On the show this week, Paul Robichaux and I discuss Microsoft’s announcement about making Copilot Chat free for all Microsoft 365 users, significant changes coming to Exchange Online audit logging, and the imminent arrival of the new Outlook via Windows Update.
Microsoft Opens Up Copilot Chat Access
The biggest news this week is Microsoft’s announcement that Copilot Chat will be available to all Microsoft 365 commercial customers at no additional cost. While this version includes GPT-4o powered chat capabilities without organizational data access, organizations can use AI agents on a pay-as-you-go basis. This represents a significant shift in Microsoft’s AI strategy and provides an easier entry point for organizations to begin exploring AI capabilities.
Read Microsoft’s Copilot for All announcement on the Microsoft website
Considering the recent announcement, understanding how to build and deploy custom agents becomes increasingly important. Tony Redmond has published an excellent deep-dive examining how to create declarative agents using different approaches, including the Teams Toolkit in Visual Studio Code and Copilot Studio.
Microsoft’s AI Reorganization
In a move that demonstrates Microsoft’s commitment to AI, Satya Nadella announced a major reorganization creating a new CoreAI – Platform and Tools division under Jay Parikh’s leadership. This brings together Dev Div, AI Platform, and key teams from the Office of the CTO, signaling Microsoft’s intention to accelerate AI development across their product stack.
Read Microsoft’s announcement about the CoreAI reorganization
Exchange Online Audit Logging Changes
Microsoft has announced the retirement of Search-MailboxAuditLog and New-MailboxAuditLogSearch cmdlets, with a transition to the Unified Audit Log planned for completion by the end of 2025. March 1st, 2025, marks when new audit log data will stop being written to mailboxes, with Microsoft providing migration tools to help organizations transition their historical data.
Read more about these changes in the Microsoft Security & Compliance blog
New Outlook’s Windows Update Arrival
The new Outlook client will be automatically installed on Windows 10 devices as part of February’s security updates. While it won’t replace the existing Outlook client installed as part of Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise/Business, organizations should start planning for this change.
Read MC976059 in the Microsoft 365 Message Center
Power Platform Tenant-to-Tenant Preview
A preview of tenant-to-tenant migrations for Power Platform is coming in February, enabling organizations to move environments between tenants without physical relocation of the data. This capability will significantly simplify merger and acquisition scenarios and tenant consolidation projects and complement tools such as Quest’s On Demand Migration.
Read more about using the preview on Microsoft Learn
Copilot Document Summarization
Microsoft is rolling out automatic document summarization in Word for Copilot users, with the feature enabled by default but collapsible if desired. We discuss on the show whether Microsoft has learned from Apple’s recent challenges with AI summarization and what this means for enterprise users.
Read the announcement in the Message Center (MC871010)
MFA Incident in Western Europe
A recent MFA incident affecting Western Europe users highlighted both the importance of robust authentication systems and Microsoft’s improved incident response capabilities. The incident, which lasted approximately two hours, was caused by unexpected CPU utilization spikes and memory issues in the authentication infrastructure.
Read the service notification in the Microsoft 365 admin portal (OP978247)
Join us next time on the show, where we’ll continue to explore the latest developments in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Don’t forget to subscribe to the Practical 365 Podcast on your favorite podcast platform.
