Message center notification MC734281 explains that Copilot for Microsoft 365 will get better grounding for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote from April 2024. After the update, the apps will be able to ground user prompts by using Graph and web searches to find relevant information. Being able to generate accurate text seems like a good thing for an AI tool, and there’s no doubt that better grounding will help. But why is it appearing six months after the general availability of Copilot for Microsoft 365?
Microsoft 365 Backup costs are charged on a PAYG basis against an Azure subscription. You pay a flat fee of $0.15 per month per gigabyte of protected content. This article discusses calculating the sizes of protected data and reports the costs accrued over two months.
The Loop app is a powerful collaborative platform that has been handicapped up to now with a restriction on its External Sharing capabilities. That restriction is being lifted in a two-phase process starting in April 2024. Tenants without sensitivity labels will get the capability first followed by those that use sensitivity labels.
Microsoft has created an easy to use Microsoft 365 Backup solution. Its key feature is speed, including speed to restore data. I tested restores for Exchange Online (which worked) and SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business (which didn’t). The lack of logging and error reporting when failures happen lead to frustration. Microsoft has some work to do to bulletproof this solution.
Microsoft has released the preview of the Entra ID usage insights for premium license consumption. This could be the harbinger of a more restricted licensing regime for Entra ID premium features such as conditional access. Putting any barrier in place to stop more accounts being protected by multifactor authentication seems like a bad idea. Let’s hope that this isn’t the case here.
The Viva Topics retirement announced on February 22, 2024 is an inevitable side-effect of Microsoft’s ongoing focus on Copilot. It is difficult to argue against the retirement. Business, technology, and implementation factors stack up against Viva Topics. The future of Microsoft Knowledge Management is firmly in the grasp of Copilot.
Microsoft originally said that Copilot for Microsoft would only support the Monarch client. Now it turns out the Outlook Win32 Copilot support is coming. No formal announcement is available and Microsoft hasn’t shared when the support will turn up in an Office channel, but it’s good news that this deployment blocker is no more. And Teams has a new Copilot experience, so things are moving in the world of AI-powered assistants.
The latest version of the Microsoft 365 Licensing Report script includes code to generate cost analyses for the departments and countries assigned to user accounts. Everything works well if the properties of Entra ID user accounts are complete and accurate. Sometimes this isn’t so, and that leads to problems when attributing costs at a department or country level.
This article describes how to use the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK to retrieve and interpret Microsoft 365 message center posts with the intention of discovering what percentage of announcemengts end up being delayed (not being available at the predicted date). Teams makes lots of feature announcements and over 57% of those announcements are delayed.
Message center notification MC711019 covers the ability to hide the General channel for a team, a feature designed to free up space in the teams and channels list. Team members (including guests) can decide if they want to see the General channel in their list. Because teams can have up to 1,000 channels, being able to hide the General channel is a useful change.
The Microsoft Graph includes the Service Communications API. SDK cmdlets can use the API to retrieve and work with service health data. In this article, we show how to use Graph SDK cmdlets (based on the API) to fetch and work with service health data, including creating an email report to update people about the current state of tenant health.
Office 365 Reaches 400 million. Well, to be precise, in their FY24 Q2 results, Microsoft said that the figure is “over 400 million paid seats,” but who’s going to quibble with the ongoing success that Office 365 has had in adding users over many years. Not much was learned about the financial impact of Copilot. We’ll have to wait to see how that plays out.
Lots of hype surrounds Copilot for Microsoft 365, but I like the way that Copilot for Teams extracts real value from meeting transcripts to generate meeting notes. Even better, Copilot for Teams allows meeting participants to interrogate the transcript to find questions asked and answered (or not) among other capabilities. It’s one of the most obvious ways to extract value from Copilot.
Microsoft’s January 15 announcement reduced deployment costs and opened the possibility for Copilot for Microsoft 365 deployments to many Office 365 tenants. Reducing costs is great, but just because Copilot for Microsoft 365 is now available to many more tenants doesn’t mean that it is a silver bullet to address all IT woes.
The Stream browser app has received a bunch of recent enhancements, some of which are still deploying to tenants. The changes make it easier for Microsoft 365 tenants work with video. While investigating recent changes, we found some stuff that works well and some limitations that we never knew about before.
