Andres Bohren Ran the Module Release Board All Week, Defender Alerts Come to Graph
+Jeff Hicks Says Goodbye to the Lonely Administrator Blog
Two days ago, on Wednesday, the Microsoft 365 ecosystem hit its yearly reset button. License prices went up across the catalog, Intune Suite features folded into E3 and E5, AutoRest retired from active support, and Tony Redmond shipped the biggest edition change to his flagship book in a decade. The 2027 edition of what has been Office 365 for IT Pros for eleven years is now Microsoft 365 for IT Pros, split across four separate books totaling more than 1,700 pages. If you have not opened your renewal code yet, that is the reason to do it this weekend.
Elsewhere the community kept moving. Andres Bohren posted through the holiday week with module release notes, Tony followed up his book launch with practical pieces on Teams and Copilot, and Jeff Hicks used his June potluck to say goodbye to the Lonely Administrator blog.
I have had numerous serious udpateds to my PSGuerrilla module (Install-Module PSGuerrilla) - https://github.com/jimrtyler/PSGuerrilla - Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! We are now sitting at v2.38.0.
Congrats to all of the new Microsoft MVPs that were welcomed to the program this week!
Build Your Own PowerShell AI Terminal Copilot
Bart Pasmans demonstrates how to construct a custom AI terminal assistant using PowerShell and Azure OpenAI. His two script solution takes natural language requests and generates the exact commands needed alongside a built in risk assessment system to prevent accidental infrastructure damage. This approach provides a highly customizable alternative to commercial tools by letting administrators control execution safety directly from the shell.
👉 https://bartpasmans.tech/powershell-ai-terminal-copilot/
Microsoft 365 for IT Pros 2027 Edition Ships as a Four Book Bundle
Tony Redmond and the Office 365 for IT Pros team published the 2027 edition on Wednesday, and the rename to Microsoft 365 for IT Pros is only the headline change. The bundle now consists of four separate books. The main Microsoft 365 for IT Pros volume sits at just over 900 pages after being trimmed from the roughly 1,300 pages the 2026 edition carried. The 431 page Automating Microsoft 365 with PowerShell third edition that Tony launched last week is book two. The Microsoft Purview for IT Pros and Power Platform for IT Pros volumes are new standalone books built from four chapters lifted out of the main volume. The main book carries a new Managing AI and Agents chapter covering Microsoft 365 Copilot, Agent 365, and Work IQ. If you subscribed to the 2026 edition, the renewal code landed in your inbox on Wednesday morning.
👉 https://office365itpros.com/2026/07/01/microsoft-365-for-it-pros/
Jeff Hicks June Potluck Marks the End of The Lonely Administrator
Jeff Hicks used his June potluck for the news on the SecretManagement archive and the Summit 2027 CFP opening, plus a run through the PSReadline CopyScreen key handler that lets you select terminal output with the shift arrow keys and copy it to the clipboard on Enter. He also drops a recommendation for The Microsoft DSC Handbook on Leanpub covering DSC v3, announces his return to SpiceWorld in Austin on November 12 and 13, and closes with the news that he is deprecating his long running WordPress blog The Lonely Administrator later this year. If you have posts from there you have relied on over the years, grab them now while they are still online. The scripting challenge this month is a VHD backup tool that pushes on both PowerShell and storage fundamentals.
👉 https://buttondown.com/behind-the-powershell-pipeline/archive/
Andres Bohren Ran the Module Release Board All Week
Andres Bohren kept his usual pace through the holiday week and shipped four module release notes worth pulling. Microsoft published a new version of the MicrosoftPlaces PowerShell module on both June 30 and July 3, so you probably want the July 3 build if you have not updated recently. Microsoft.Online.SharePoint.PowerShell 16.0.27424.12000 landed on June 30 with the usual mix of authentication and provisioning refinements. Microsoft shipped a new PowerToys build this week that Andres notes on July 3 for anyone running the utility suite. And Git ticked up to 2.55.0 on July 1, which Andres covers with his usual install walkthrough using winget. If you follow one blog for Microsoft module release notes, Andres is still the one to read.
Teaching Tara: PowerShell Script Breakdown
Andrew Pla and Tara Sinquefield sit down together and read through scripts as a team. Tara asks the beginner questions the rest of us stopped asking a long time ago, and Andrew explains variables, param blocks, sub expressions, calculated properties, and the pipeline at the pace of someone just starting to learn. If you have anyone on your team who is trying to pick up PowerShell, this is the episode to send them. Bonus AI discussion at the end on where Claude and ChatGPT actually help learners versus lead them into bad habits.
Morten Mynster Kristensen Spots New Graph Beta Permissions for Creating Defender Alerts
Fellow PowerShell MVP and LeastPrivilegedMSGraph author Morten Mynster Kristensen flagged this week that Microsoft quietly landed two new Beta permissions on Microsoft Graph, SecurityAlert.Create.All in both delegated and application forms. The endpoint at /security/alerts_v2 now accepts POST, which means you can create your own alerts in Microsoft Defender XDR from PowerShell rather than only reading them. For anyone who has built detection logic in a script and had to route the output to email, a Teams webhook, or a Sentinel ingestion pipeline, the ability to write directly into the Defender queue is a meaningful architectural shift. I plan to get support for this into my PSGuerrilla module.
