M365

The Copilot inference and evaluation policy controls if users can ask Copilot in Teams to evaluate the emotions of other meeting participants.

The new Take notes with Copilot feature for personal notebooks in OneNote on Windows helps you gather and create notes directly on the page using natural...

Paul Schnackenburg dives deep into how Microsoft Purview has prioritized data governance and security features to address the challenges of oversharing and lax permissions exposed by M365 Copilot.

Microsoft has announced some big changes to its M365 app UI as well as M365 Copilot for early next year.

On December 12, Microsoft said that they want to make the Search-UnifiedAuditLog cmdlet use high completeness for all its searches. The result is a disaster.

You logged into Purview eDiscovery and found yourself in a whole new user experience (UX). You have a priority hold or collection and need counsel’s buy in on the new search, hold, review and export options. Buried at the end of my

Big changes are being hinted at for SharePoint and Microsoft Viva...

The new Copilot for Windows app doesn't work with Entra ID accounts, so Microsoft now has some curious advice for managed organizations.

Coming on Friday on YouTube, we look at Remote Help in Intune. What are the advantages and disadvantages? Is the software worth the price? #microsoft365 #intune 🧑‍🏫 NEW Course - Discover Microsoft 365 and Get More Done ► Start Learning - https://bit.ly/3NI9Uo8 🆓 FREE Facebook Group From security to productivity apps to getting the best value from your Microsoft 365 investment, join our Microsoft 365 Mastery Group https://www.facebook.com/groups/microsoft365mastery 🆓 FREE Microsoft 365 Guide Our FREE Guide - Discover 5 things in Microsoft 365 that will save your business time and money….. and one feature that increases your Cyber Security by 99.9% ► Download our guide here today: https://bearded365guy.com 💻 Want to Work Together? Drop me an email: jonathan@bearded365guy.com 😁 Follow on Socials TikTok @bearded365guy Instagram @bearded365guy

Introduction In the second part of these series, we continued the flow obtaining the issues per service name and filtering by those we are interested on, in the third part, we store the issues in a…

Small and medium-sized businesses need an AI solution that helps them work smarter. Learn how Microsoft 365 Copilot is a strategic investment for growth.

In this video, we’ll guide you through the steps to block USB storage devices in Microsoft 365 and Intune. Learn how to enhance your organization's security ...

Since we first announced the new consumer Copilot in October, we have loved seeing the ways people have made Copilot their own. It has helped people think through their ideas and get a fresh perspective, has made it less overwhelming to find the right information, and has even helped people feel supported when navigating difficult

Intelligent versioning means that SharePoint Online manages file versions automatically and only keeps what's needed. The feature works for OneDrive too.

SharePoint Agents are AI-powered agents that revolutionize the way you interact with documentation transforming your workflow and boosting your productivity.

Microsoft Teams

This year, the spotlight at Microsoft Ignite was on AI. I’ll share the announcements that impressed me the most and explore how they’re shaping the future of work

In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, the protection of sensitive organizational data is critical, especially given the accelerated adoption of AI...

With Microsoft Purview’s "Secure by Default" initiative from the engineering team at Microsoft, creating and publishing sensitivity labels has become simpler and more efficient. Now, you can cover all prerequisites and set up the 12 recommended labels, publishing them to end users in just a few clicks. This streamlined process means that even organisations with minimal administrative effort can achieve robust data protection.However, if you'd like to take the recommended or manual route, that re

The new Purview Portal UX adds a lot of new functionality and architectural changes. The classic versions are scheduled for decommissioning in January, so Purview users need to get up to speed quick and adapt your workflows. I created a page that calls out the changes, potential impact and recommendations for experienced users.

The slew of product announcements at the Microsoft Ignite 2024 conference included lots about AI and Copilot. This article covers some of the highlights.

Microsoft is releasing new AI agents in Microsoft 365 to improve business processes and individual productivity. These agents can automate tasks, provide information, and more.

