Copilot for Microsoft 365 has introduced a feature that allows users to select their preferred language during a Teams meeting, even if transcripts or captions are not activated. This option is available when the ‘Allow Copilot’ setting is configured to ‘Only during the meeting’. The rollout of this feature began in mid-June 2024, and it does not require any administrative action to be enabled.
This ensures that responses from Copilot for Microsoft 365 are in the language chosen by the user. When this feature is selected, a language selector screen will appear, and a language must be chosen for the meeting to start Copilot for Microsoft 365. It’s designed to enhance the user experience by providing support in the user’s preferred language during the meeting.
When this will happen General Availability: Microsoft will begin rolling out late July 2024 (previously mid-June) and expect to complete by early August 2024 (previously late June).
How this will affect your organization Users will receive a language selection dialog box in Teams when Allow Copilot is set to Only during the meeting, transcript is off, and Copilot is selected to ensure that Copilot for Microsoft 365 responses are in the appropriate language.
What you need to do to prepare: This rollout will happen automatically with no admin action required. You may want to notify your users about this change and update any relevant documentation as appropriate.
Rewrite your messages with Copilot in Teams chat and channels
Copilot can assist you in crafting more polished and coherent messages, straight from the text compose box in chat and channels. It goes beyond spell-checking and grammar correction; Copilot also suggests improvements, rewrites, and adjustments to enhance the clarity, tone, and impact of your messages. Whether you’re quickly responding to your coworker or sharing a detailed project update with a VP, Copilot has your back. If you have a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license, you can navigate to the message compose box anywhere in Teams and start crafting your message. To start rewriting click on the Copilot icon in your chat box, press “Rewrite,” and watch your message instantly transform!
Not only is this an easy way to perfect your messages, but it does so without requiring you to type in any prompts. Just choose how you want to modify your message and Copilot does the work for you! If you need further editing, you can always refine your message by stacking different tones and lengths together. “Rewrite” is available for times when you don’t have any specific asks in mind for Copilot and want to use it more like a proofreader, and “Adjust” is there to give you specificity on what you want to change in your message. And remember, Copilot is the foundation of your message, but it is always important to proofread and confirm any generated content before you hit send.
Now available: Custom tone
While having Copilot do the work with those pre-set adjustment options is a great, no-prompt way to rewrite your messages quickly and efficiently, there is a new feature that allows you to tell Copilot exactly how you want to turn your writing into the best version of itself: Custom tone.
Custom tone takes everything touched upon with the “Adjust” feature and gives you the freedom to pick how Copilot can rewrite a message for you via an open prompt. With that comes the freedom to ask for multiple changes to be made, which Copilot will complete simultaneously in your rewrite. Do you want to add persuasive language to make your message more compelling? Or add additional context to your tone to give the right impression? Or turn a long sentence into a bulleted list before sharing it with your team? With custom tone, prompting how to change your message gives you the reins to make Copilot work exactly how you want it to.
Custom tone even allows you to bridge language barriers between global coworkers! Simply ask Copilot to translate your message to a specific language. For example, you can prompt that you want Copilot to make your message “longer and cheerful and in Spanish” and Copilot can apply those changes while translating instantly in the compose box – without you needing to leave your flow of work. Now, Copilot in Teams allows you to reach global audiences like never before, making it easier to write and receive messages adapted to you.
Teams messages – your next superpower
A lot of our workday is spent responding to messages in Teams. That may mean you are swamped with messages waiting to be responded to, some that are truly urgent and get buried by all your other unread chats and channels. With Copilot, you can respond faster and more effectively, driving collaboration forward. It helps reduce complexity for you as a writer, making it easier to land your message with each audience, faster. And you benefit as the message’s receiver, too – a message that is easier to understand allows you to act on it more deliberately. Thanks to Copilot, writing messages in Teams has never been easier, and it’s all thanks to an AI feature – powered by you.