A new beta Graph API supports the creation of a Viva Engage community. This article explains how to use the Graph SDK to create a new community with the API. It’s the start on the transition from the old Yammer APIs to fully embrace the Graph API.
Copilot for Word reference documents help to ground the prompts sent to LLMs for processing. The documents can be too large, which means that their contents aren’t fully taken into account when the LLM processes the prompt. This might or might not be an issue.
The Delve web app will be deprecated by Microsoft in December 2024. It’s the end of a line for an app that once promised to reimagine search. The problem is that Delve never achieved much traction within Office 365 and its functionality never increased. In fact, Delve seemed to lose features over the years. Delve now joins apps like Sway and StaffHub as artifacts of Office 365 development and evolution.
Copilot for Word is an application-specific implementation of Microsoft 365 Copilot. Amongst its capabilities, Copilot can generate and rewrite text. In this article, I explore the experience of interacting with Copilot for Word to generate text that could be used for articles and to rewrite paragraphs from real articles.
Message center notification MC687849 announces the retirement of the Teams Who bot. This was one of the original apps developed to show the potential of Teams. In truth, the bot was never very useful. Microsoft says that its functionality will be replaced with Copilot. You’ll be able to query for the answers the Who bot provided for a small extra investment.
Microsoft has described the compliance support from Purview solutions for data generated by Microsoft 365 Copilot prompts and responses. There’s nothing earthshattering in terms of what Microsoft is doing, but it’s good that audit events and compliance records will be gathered and that sensitivity labels will block Copilot access to confidential data.
The Office 365 for IT Pros eBook team is delighted to announce the release of the 101st monthly update (November 2023). Subscribers can download the updated files from Gumroad.com. The update covers many chapters and includes topics like the release of the new Teams client, which we learned on October 31 will become the only Teams client on March 31, 2024. Lots of ongoing change inside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem… Which is why a book like Office 365 for IT Pros is the only way to stay current!
In Microsoft’s FY24 Q1 results, they disclosed that the Teams number of users had reached 320 million monthly active users. That’s 80% of the overall number for Office 365 monthly active users. The two sets of numbers might not overlap precisely, but one thing’s for certain – Teams is driving a lot of growth and revenue for Microsoft.
An interesting discussion in the Microsoft Technical Community about limiting the teams privacy mode to private for new teams caused me to try out the principles. The idea works, with caveats, and I wonder if anyone will use it in production. It’s an interesting technique for using container management sensitivity labels that I’d never thought about before, so here it is.
Microsoft announced that they will deprecate the user photo cmdlets from Exchange Online from November 30, 2023. Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK cmdlets replace the EXO cmdlets because user photo data is stored in Entra ID. Although inconvenient for those who need to update scripts, this is part of an effort to rationalize how Microsoft 365 handles user profile information.
Microsoft announced that the Loop app will be licensed for four Microsoft 365 product SKUs (two for SME, two for enterprise). Preview users that don’t have one of the chosen licenses are unaffected, at least for now. The licensing decision doesn’t affect the use of Loop components in applications like Outlook and Teams chat, but it is part of a trend to license new functionality in Microsoft 365 rather than the older Office 365 products.
At a September 21 event in NYC, Microsoft announced that the Microsoft 365 Copilot digital assistant will be generally available to enterprise customers on November 1. Quite how many customers will be willing to cough up for license upgrades and $30/month Copilot subscriptions will soon be seen. The advent of the Copilot Lab to help users come to grips with building good prompts to drive Copilot is an excellent idea, but the focus on Monarch as the sole Outlook client might become a blocking factor for some.
Recent details released about the Storm-0558 attack on sensitive U.S. agencies revealed the importance of the MailItemsAccessed event for forensic investigations. Luckily, after Microsoft was a tad embarrassed by the recent Storm-0558 attack, tenants with Office 365 E3 or Microsoft 365 E3 licenses can capture the MailItemsAccessed event for mailboxes without having to pay for Microsoft Purview Audit Premium. But you might have to do a little work to ensure that the right audit configuration is used for all mailboxes.