In today's complex digital landscape, organizations are often challenged with fragmented solutions, where visibility into sensitive data and its use may be siloed across different systems. Recent studies show that 21% of decision-makers cite the lack of consolidated and comprehensive visibility caused by disparate tools as their biggest challenge to an effective security posture[1]. This results in a lack of centralized understanding of risks when combined with an overwhelming volume of alerts, creates gaps in protective controls and inefficiencies in mitigating data security incidents. Ultimately, this hinders the organization’s ability to strengthen its data security posture. Moreover, these challenges are only getting amplified with the rapid adoption of generative AI (GenAI) as organizations are racing to address data risks such as data leaks, data theft, data oversharing, and data compliance for GenAI use. 84% of organizations agree they need to do more to protect against the risky use of AI tools[2], making data security top of mind. A key component of a strong data security posture is comprehensive and correlated visibility into type, location, and volume of sensitive data and user activities around the data. “By 2026, more than 20% of organizations will deploy DSPM technology, due to the urgent requirements to identify and locate previously unknown data repositories and to mitigate associated security and privacy risks".[3] Without this level of visibility and continuous risk assessment, businesses remain vulnerable to undetected data misuse, operational inefficiencies, and alert fatigue. ​ To meet this customer need, today we are excited to announce the public preview of Microsoft Purview Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) to provide visibility into data security risks and recommend controls to protect data. DSPM offers contextual insights into data, its usage, and continuous risk assessment of your evolving data landscape, helping to mitigate data risks and strengthen your data security posture. DSPM is natively integrated with Microsoft 365 and Windows devices and does not require any additional agents or plugins, making it very easy to get started for both existing and new Purview customers. With DSPM, customers can discover risks, apply protections, as well as investigate and mitigate data security risks all within an integrated and seamlessly connected experience without having to stitch together multiple different products. And finally, DSPM leverages the power of generative AI through its deep integration with Security Copilot. With this integration, you can easily uncover risks that might not be immediately apparent and drive efficient and richer investigations - all in natural language. Data security admins can leverage DSPM as a starting point for a better understanding of their data security risks through: Centralized visibility: DSPM correlates signals from Information Protection (MIP), Insider Risk Management (IRM), and Data Loss Prevention (DLP) to provide top data security insights. Without DSPM, data security teams would have to spend time correlating insights across data and user context, which can lead to blind spots, inaccurate assessments, or different interpretations and prioritization of risks. With DSPM, your teams have a shared understanding of key risks provided through a series of analytics reports providing insights across location and type of sensitive data, risky user activities, and common exfiltration channels, as well as sensitive data detected in GenAI interactions.  Figure 1: DSPM overview page provides centralized visibility across data, users, and activities, as well as access to reports Policy recommendations: In addition to providing insights, DSPM also provides actionable recommendations on policies that can make your data security program more effective. DSPM will provide scenario-based policy recommendations for Insider Risk Management and DLP, enabling teams to create integrated DLP and IRM policies with just a few clicks. For example,  DSPM can help you create an IRM policy that identifies risky behavior such as downgrading labels in documents followed by exfiltration, and a DLP policy to block that exfiltration at the same time. You can further fine-tune these policies through the existing policy experience in DLP and IRM. Figure 2: IRM and DLP correlated policies being recommended by DSPM Continuous risk assessment and trends: DSPM also brings a view of historical trends and insights based on sensitivity labels applied, sensitive assets covered by at least one DLP policy, and potentially risky users. This supports the scale and continuous improvement of your data security program by helping your teams discover new data risks and understand if existing strategies and policies are being effective.   