Additional resources
For more examples of prompts that Copilot can help you with, check out Copilot Lab! Filter by specific Microsoft 365 apps to learn what prompts to use for meetings, in chats, and get tips for better optimized prompts with Copilot!
On the 25th of April, Microsoft announced a robust set of multi-tenant organization (MTO) capabilities within Microsoft 365, now generally available to enhance any organization’s collaboration, communication, and administration across multiple tenants. These capabilities span Microsoft 365 People Search, Microsoft Teams, Viva Engage and Microsoft Defender XDR, which can be enabled via the Microsoft 365 admin center or Microsoft Entra admin center.
This segmentation can cause frustration when users need to communicate and collaborate across tenant boundaries, whilst IT admins need to perform the same set of administrative tasks per tenant to maintain their organization.
A diagram showing multiple tenants within a single organization.
The capabilities we discuss below help multi-tenant organizations address these complexities, while staying compliant and secure:
Find people across organizations easily: Search for and communicate with colleagues in a unified manner with improved people search. Every search now returns a single, accurate result, simplifying how you connect with the right colleague.
Streamlined workforce collaboration: Engage in calls, chats, and meetings across tenants without the barriers of meeting lobbies. Enjoy immediate access to meeting content and collaborative tools in real time.
Unlock new ways for employees and leaders to connect: We’ve broadened the capabilities in Viva Engage, facilitating cross-tenant announcements and enabling community interaction and campaign participation that extend beyond tenant boundaries.
Manage incidents across tenants: Microsoft Defender XDR provides a single, unified view of all tenants your organization manages, allowing for swift incident investigation and advanced threat hunting without the need to switch between tenant views.
Simplify multi-tenant management: The newly defined multi-tenant organization boundary in Microsoft Entra ID P1 simplifies the enablement, configuration and management of the capabilities above. Whether through Microsoft Graph APIs or the Microsoft 365 Admin Center, setting up is intuitive and straightforward.
Find people across organizations easily with People Search
The multi-tenant organization (MTO) People Search is a collaboration feature that enables search and discovery of people across multiple tenants. A tenant admin can enable cross-tenant synchronization that allows users to be synced to another tenant and be discoverable in its global address list. Once enabled, users can search and discover synced user profiles from the other tenant and view their corresponding people cards.
An image showing a synchronized user profile from another tenant in Microsoft 365
Streamline workforce collaboration with Microsoft Teams
Once administrators form a multi-tenant organization in the Entra ID platform organizations with the new Teams desktop client will automatically receive the Teams MTO features with no additional configuration. Users can now join a meeting, chat, call, or collaborate in a channel hosted by another tenant, and simultaneously compose chat messages in their own tenant. Users can receive cross-tenant notifications for all accounts and tenants added to the Teams client, no matter which one is currently in focus. People’s search is also improved. Searches for coworkers in a multi-tenant organization could often return multiple results for the same person. With the new MTO capabilities in the new Teams client, searching for a coworker in an MTO will return a single result, helping you to identify the correct colleague and keep your conversations in one place.
The new Teams desktop client showing improved people search capability on the right hand side Users that join a meeting in another tenant can now bypass the meeting lobby, have access to all in-meeting content and resources and can collaborate in real time.
Manage incidents across tenants with Microsoft Defender XDR
Security operations teams that work with multiple tenants need a reliable and comprehensive security solution that can keep up with modern threats and provide unified and connected experience to enhance their security operations. Microsoft Defender XDR now delivers unified investigation and response experience for multi-tenant organizations alongside native protection across endpoints, identities, email, collaboration tools, cloud apps, and data.
With multi-tenant management in Microsoft Defender XDR, security operations teams can quickly investigate incidents and perform advanced hunting across data from multiple tenants, removing the need for administrators to log in and out of each individual tenant.
Enable Microsoft 365 multi-tenant capabilities with Microsoft Entra ID
Multi-tenant organization platform capabilities are now rolling out to standard production tenants in Microsoft 365. To deliver the above capabilities, administrators can enable multi-tenant capabilities in the Microsoft 365 admin center and configure which users in the organization can take advantage of multi-tenant capabilities using either Microsoft 365 admin center or Microsoft Entra admin center.
