Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2 Announcement

Big announcements were made this week on what is being termed as Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2.  There are three major capabilities with this release:

1. Copilot Pages
2. Copilot Microsoft 365 Apps
3. Copilot Agents

1) Copilot Pages

Copilot Pages are a new immersive and collaborative experience that begins with you engaging with Copilot to obtain information.  From there, an interactive experience starts that allows you to take information you obtain from Copilot, extract it, share and then collaborate with that data in real-time with your colleagues.  It allows quickly transition information you obtain from Copilot to create persistent work products.

If you are wondering what a Copilot Page is, it is essentially an integrated experience with Loop.  Loop files are created and stored for the user.  Loop files are managed just like any other Office file stored in SharePoint Online.  The Copilot Page is stored in a new user owned SharePoint Embedded container designated for user.  Copilot Pages can be managed from an enterprise perspective just like any other piece of content in SharePoint Online.

2) Copilot Microsoft 365 Apps

There are new experiences being delivered with Copilot with each of the Microsoft 365 Apps.

Copilot in Excel: Provides new capabilities to assist users with formatting and analyzing data in spreadsheets.  Copilot knows how to reason over the data and assist with tasks with formatting and preparing data to make decisions.  Applying formulas, formatting, are just pieces of this.  You now can ask Copilot questions about the data.  Copilot can make recommendations on visual formats for the best chart to represent the data you have in Excel.  If you need to do some advanced analysis, you can leverage Copilot to generate Python code in your spreadsheet to create complex operations such as building visualizations, data refinement, machine learning and predictive analytics.  There are also new capabilities where Copilot can reason over data in a spreadsheet and generate summarized natural language responses about the data that can be used in other business products you are creating.

Copilot in PowerPoint: There are new Copilot features that assist with the creation of slides and content.  Narrative Builder is a new feature where Copilot assists you with creating an outline and then generates slides based on that outline.  You have the ability to tell Copilot the type of information you and to bring into the presentation, it will query your corporate data and then pull the data into the outline for you to review.  There is also a new feature called Brand Manager that will bring in your corporate brand and apply it to the presentation.

Copilot in Teams: There is a new feature that brings together the meeting transcript with chat data provide a complete picture of what was discussed in the meeting.

Copilot in Outlook: There is new capability that will assist you with Prioritizing your inbox.  Copilot will quickly review the messages that matter, and generate a summary of each email including why it was prioritized.

Copilot in Word: Today, Copilot already assists the user with bringing in and referencing data from the web and files you have access to.  This is going to be expanded to other locations such as your email and meetings.

Copilot in OneDrive: With Copilot, you now do not have to remember where that content was stored, especially if you have amassed a large volume of content of the years.  All this information is accessible to Copilot.

3) Copilot Agents

This is an extremely exciting new capability.  Agents are basically AI assistants that are designed to automate and execute business processes.  They can be very simple in nature that automate simple tasks or be more complex to replace repetitive tasks.  To create an agent there is a new agent builder tool that is built to be simple for an information worker.  An agent can be created based on a defined set of data, and then users can interact with that agent to obtain data.  More advanced agents can operate autonomously and independently execute and perform planned activities.

There is a new lightweight Copilot Studio tool that assists users with the creation of an Agent.  You have the ability to tell Copilot Studio, in natural language, what you like it to be.  You can identify knowledge sources and data across the enterprise to be leveraged by the Agent.  From there the Agent and be deployed to the enterprise.

References

• Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2: Pages, Python in Excel, and agents | Microsoft 365 Blog
• Announcing Copilot Pages for multiplayer collaboration - Microsoft Community Hub
• Copilot pages for IT Admins - Sep 2024 update - Microsoft Community Hub
• Unlock the power of Copilot in Excel, now generally available - Microsoft Community Hub
• Supercharge your business with agents built with Microsoft Copilot Studio | Microsoft Copilot Blog

Microsoft Copilot is coming to the US Government Clouds

Microsoft Copilot is coming to the US Government Clouds.  Here is some basic information you should know.

GCC Cloud

Current roadmap it to release Copilot in two waves to the GCC cloud.  Wave 1 will land in October 2024.  This first wave will comprise of such features as Copilot Graph-ground chat, Copilot with the major apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams chat) and Intelligent Meeting Recap.  This first set of capability is strategically aligned with supporting user experiences with the primary collaboration clients that user interact with daily.

