Author: Tony Redmond

Latest Articles

Practical Copilot: Creating a Declarative Agent

Microsoft is all in for Copilot at present and agents are a big part of the story. Multiple ways exist to create a declarative agent for use with Copilot in BizChat and Teams. This article reviews how to create an agent with the Teams Toolkit, Copilot Studio, and Microsoft 365 Copilot - and if any usage data are created for custom agents.

January 21, 2025

Practical SharePoint: Discover Where Files without Retention Labels Exist in SharePoint and OneDrive

Purview Data Lifecycle management includes many ways to apply retention labels to SharePoint Online files, some of which require E5 licenses. Tools are available to show you what files have retention labels, but finding unlabeled SharePoint files is difficult because no out-of-the-box methods are available. Here we show how to use a content search to find unlabeled SharePoint files, and how to adjust the search results to have usable data for further processing.

January 13, 2025

Practical 365 Review of 2024

In our 2024 review of Microsoft 365, we consider some of the major technical advances that occured in Microsoft's cloud ecosystem in 2024 together with some upcoming changes that have the potential to affect tenant operations. As always, our choice of what's important and what's not might not match yours, so feel free to comment and voice your opinion.

December 19, 2024

Practical Entra ID: Find Unused Guest Accounts with PowerShell

Given the widespread use of guest accounts within Microsoft 365 to allow external sharing of resources, it’s almost inevitable that some unused guest accounts exist in any Microsoft 365 tenant. Identifying unused guest accounts is a good management practice. If the accounts serve no purpose, why keep them? This article explores how to find unused guest accounts. What you do with them later is up to you.

December 16, 2024

Practical Copilot: Figuring Out What People Do with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft has a new allInteractionHistory Graph API in beta. The API returns details of user interactions with Microsoft 365 Copilot apps, like Copilot in Word and Copilot in Outlook at a much more detailed level than what is available in the usage report API. Despite the current flaws in the API, having access to detailed information about how people use technology is incredibly valuable.

December 10, 2024

Practical Teams: The New Chat and Channels Experience

Since its inception, the Teams user interface has emphasize teams and channels for collaboration. But that's not how people work, and the new chat and channels experience emphasizes chats a lot more. This doesn't mean that channels are going away. They remain the foundation of teams and the right way to communicate and share information for ongoing use, but the change to highlight chats might take some getting used to.

November 18, 2024

Practical Graph: Analyzing Microsoft 365 Copilot Interactions Using Compliance Records

Every time Microsoft 365 Copilot interacts with a user, the Microsoft 365 substrate captures the Copilot interaction as a compliance record in the user's mailbox. By fetching and analyzing the compliance records, we can understand how the user interacts with Copilot. This article discusses how to retrieve and analyze the records with the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK.

November 4, 2024

Practical Graph: How to Use Graph Schema Extensions

Sometimes Microsoft 365 tenants need to store specific data for objects like users and groups. The Graph provides several extensibility options. This article describes how to define and use schema extensions to store information about the container management labels assigned to Microsoft 365 Groups.

October 28, 2024