This approach allows you to define a boundary around the Entra ID tenants that your organization owns, facilitated by an invite-and-accept flow between tenant administrators. Learn more about the process in the Microsoft 365 admin center here and using Microsoft Graph API’s here. We recommend the use of the Microsoft 365 admin center to simplify the setup experience and to view your newly created MTO:
Snapshot of a multitenant organization collaboration with three tenants.
Following the formation of the multi-tenant organization, Microsoft offers two methods to provision employees into neighboring multi-tenant organization tenants at scale.
For a simplified experience, stay in the Microsoft 365 admin center to sync users into multiple tenants in your multi-tenant organization. Microsoft recommend this method for smaller multi-tenant organizations who plan on all employees receiving access to all multi-tenant organization tenants.
For a customizable sync experience, head over to Entra ID cross-tenant synchronization. Cross-tenant synchronization is highly configurable and allows the provisioning of any multi-hub multi-spoke identity landscape. We recommend this method for enterprise organizations of complex identity landscapes. Either method works. Choose the one that works best for your specific organization!
Today, Microsoft announce that Microsoft Copilot for Security will be generally available worldwide on April 1, 2024. The industry’s first generative AI solution will help security and IT professionals catch what others miss, move faster, and strengthen team expertise. Copilot is informed by large-scale data and threat intelligence, including more than 78 trillion security signals processed by Microsoft each day, and coupled with large language models to deliver tailored insights and guide next steps. With Copilot, you can protect at the speed and scale of AI and transform your security operations.
Copilot for Security economic study, which shows that experienced security professionals are faster and more accurate when using Copilot, and they overwhelmingly want to continue using Copilot. The gains are truly amazing:
* Experienced security analysts were 22% faster with Copilot. * They were 7% more accurate across all tasks when using Copilot. * And, most notably, 97% said they want to use Copilot the next time they do the same task.
This new study focuses on experienced security professionals and expands the randomized controlled trial we published last November, which focused on new-in-career security professionals. Both studies measured the effects on productivity when analysts performed security tasks using Copilot for Security compared to a control group that did not. The combined results of both studies demonstrate that everyone—across all levels of experience and types of expertise—can make gains in security with Copilot. When we put Copilot in the hands of security teams, we can break down barriers to entry and advancement, and improve the work experience for everyone. Copilot enables security for all.
Microsoft 365 Backup is currently in preview and will begin rolling out to organizations in early 2024. You can set up billing for the product as described in Set up Microsoft 365 Backup. Once Microsoft 365 Backup has been deployed and is available for use in your tenant, you’ll see it in the Microsoft 365 admin center page under Settings.
During the preview period, performance and speed of web interfaces, initial configuration, and restores might be slower than expected as we scale up our infrastructure to remove undesirable latency from our system.
Business continuity assurance is a top-of-mind concern for many companies. Microsoft 365 Backup delivers business continuity peace of mind by providing performance and reliable restore confidence. When evaluating a backup and restore offering, what really matters isn’t solely the backup, but the ability to restore your data to a healthy state quickly when you need to do so. Recovering large volumes of content is difficult when copying data at a scale from a remote, air-gapped location requiring weeks or even months to get your business back up and running.
In cases of a ransomware attack that encrypts large swaths of your data, or instances of an internal accidental or malicious data deletion or overwrite event, you need to be able to get your business back to a healthy state as soon as possible. This is what the Microsoft 365 Backup product offers, both through the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as via third-party applications built on the Microsoft 365 Backup Storage platform.
