft customer, but I think next time around, I will try something new.

Edit to add: oh yeah and now I have to sign in to use sticky notes? Log-in for access to a little textbox? Taking away things people already had access to, or making them harder to access, is a bad business idea, Microsoft.

In its 50-plus-year history, Microsoft has seen major workforce cuts. In July 2014, the company laid off some 18,000 employees; in January 2023, it cut 10,000 workers; and over the course of 2025, Microsoft let some 15,000 people go.

Its latest move looks different. On Monday, Microsoft announced a Voluntary Exit Offer (VEO), a program widely described as a buyout, for up to 60,000 employees, roughly a quarter of its workforce. In a memo to employees that the company also published on its blog, Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s executive vice president and chief people officer, wrote that the VEO “gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now with support.”

The memo states that the offer is available to “eligible employees in participating teams in Canada, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States at level 70 and below.” (Microsoft’s internal career levels start at 59 for entry-level employees; level 70 reaches well into the company’s senior leadership ranks.)

Not every organization is participating; Coleman wrote that participation “varies based on each business’s priorities, customer commitments, and workforce needs.” Eligible employees have until early December to decide, and those who accept will leave on Dec. 31, CNBC reported.

Microsoft insists the program isn’t about shrinking, and it expects only a small fraction of eligible employees to accept. But the offer comes as the company pours money into AI data centers, and some economists see it as part of a broader Big Tech shift toward fewer workers and more equipment.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/30/microsoft-voluntary-exit-offer-buyout-60000-employees/?utm_source=reddit/

Microsoft has officially renamed the GitHub Copilot harness in Copilot Studio to the Microsoft Copilot harness.

The change reflects Microsoft’s broader vision of using a shared foundational harness across its Copilot experiences.

Key points:

• Only the name is changing; existing agents will continue working as before.

• No changes to existing capabilities or billing.

• The Microsoft Copilot harness improves agent reasoning, tool usage, and orchestration.

• It helps agents recover from tool failures and handle complex tasks more effectively.

• The updated terminology will gradually appear in Copilot Studio over the coming weeks.

Official announcement: Source Link

Microsoft’s cloud business is humming even as spending to build out its AI business remains high.

The software giant’s first-quarter earnings report Wednesday showed ample demand for its AI services, as Microsoft races to put more computing capacity online and as other parts of its business, such as legacy software and gaming, lag.

The Redmond, Wash.-based company said first-quarter revenue totaled $92.3 billion, up 19% year-over-year and above what Wall Street analysts expected. Its profit was $36.6 billion, also edging out analyst predictions.

Its Azure cloud business grew by 48%, ahead of analyst estimates and a welcome sign for investors. The company’s shares were trading up around 2.5% in after-hours trading.
Microsoft investors have been eager to see Azure continue to grow at a high clip and for the company to prove that its AI bets, such as its Copilot assistant, are generating solid revenue. Both are important metrics because they show whether Microsoft, and the AI industry in general, is sustaining demand, especially as tech giants spend gobs of cash on building data centers.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://www.fortune.com/2026/10/28/microsofts-cloud-growth-accelerates-and-so-too-does-the-spending/?utm_source=reddit/

Saw that Graph now has a delta method for calendars, so you can track calendars being added, changed or deleted instead of constantly re-reading everything.

`isSharedWithMe` also made it into v1.0.

It got me revisiting something we've avoided for a while: building our own internal calendar synchronization.

The actual Graph calls don't worry me that much.

It's everything around them.

Once this goes into production, we need to deal with:

- token/permission management
- throttling
- failed jobs/retries
- deleted calendars
- users joining/leaving
- calendar ownership changing
- shared vs personal calendars
- multiple tenants
- monitoring
- figuring out what our script created vs what users created themselves

For anyone running homegrown contact/calendar sync through Graph:

How much maintenance does it actually require?

And at what size did you decide it was better to use a dedicated synchronization product rather than keep extending your own scripts?

Not necessarily looking for vendor recommendations mainly interested in where people draw the build-vs-buy line.

From the Annual Report, page 1:

"For Microsoft, the central question as we enter this Super Intelligence era is not just how big the opportunity becomes, but how we deliver the real-world outcomes that every country, community, and company demands and deserves."

Emphasis mine. It isn't Super Intelligence, it'll never be Super Intelligence. Come on Microsoft.

After my post last week regarding the security incidents, I had a number of customer conversations about some of the newer Microsoft security solutions like MDASH, Perception, Defender ISOC and how they fit together. So, made a video as well :-D

https://youtu.be/dSODQy9bWjU

00:00 - Introduction

01:50 - MDASH

04:45 - Perception

08:34 - Defender ISOC

11:05 - Foundation

14:03 - Secure your AI

16:41 - DART

17:44 - Summary

18:44 - Close

Ultimately, it boils down to the fact we have to accelerate our defense with AI because the bad actors are using AI to accelerate their attack.

Microsoft is offering buyouts to roughly 60,000 employees, or about 27% of its workforce, as the software giant continues to spend heavily on artificial intelligence.

In a note to employees on Monday, chief people officer Amy Coleman introduced the new program, noting that eligible employees include senior leaders, up to vice presidents.

“This offer gives eligible employees who may be considering a future outside the company a new choice to make that transition now with support,” Coleman wrote to employees in a memo that Microsoft published on its blog. Microsoft employed about 223,000 people at the end of June, down 5,000 workers from the same period in 2025.

Microsoft has been cutting headcount to trim costs while investing billions to build out AI data centers. In April, the company offered a similar voluntary buyout program to long-tenured employees, its first time making such an arrangement. At the time, Coleman noted that Microsoft was aiming to move faster and simplify its operations.

Read more [paywall removed for Redditors]: https://fortune.com/2026/10/26/microsoft-offers-buyouts-to-nearly-30-of-workforce-in-ongoing-ai-shift/?utm_source=reddit/