👉 https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mortenmynster_powershell-msgraph-automation-activity-7345854938947694593
Tony Redmond on the Small Window for Incoming Teams Calls
Tony Redmond writes that a recent Microsoft Teams improvement is buried deep enough in settings that most users will never find it. Incoming Teams calls can now be answered in a small window rather than the full application view, and for people who take a lot of calls the difference is real. You can keep working in your primary application while the call runs in a small overlay rather than losing your context every time somebody rings. Tony’s frustration with the discoverability of the feature is fair. If you are a busy person on Teams, this is worth changing this weekend so it is on the next time you need it.
👉 https://office365itpros.com/2026/06/30/teams-small-window/
PowerShell with Buttons
Andrew Pla and Stephen Valdinger at PSConfEU 2026 The PSConfEU 2026 session recording landed this week and it is a full ninety minute hands on walkthrough of PowerShell Universal from the two of them. Stephen Valdinger from Chocolatey Software leads the technical demo, Andrew Pla plays the perfect stand in for anyone getting reintroduced to PSU after a break, and the pair walk through turning a real PowerShell module into a full web application with a REST API layer, a SQLite back end, forms, dashboards, Pester unit tests, PSPlayright UI tests, and a new plaster template that scaffolds a full PSU app module for you in one command. This is the practical content that sends you straight to Adam Driscoll’s docs Sunday afternoon.
Windows 11 26H2 Prep Time Starts Now
Microsoft published the initial 26H2 announcement in late June and the message from the community is start testing. Jason Leznek’s Windows IT Pro Blog piece covers the upgrade paths, the Autopatch pilot to production strategy, and the tracking mechanisms available to walk your fleet through a controlled rollout. For K12 shops with student devices in the field, summer is the window to get the pilot ring stood up before the school year starts. The changes are not disruptive on the surface but the Autopatch story continues to mature and the discipline of running the pilot correctly compounds over years.
Encore: Lessons in Leadership from PowerShell Pioneers Jeffrey Snover and Don Jones
The encore of the April 28, 2025 conversation recorded live at the PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit dropped fresh this week. Snover walks through the origin story of PowerShell and the pivotal moment his path crossed with Don’s, Don brings his usual thoughtful reflection on the shift from individual contributor to leader, and the throughline is that vulnerability, repetition, and kindness are core to any real career.
PSConfEU 2026 Session Archive
The rest of the PSConfEU 2026 sessions from Wiesbaden continue to upload on the SynEdgy channel through the summer. I shared Andrew’s above, but I could frankly load the newsletter if I wanted to. Deep technical content across PowerShell, DSC, PSU, security, and community sessions from the tenth anniversary edition of the conference.
👉 https://www.youtube.com/@synedgy
Events
Midwest Tech Talk 2026 | July 19 to 21, 2026 | Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri I am speaking at this one in just over two weeks. Kickoff event Sunday July 19, main conference Monday and Tuesday at The Resort at Lake of the Ozarks, with an evening event Monday hosted by Provision Data Solutions. Two day K12 technology and security symposium built by folks who actually run school district tech departments, doubling as the K12TechPro Regional Meetup for the Midwest. If you are in K12 IT anywhere in the region, this is the one to make this summer.
👉 https://www.midwesttechtalk.com/
MMS Midway | October 25 to 28, 2026 | San Diego, California The classic endpoint management and PowerShell conference moves to San Diego this fall. Strong K12 IT representation if you are looking for peers in that space.
👉 https://mmsmoa.com/
SpiceWorld 2026 | November 12 to 13, 2026 | Austin, Texas Jeff Hicks is returning to Austin this fall to talk PowerShell at the annual Spiceworks community event. The pricing is genuinely reasonable for the caliber of content, and if you have a hybrid IT day job the tracks tend to hit the practical stuff you can use Monday morning.
👉 https://www.spiceworks.com/spiceworld/
Zero Trust World 2027 | February 17 to 19, 2027 | Orlando, Florida ThreatLocker’s seventh annual cybersecurity training event lands at Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando. Three days of hands on training, real attack technique walkthroughs, hacking labs, and Cyber Hero Certification exam sessions every morning. If you defend an environment for a living, this one is built for you.
👉 https://ztw.com/
PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2027 | April 5 to 8, 2027 | Orlando, Florida The flagship US PowerShell event moves to the Sheraton Lake Buena Vista in Orlando. Call for papers opened Wednesday and runs through the summer, and early bird registration is open now. The OnRamp program for newcomers runs alongside the main track.
👉 https://powershellsummit.org/
PSConfEU 2027 | Dates and location to be announced SynEdgy is organizing the eleventh edition of PowerShell Conference Europe after this year’s tenth anniversary run in Wiesbaden. Watch psconf.eu for the announcement, which typically lands toward the end of summer.
👉 https://psconf.eu/