To summarize, applications built on top of the Microsoft 365 Backup Storage platform deliver the following benefits regardless of the size or scale of the protected tenant:
Full SharePoint site and OneDrive account restore fidelity, meaning the site and OneDrive are restored to their exact state at specific prior points in time via a rollback operation
In the future, roll forward granular file-level restores in OneDrive and SharePoint
Full Exchange mailbox item restores or granular item restores using search
Consolidated security and compliance domain management
Walkthrough an overview of Microsoft 365 Backup here…
Architecture
Microsoft 365 Backup provides ultra-fast backup and restore capabilities by creating backups within the protected services’ data boundaries.
Microsoft 365 Backup not only provides uniquely fast recovery from common business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) scenarios like ransomware or accidental/malicious employee content overwrite/deletion. Additional BCDR scenario protections are also built directly into the service. For example, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange Online provide replicated copies of your data across geographically disparate datacenters to automatically protect against physical disasters and automatically failover to live active copies seamlessly without the need for end customer intervention.
Our backups are protected from malicious overwrites because OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange use Append-Only storage. This means that SharePoint can only add new content blobs and can never change old ones until they’re permanently deleted. The Exchange items are backed up in an immutable manner and can’t be accessed by a client process (such as Outlook, OWA, or MFCMAPI). This process ensures that items can’t be changed or corrupted after an initial save, protecting against attackers that try to corrupt old versions. For More information about the built-in service and data resiliency, see SharePoint and OneDrive data resiliency in Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online data resiliency in Microsoft 365.
Key architectural takeaways:
Data never leaves the Microsoft 365 data trust boundary or the geographic locations of your current data residency.
The backups are immutable unless expressly deleted by the Backup tool admin via product offboarding.
OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange have multiple physically redundant copies of your data to protect against physical disasters.
The multitenant organization capability is designed for organizations that own multiple Microsoft Entra tenants and want to streamline intra-organization cross-tenant collaboration in Microsoft 365. It’s built on the premise of reciprocal provisioning of B2B member users across multitenant organization tenants.
Collaboration in Microsoft 365 is built on the premise of reciprocal provisioning of B2B identities across multitenant organization tenants.
Members Not Guests
When Entra ID synchronizes accounts from a source tenant to a target tenant, it creates the entries in the target tenant as member accounts, not guest accounts. If you examine the properties of a synchronized account, you can see that the user principal name looks like a guest account but the user type is the same as a regular user account:
Side-by-side multitasking and cross-tenant notifications
With the new Teams client, users can now work across multiple tenants and accounts in side-by-side windows. They can join a meeting or collaborate in a channel hosted in another tenant, and simultaneously compose chat messages in their own tenant. Users can receive cross-tenant notifications for all accounts and tenants added to the Teams client, no matter which one is currently in focus.
Limitations for multitenant organizations in Microsoft 365 preview
The following are limitations of the multitenant organizations in Microsoft 365 preview:
A maximum of five tenants in the multitenant organization is supported.
A maximum of 100,000 users per tenant is supported.
Teams on the web, Microsoft Teams Rooms (MTR), and VDI/AVD aren’t supported.
The ability to grant or revoke permission to receive notifications from other tenants and to switch between tenants isn’t supported on mobile.
People in your organization links may not work for users from another tenant if their account had originally been a guest and they had previously accessed SharePoint resources.
It might take up to seven days for a user to appear in search once they’ve been synchronized. Contact Microsoft support if users aren’t searchable after seven days.
If you want to add more than five tenants or 100,000 users per tenant, contact Microsoft support.
Cross-tenant synchronization in Microsoft Teams:
Cross-tenant synchronization is a one-way process. This means that users from the source tenant are synchronized to the target tenant, but not the other way around.
Synchronized users have their own account in the target tenant. This means that they have their own profile, mailbox, and Teams chat history.
Synchronized users can access Teams in the target tenant. They can chat with other users, join teams, and participate in meetings.
Synchronized users cannot access other Microsoft 365 services in the target tenant. This is because they are not considered to be full members of the target tenant.
The basic issue here is that the original cross-tenant synchronization mechanismwasn’t tailored to support Microsoft 365 apps. The MTO (Multi-Tenant Organization) is explicitly engineered to support Microsoft 365, so it looks (from initial tests) that the use objects synchronized to another tenant a) appear in the GAL and b) are routable because their SMTP mail address is valid.
