M365 News for October 29

The second news issue for October, so a short catch-up

Photo by Sunder Muthukumaran on Unsplash

The original M365 news for October hit on the first, so here we are four weeks later, and it’s still October. Since it’s the same month, the news might be a little shorter than usual, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t seen some interesting items:

Naturally, there are more details on new Copilot features worth taking a look at:

• All the news on Microsoft’s latest Copilot and Windows AI features

• Now You Can Speak Directly to Microsoft's Copilot AI (Apparently, only if you’re a personal user. I haven’t seen the voice option with a tenant account yet.)

• Microsoft's new Copilot Vision "Sees" your screen to provide AI help (Privacy advocates and organizations with data privacy requirements will be looking to turn this off, regardless of what MS says about the security of this feature.)

• I hadn’t considered this when looking at Copilt in OneDrive - Shortcuts in OneDrive for Business get the benefits of Copilot for Microsoft 365.

• Bookmarking - Deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot in four chapters

• Copilot Pages: How they work and how to manage them (It’s all Loop under the hood.)

• Microsoft 365 Insider commercial users can now access Copilot for OneNote on iPad and Mac.

• Microsoft to roll out AI agents in Copilot Studio next month.

I have these conversations weekly at least:

Which Copilot Are They Talking About?

This is concerning:

Copilot Errors Can End up Infecting the Microsoft Graph.

The text copied into the Copilot page included the error and was caught and corrected there. The content stored in the Loop component is accurate. But here’s the thing. When I went back to Microsoft 365 Business Chat (aka BizChat) to repeat the question with a different prompt asking Copilot to be explicit about what happens to soft-deleted items, the error is present once again, even though Copilot now cites the page created for the previous query.

There was also some non-Copilot news, as hard as that is to believe with the almost constant stream of public announcements about Copilot. ;-)

There’s a big change coming to Teams:

Introducing the new Microsoft Teams chat and channels experience.

The screenshots don’t look as confusing as I was afraid they would, but my question remains. Will users get confused about using chat versus Teams because many of us have very different retention policies and records management expectations for chat versus channel posts?

I hope not because I would also like to make it easier for people to keep informed about new posts in channels.

Speaking of Teams, it’s becoming the new email regarding phishing. - Black Basta ransomware poses as IT support on Microsoft Teams to breach networks.

If you use Teams phone, the Queues app for Microsoft Teams is now generally available.

In case I haven’t linked Tony enough in this issue:

How I Write PowerShell for Microsoft 365

I recently showed some folks how to use Loop in a meeting set up with the agenda; they love it. Loop can be hard to explain, but it’s so powerful. (How to Get Organized With Ease Thanks to Microsoft Loop)

Have you used Loop? What do you think about it? It seems to be everywhere: in meeting notes, Copilot Pages, etc. Yet, it also seems like unfinished business in many ways.