Figure 3: Trends on DSPM provide a historic view of how the efficiency of my data security posture Supercharge DSPM with Security Copilot With Security Copilot embedded in DSPM, organizations can gain more out of DSPM by accessing GenAI-powered insights in natural language. Data Security teams can conduct deeper investigations to better understand potential risks to their data. DSPM can help teams get started and prioritize their efforts through: Starting suggested prompts: These are contextually relevant insights for the top data risks in your organizations such as ‘Which sensitive files were shared outside the org from SharePoint last week?”. Right in the DSPM experience, your teams can see five categories such as ‘alerts to prioritize’, ‘sensitive data leaks detected’, ‘devices at risk’, and ‘risky sequenced activity’. Follow-up prompts: Building on the response to these starting prompts or user-entered open prompt, Copilot provides suggested prompts to guide you through a recommended path of investigation. Open prompts: You can further customize your analysis by using open prompts allowing you to explore investigations in many directions across data sets, alerts, users, and activities. Security Copilot in DSPM enables teams to discover previously unseen risks and accelerate data security by suggesting scenarios and prompts that can help triage and prioritize risks. Through these guided investigations, Copilot makes it easy to onboard newer team members and drive greater efficiency for experienced team members. Figure 4: Security Copilot supercharging and guiding investigation with starting suggested insights and follow-up prompt, and enabling open prompt Let’s walk through a scenario to make DSPM real. We know that a data security admin receives around 60 alerts per day and can address only 50% of those alerts the same day. With so much to do, admins often don’t have time to assess which alerts to prioritize or to proactively identify improvements that would strengthen the organization’s data security posture. In this scenario, Anna is data security admin in an organization working on the very confidential project Obsidian, and she is focused on checking if there are data exfiltration risks to that project’s sensitive information. On the DSPM reports, she can verify locations with unprotected files classified as ‘Project Obsidian,’ as well as the top risky user activities involving this project. These insights will help Anna fine-tune policies and identify abnormal behavior, such as departing users performing exfiltration activities with Project Obsidian data that exceed the organization’s average. To go deeper into the risks she identified, she can ask Security Copilot ‘Which sensitive files were shared outside the org last week classified as Project Obsidian?’ to understand what specific data was impacted, and she can continue the investigation with suggested or open prompts. And to then take quick actions to improve protections on Project Obsidian, Anna will find at the top of DSPM overview page an integrated recommendation for IRM and DLP policies to prevent sequential activities that might leak sensitive data, triggered by risks on this project. Figure 5: Analytics report showing top risky activities on unprotected sensitive data, where I can see specific data involved This is just the start! Currently, DSPM provides insights across your Microsoft 365 workloads and Windows devices. In the future, you will see us continue to add additional value to help you better understand and strengthen your data security posture across your data estate. Learn more about DSPM in our documentation and deep dive video. This capability will be available in public preview within the coming weeks. Enhancing data security posture for Generative AI usage As the adoption of GenAI grows, so is the need and urgency to protect data in GenAI. To do so,  organizations can use DSPM for AI (previously known as Microsoft Purview AI Hub), now in general availability. DSPM for AI is designed to help organizations secure, govern, and identify risks in the use of AI applications, including Microsoft's Copilot and other third-party AI tools. DSPM for AI offers ready-to-use policies to prevent data loss in AI prompts and it integrates with Microsoft's broader Purview features like sensitivity labeling, auditing, and data classification. Today, we are also announcing the public preview of the new oversharing assessment for Microsoft 365 Copilot in DSPM for AI, to help customers discover sensitive information and locations with potential oversharing risk based on existing patterns. This report will also provide recommendations on how to protect sensitive data with labeling or permissions, and actionable alerts to monitor drift away from these policies and permissions, and it will reflect the new risky GenAI usage detection from IRM and Communication Compliance. Learn about our announcement for IRM in this blog. Figure 6: New Oversharing report on DSPM for AI This view leverages new Purview capabilities that aim to enable better data permission and prot