Wave 2 is planned for March 2025.  In this release additional Office collaboration scenarios will be supported: Teams Meeting Copilot, OneNote, Stream, Planner, OneDrive for Business and Loop.

GCCH/DoD Clouds

Targeted for Summer of 2025.  

References

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/public-sector-blog/microsoft-copilot-for-microsoft-365-gcc-ga-update-empowering/ba-p/4222952

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/public-sector-blog/azure-openai-service-is-fedramp-high-and-copilot-for-microsoft/ba-p/4222955

Microsoft 365 Backup GA

A new solution called Microsoft 365 Backup and Backup Storage recently went GA.

This is a really cool new capacity that assists organizations in protecting themselves from disaster recovery and security scenarios when you need to recover your data.  Microsoft 365 has tons of data protection services built natively into the service.  Microsoft 365 Backup helps protect you against ransomware attacks and gives you the ability to have self-service recovery capabilities.

Microsoft 365 Backup is currently scoped to OneDrive, SharePoint and Exchange data.  With Microsoft 365 Backup you have the ability to mass backups and recovery points for your most critical business data.

For more information, read here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-backup-blog/microsoft-announces-general-availability-of-microsoft-365-backup/ba-p/4205300

Microsoft 365 Organizational Messages

A new interesting feature called Organizational Messages for Microsoft 365 will be in Public Preview.  This new interesting feature will assist you with communications with your users outside of email.  Users will receive communications through Windows 11 or Microsoft 365 apps.  

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-blog/introducing-organizational-messages-preview-in-the-microsoft-365/ba-p/4123890

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/admin/misc/organizational-messages-microsoft-365?view=o365-worldwide#setup-requirements

UAL Logging Updates for Office 365

 New logging capabilities are coming for Office 365 customers.  Much of this was driven by our engagement with the US Government to help them obtaining more logs and telemetry data.  Specifically, 

• Unified Audit Log (UAL) Ingestion Size has been expanded to increase the amount of data flowing to SIEMs.
• Retention has been increased to 180 days.

There is additional important information in the announcement that you should be considering.

Reference - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/public-sector-blog/cisa-omb-oncd-and-microsoft-collaborate-on-new-logging-playbook/ba-p/4063661

Multi-Tenant Organization (MTO) for Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is now releasing a new group of features that fall under what is called Multi-Tenant Organization (MTO).  Over the past several years, Microsoft has received a significant amount of requests for supporting organizations that have multiple tenants.  Administrators need the ability to provide common configuration and management of users across these tenants, plus enable collaboration between users in these tenants.

Some important features that are part of this are:

• Side-by-side multi-tasking and cross tenant notifications – This allows a user to be in multiple tenants within a single Teams client user experience. 
• Improved people search and chat experience – Allows users to find their peers in other tenants and chat with them.
• Richer meeting experience – Enables full fidelity meeting experience between users in different tenants.

Highly recommend reviewing the entire article.

Reference: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-teams-blog/announcing-more-seamless-collaboration-in-microsoft-teams-for/ba-p/3901092 

Microsoft 365 Copilot

Very exciting public announcement.  Microsoft 365 is now being integrated with ChatGpt.  Introducing Microsoft Copilot which is a next-generation AI solution integrated with Microsoft Office.

From the announcement:

• Copilot in Word writes, edits, summarizes and creates right alongside people as they work.
• Copilot in PowerPoint enables the creation process by turning ideas into a designed presentation through natural language commands.
• Copilot in Excel helps unlock insights, identify trends or create professional-looking data visualizations in a fraction of the time.
• Copilot in Outlook can help synthesize and manage the inbox to allow more time to be spent on actually communicating.
• Copilot in Teams makes meetings more productive with real-time summaries and action items directly in the context of the conversation.
• Copilot in Power Platform will help developers of all skill levels accelerate and streamline development with low-code tools with the introduction of two new capabilities within Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents.
• Business Chat brings together data from across documents, presentations, email, calendar, notes and contacts to help summarize chats, write emails, find key dates or even write a plan based on other project files.

This is beyond exciting and is going to definitely change the game….

Announcements

https://news.microsoft.com/2023/03/16/introducing-microsoft-365-copilot-your-copilot-for-work/

https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/03/16/introducing-microsoft-365-copilot-your-copilot-for-work/