Where every claim comes from.
Official sources, clearly marked, plus a short named list of trusted independents. That is the whole rule, and it is the reason to trust anything here.
Two marks
- Official
- Published by Microsoft. Product groups, docs, licensing terms, admin centres.
- Independent
- Named list only. Dated, with a stated reason. Never the source for what a product does or what it costs.
Anything outside those two marks does not get linked. Not aggregators, not reprints, not AI-written summaries of Microsoft posts, not vendors writing about their own integration.
The hard line
An independent can be cited for interpretation, for operational consequence, and for the workaround nobody documented. An independent is never the source for what a product does or what it costs.
Those two claims trace to Microsoft Learn, to the service descriptions, or to the Product Terms — or they do not run. In practice that means a licensing article here will cite the Product Terms clause even where a faster answer was available elsewhere.
The named list
Seven. Deliberately. Twenty would be a blogroll, and a blogroll is the noise this site exists to remove. Each one is here for a stated reason and gets reviewed every quarter.
- Directions on Microsoft — www.directionsonmicrosoft.com
- Worth it when the Product Terms are ambiguous and the answer is worth thousands. Read it; do not cite it in place of the terms.
- Practical 365 — practical365.com
- Good at saying what a change means operationally. Added for editorial standards and consistency.
- Vasil Michev — www.michev.info
- Covers the things the documentation leaves out. Added for technical accuracy.
- Entra.News — entra.news
- Often ahead of the message centre on identity changes. Added because Entra moves faster than its own documentation.
- Nikki Chapple — nikkichapple.com
- Added because compliance documentation is dense and this makes it usable.
- Office 365 for IT Pros — office365itpros.com
- The deepest single reference outside Microsoft. Added for completeness and update discipline.
- M365 Maps — m365maps.com
- Faster than the service descriptions for a first answer. Confirm anything that matters against the Product Terms. Added because Microsoft publishes nothing equivalent.
Two things to know
Several people on the independent list work at or with Microsoft while writing under their own name. That makes the line between official and independent blurrier than a two-mark system suggests. The mark describes the publication, not the author's employer.
Directions on Microsoft is a paid subscription. It is on the list because it is worth reading when the Product Terms are ambiguous, not because you should expect to click through to it.
Corrections
Errors get fixed in place with a dated note at the foot of the article. Nothing is deleted silently. If something here is wrong, say so and it changes.