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Use this deployment blueprint to help prevent oversharing when using Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Welcome to Ignite 2024! We’re excited to share a LOT of really innovative and useful new features with you. Getting everything ready to present at Ignite keeps us incredibly busy this time of year, as you might imagine. But it’s also a time when I find myself reflecting on the impact that all of these Teams features that we’re about to highlight can have on so many different aspects of work. I’m continually impressed that with each update, collaboration in Teams gets smoother, and new Copilot features help me be more productive, and work smarter and faster. This year’s additions to Teams move the bar even further as they support a richer flexible working experience and harness the power of AI to help you do more. There’s exciting news to share in every one of our categories, and I hope you’ll scroll through the healthy list of updates below, and let us know which ones you think will benefit you the most. Or if you’d like, jump to your favorite category first: Microsoft Places Chat and Collaboration Meetings, Mesh in Teams, Webinars and Town Halls Teams Rooms and Devices Teams Phone Teams Fundamentals Frontline Worker Solutions   Microsoft Places One of the most exciting products being announced at this year's Ignite is Microsoft Places, an AI-powered workplace solution for flexible work available with a Teams Premium license. Places alongside Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Teams make up the AI-powered workplace, solutions reimagining flexible work in a way that empowers every employee to achieve their best outcomes. Places intelligently allows you to coordinate your hybrid team to make the most of in-office days, modernize how employees make connections, and optimize space management with occupancy and utilization data.   Recommended in-office days with Copilot: Generally available now Deciding whether to go to the office depends on your in-person meetings and who else plans to be there. Copilot in Places makes this decision easier by recommending if today is a good day to come into the office based on your scheduled in-person meetings, your coworkers’ planned attendance, and any leader guidance that exists.   Managed booking with Copilot: Generally available now With schedules and meetings constantly shifting, avoid the frantic rush to update your room booking at the last minute. Places goes beyond a simple booking app, using Copilot to help you manage room bookings. Regardless of shifting schedules, Copilot will ensure you always have the right space to work.   Places finder: Generally available now All meeting rooms and desks are not created equal. Save yourself time figuring out which room or desk has the space and technology you need using Places finder, your booking helper.   Workplace presence: Generally available now No more missed connections when you and your colleagues are in the office. Seamlessly coordinate meetings, teamwork, and connections with workplace presence. Your workplace presence updates with your work plan and includes an automatic update of your location to “office” when connecting your laptop to a monitor at an in-office desk or peripheral in a bring your own device (BYOD) room. Users have control of this feature and can also update their workplace presence manually to set where they are. See who is nearby in 1:1 or group chats to easily coordinate lunch, brainstorming sessions, or in-person meetings.  You can find location information on your colleagues’ profile card or in the participant list in group chats. In 2025, workplace presence will automatically update with Wi-Fi signals.   Space analytics with Copilot: Generally available now Optimizing space for a hybrid workforce is difficult if you don’t have visibility into how often employees are coming into the office and what spaces are actually being used. Make better space decisions with occupancy and utilization insights and Copilot recommendations from intent data, check-ins, and device signals, with space analytics. Make sure your workplace is working for your employees.   Team guidance: Generally available now Trying to create the right in-person cadence for your team is challenging. Find the best work patterns for your team with team guidance, which identifies a purpose for team days in the office. Meet the needs of the group by working with team guidance to establish expectations and adjust the rhythm.    Quick book: Generally available now Forgetting to book meeting rooms for the day leads to a last-minute rush to book. For in-office meetings without a room booked, Places will prompt you to book rooms and offer recommendations from the Places card. View suggested rooms for each meeting, and 'quick book' rooms in bulk for the day. Book a space for all your meetings all at once.       Chat and Collaboration Copilot file summary in chat: Public preview in early 2025 When a file is shared in a chat, you don’t always have the time to open it, read through, and grasp the key ideas. With new file summaries in 1:1 and group chats in Teams, Microsoft 365 Copilot can quickly summarize content from Microsoft Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and PDFs, so you can understand the main points without opening the file. This feature is also available on mobile, making it easier to grasp key ideas without reading an entire document on a small screen while on the move. It respects the file's security policies, ensuring that only users with access to the file receive a summary, which will carry the same sensitivity label as the original file.   