A recent update for the Loop app allows users to create and collaborate on code blocks. The editor is very simple and doesn’t check syntax, but it could be a way for people (within a tenant) to collaborate and sketch out potential code solutions to problems. You can create Loop components from code blocks and use those components with Teams chat and Outlook messages, if you remember to stay within your tenant.
Microsoft has moved to resolve anti-competitive problems around bundling of Teams in Office 365 and Microsoft 365 by introducing new Microsoft 365 and Office 365 EEA licenses that don’t include Teams. Existing customers aren’t affected and can continue to use Microsoft 365 and Office 365 licenses that include Teams. At the same time, Microsoft promises to make it easier for third parties to integrate apps with Teams and the Microsoft 365 apps. We’ll see how that turns out in the future.
Microsoft has decided to remove the Reuse Files feature from Word. They haven’t said why this is happening, but 8t might be linked to the launch Copilot for Microsoft 365. “AI-Lite” features like Reuse Files don’t add a huge amount of value and possibly cloud the message about AI in Microsoft 365. The truth is that we don’t know why Microsoft is removing Reuse Files from Word. Will they do the same in Outlook and PowerPoint?
Microsoft announced on August 17 that they are not proceeding with the implementation of dark mode support in the Teams Admin center. The news came as a surprise, but it’s an indication of the lack of user interface consistency across the different Microsoft 365 administrative consoles. Token handling is another example. I can live without dark mode, but being forced to sign out by the Teams admin center is a pain.
A Microsoft 365 Copilot session for partners didn’t reveal much new about the technology, but it did emphasize software, prompts, and content as core areas for implementation projects. Building good queries is difficult enough for normal searches, so how will people cope with Copilot prompts. And are the data stored in Microsoft 365 ready for Copilot? There’s lots to consider for organizations before they can embrace Microsoft’s digital office assistant.
Microsoft has announced that they are replacing the user data search tool with Purview eDiscovery standard. The change will happen on 30 August 2023 and active user data search cases will be transferred automatically to eDiscovery standard at that point. The change makes sense because the user data search tool hasn’t been enhanced much since its inception. Anyway, user data search cases were simply a special form of eDiscovery case, and now they’re all the same.
The Microsoft 365 admin center contains a new option to enable the Loop app for everyone in a tenant. The setting overrides a previous cloud policy used to control access to the Loop app. It’s the kind of change you’d expect to see as an app makes it way through preview to the point when it becomes generally available. In other Loop news, the Loop app is available as a PWA through the Microsoft Store.
A reader asked why some deleted Microsoft 365 user accounts appear to have assigned licenses. That seemed strange because licenses are freed up for reuse when accounts are deleted, so we took a look behind the scenes to find out why some deleted user accounts keep license information in their properties and some do not.
Microsoft 365 apps now boast a simplified sharing experience. In other words, Microsoft has overhauled and revamped the dialogs used to create and manage sharing links. This is the first real change in the area since 2020-21. It’s a good time to make sharing easier for people because the introduction of Microsoft 365 Copilot means that overshared files and folders will be exposed.
On July 31, Microsoft announced that Clipchamp for Work will roll out to targeted release Microsoft 365 commercial tenants in the next few weeks. Although it’s good that Microsoft 365 tenants will get a very capable video editor, the goodness of the announcement is reduced by the fact that Microsoft is not making Clipchamp for Work available for Office 365 enterprise SKUs. That seems like a great pity, but it’s all part of Microsoft’s plan to nudge customers toward Microsoft 365.
At the Inspire conference, Microsoft briefed their partners about the Microsoft 365 Backup and Microsoft 365 Archive products they plan to launch at some time in the future. Microsoft’s biggest advantage is their access to data and the speed at which they can process the information. Whether this gets people past the “all digital eggs in the Microsoft basket” issue remains to be seen.
Stream video playback in Teams chats and channels is now inline, meaning that the video plays direct without any need to call the Stream browser client. It’s a good update that makes watching Stream videos a very seamless experience. It would be nice if Microsoft can improve some other integration points where Stream and Teams touch because some of the other integration features don’t work so well. In other news, SharePoint Online is rationalizing how it stores user photos.