In the next post we will go deeper on how to configure MTO step by step. Stay tune for more goodies …
Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 in two ways. It works alongside you, embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps you use every day like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more, to unleash creativity, unlock productivity, and uplevel skills. TMicrosoft also announcing an entirely new experience: Business Chat. Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data—your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and contacts—to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can give it natural language prompts like “tell my team how we updated the product strategy” and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails, and chat threads.
Recent GitHub data shows that among developers who have used GitHub Copilot, 88 percent say they are more productive, 77 percent say the tool helps them spend less time searching for information, and 74 percent say they can focus their efforts on more satisfying work.
Copilot will only query accessible data based on the controls you set up in your organization. If your organization already has the right information, access controls, and policies set up, then you’re already a step ahead!
Permissions within your Microsoft 365 tenant prevent data leakage among users, groups, and tenants. Microsoft 365 Copilot uses your existing permissions and policies to deliver the most relevant data, so obtaining good content management practices at the beginning is important.
Be Copilot ready
Before you can access Copilot for Microsoft 365, you must meet the following requirements:
Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 are licensing prerequisites (For SMB Customers, Microsoft 365 Business Standard or Business Premium will be eligible base licenses).
a Microsoft Entra ID-based account is required
OneDrive Account You need to have a OneDrive account for several features within Copilot, such as saving and sharing your files. Deploy a OneDrive account.
New Outlook (for Windows and Mac) For seamless integration of Copilot with Outlook, you’re required to use the new Outlook (for Windows and Mac), currently in preview. You can switch to the new Outlook by selecting “Try the new Outlook” in your existing Outlook client. For more information, see Getting started with the new Outlook for Windows.
Microsoft Teams To use Copilot with Microsoft Teams, you must use the Teams desktop client or web client. Both current and new versions of Teams are supported. Mobile-only users have limited functionality.
Microsoft Loop To use Copilot in Microsoft Loop, you must have Loop enabled for your tenant. For more information on enabling Loop, see Get started with Microsoft Loop.
Protect your Copilot for Microsoft 365 data with Microsoft 365 security tools
Microsoft recommends the “just enough access” approach to addressing this situation. In this approach, each user can access only the specific information required for their job. This approach entails tightly controlling permissions so users can’t access documents, sites, or data they shouldn’t see.
Microsoft tools for securing data
Microsoft 365, Copilot for Microsoft 365, and connected services all use the policies and settings that administrators define to tighten permissions and implement “just enough access.” They do so through plugins and Microsoft Graph connectors to prevent data oversharing. The following list provides a brief summary of some of the tools that administrators can use to define these policies and settings:
Microsoft Purview Information Protection. Classify and optionally encrypt documents and emails based on sensitivity. You can create policies to restrict access to only authorized users.
Microsoft Purview sensitivity labels. Classify and label SharePoint sites, documents, and emails with sensitivity tags like “Confidential” or “Internal use only.” You can create policies to limit access to assets with specific sensitivity tags.
Microsoft Entra conditional access policies. Grant or restrict access to Microsoft 365 information and services, including SharePoint, based on conditions like user location, device, or network. These policies are useful for limiting access when the system detects risks or user credentials become compromised.
Microsoft Entra Privileged Identity Management (PIM). Provide just-in-time admin access, enforce the principle of least privilege, and limit permanent standing privileges by only granting a user the permissions they need when needed.
SharePoint site access reviews. Require and automate access reviews of site owners, members, and access requests, to revoke permissions that users don’t need or no longer require. Access reviews ensure users only retain the access they need for their role.
Microsoft Graph connectors and plugins. Limit access to connected external data using Microsoft Graph connectors or plugins.
There 18 Microsoft 365 Copilot versions, we will go in deep later on on this series….To be continue, stay tune
Catastrophic Failure 