Storyline integrated in Teams: Public preview in early 2025 Employee communications are often scattered across multiple locations, leading to frustration, delays, and overload. Storyline in Teams empowers leaders to share communications with an entire company, and simplifies the ways you and your colleagues share and connect. The Storyline integration provides a new way to discover content, contribute your ideas and perspectives, and express yourself while staying in your flow of work in Teams.  Integration of communities with Teams and much more is coming next year.    The new chat & channels experience: Available now in public preview The new chat and channels experience is designed to help you collaborate more efficiently and effectively. It’s simple by default, enabling everyone to stay on top of what matters, and it’s powerful on demand, allowing you to organize information and communicate your way. Catch up on chat, channels and teams in one place, use filters to triage messages, create custom sections to organize conversations by topics, and more. Join hundreds of customers like Eaton, Vodafone, VML, Itaú Unibanco S/A and Kyndryl who are using the new chat and channels experience as part of the Teams private preview program. Learn more here.   Loop workspace in a channel: Generally available in early 2025 Channels in Microsoft Teams streamline collaboration by bringing people, content, and apps together and helping to organize them by project or topic. You will be able to add a Loop workspace tab to standard channels enabling your team to brainstorm, co-create, collect, and organize content—together in real-time. Everyone in the Team gets access to the Loop workspace, even as Team membership changes, and the workspace adheres to the governance, lifecycle, and compliance standards set by the Microsoft 365 Group backing the team. To get started, click the plus sign (+) at the top of the channel and select Loop from the app list.   Name pronunciation: Available now in public preview, generally available in early 2025 You can now record and share the correct pronunciation of your name, fostering inclusivity and ensuring colleagues pronounce names accurately. Simply open your profile card to make a recording. This recording will be accessible on your profile card to individuals at your workplace or school using Microsoft 365. With a single click, you can listen to your colleagues' name pronunciations.   Skin tone setting for emojis and reactions: Generally available now The new skin tone setting for emojis and reactions in Teams lets you personalize your digital interactions by selecting a skin tone that best represents you. In your settings, you can choose from a range of skin tones. Once selected, this will be consistently applied across chat, channels and meetings as well as on various clients, allowing you to express yourself more authentically in conversations.   Changing skin tone in Teams Settings > Appearance and accessibility in Teams for Desktop: To change your skin tone go to Teams Settings-> Appearance and accessibility in Teams Changing skin tone in the emoji menu in Teams for Desktop   Meetings, Mesh, Webinars, and Town Halls Copilot in Teams can analyze content shared on-screen: Public preview in early 2025 Maximize meeting insights with Microsoft 365 Copilot’s new ability to analyze content presented in Teams. Copilot’s ability to reason over any content shared on screen ensures that no meeting details are overlooked. Copilot provides a 360-degree view of meetings by analyzing spoken words, chat messages, and now, on-screen content. This comprehensive data enables users to ask Copilot to summarize or find specific information from screen-shared content (e.g., ‘Which products had the highest sales?’), consolidate insights across both the conversation and presentation (e.g., 'What was the feedback per slide?'), and draft new content based on the entire meeting (e.g., 'Rewrite the paragraph shared on the screen incorporating the feedback from the chat’). This works for any content shared while sharing your desktop screen (including but not limited to documents, slides, spreadsheets, and websites, irrespective of platform or app). Support for PowerPoint Live and Whiteboard in Teams will be available at a later date.     Liv

Empower every employee with Microsoft Copilot and transform every business process with agents built in Microsoft Copilot Studio. Learn more

If left unaddressed, M365's default permissions and Copilot's discoverability can create major cybersecurity risks for organizations and their data.

Warning: This post was written by me, not AI. :) There is a Microsoft Purview capability whereby a retention label can be applied to cloud attachments.  (Microsoft reference: Auto-apply retent…

Microsoft is increasing the price of Power BI Pro licenses from $10 to $14 per user per month and PPU licenses from $20 to $24 per user per month, effective April 1, 2025.