Tag: microsoft-365

Copilot Studio announcements at Microsoft Build 2025

In this post, and in the above-linked video,  I’ll give you an overview of all the new features of Copilot Studio announced during the just ended Microsoft Build 2025 conference, broken down by macro categories: multi-agent support, models, knowledge, tools, analytics, publishing, application lifecycle management.

Multi Agents

Multi-Agent Orchestration

Rather than relying on a single agent to do everything—or managing disconnected agents in silos—organizations can now build multi-agent systems in Copilot Studio, where agents delegate tasks to one another.

In the demo showed in my video, we have a banking agent that helps customers with their banking needs (for example checking account balances, transferring funds, report a stolen card and so on): previously you would have to build a single agent with all of these capabilities, now instead you can break a complex agent down into many connected agents each one specialized in a single functionality.

Adding a new agent is very easy: you can add an agent from Copilot Studio or the Microsoft 365 SDK, Microsoft Fabric, Azure AI Foundry. And in the future you’ll be able to connect to third party agents, via the A2A protocol.

Multilingual capability for Generative Orchestrator

Microsoft now provides a catalog of managed agents you can browse and install from within Copilot Studio. These agents are complete solutions, that you can use as template and customize for your needs.

Models

Copilot Tuning

A feature that was long-waited is Copilot Tuning. Copilot Tuning allows you to fine-tune large language models (LLMs) by using your own data. That’s implement in a task-specific fashion, let’s say in a controlled way, let’s see an example.

The first step is configuring your model. Click create new. Next, you’ll provide the model name, a description of the task you’d like to accomplish, and select a customization recipe tailored to the specific task type.

Next, you’ll give the model instructions to help it identify and prepare the most relevant data from your SharePoint sites.

Next, you need to provide the training data or knowledge, which forms the foundation of your fine tuned model. Currently only SharePoint sources are supported.

The final step in configuring is to define who can use the fine-tuned model to build agents in Microsoft 365 copilot by using security groups.

Now that your model is configured, you’re ready to prepare your training data with data labeling. Data labeling is the process of identifying the best examples that you want the model to learn from.

Once your data are processed, you’ll receive an email notification indicating that your data is ready for labelling.

The model you have fine-tuned can be used in M365 Copilot Agent Builder. So from the new M365 Copilot interface you select Create Agent, and you’ll be prompted to select the purpose of your agent: general purpose or task-specific. Select task specific to see the list of fine-tuned models that are available to you. You select a model, then from now on you proceed to building and customize your agent as usual.

Bring Your Own Model as a primary response model

We are now offered the possibility to fine-tune the LLM model used by Copilot Studio while building our agents, in two different ways: at agent level and at tool level. Let’s start with the agent level.

Once you have your agent initialized, go to the settings, in the generative AI tab, you have now a drop down to change the primary response model: you have some preset options plus the possibility to connect to AI Foundry and select your own published models from AI Foundry.

Bring Your Own Model as a primary response model

The second way how you can introduce a fine-tuned model in our Copilot Studio agents is via the prompt tool.

The prompt tool allows you to specify a task to be completed by Copilot Studio, describing it in natural language, and copilot studio will call it when it reckons necessary.

Now you have the possibility to specify a model for your prompt. You have some of the managed models already available for you, the ones that are curated by Microsoft. In addition it’s also possible to use one of 1900 plus Azure AI Foundry models based on your specific  use case.

Knowledge

SharePoint lists, Knowledge Instructions

Copilot Studio is making progress on the Knowledge management as well. Now it supports SharePoint Lists, as well as uploading files grouping them together as a single knowledge base. Plus, now you have the option to write Instructions at knowledge level.

Tools

Computer Use

I think Computer Use is by far the most impressive tool added to Copilot Studio. Unfortunately it’s going to be available only for big customers in USA, at least for now.

Computer Use allows Copilot Studio Agents to interact with desktop apps and websites like a person would—clicking buttons, navigating menus, typing in fields, and adapting automatically as the interface changes. This opens the door to automating complex, user interface (UI)-based tasks like data entry, invoice processing, with built-in reasoning and full visibility into every step.

Dataverse Functions

You have also Dataverse Functions in preview, you can create one from the Power Apps portal, the function can have inputs and outputs and a formula containing your business logic: and then you can add that function to your agent selecting the Dataverse connector and choosing Unbounded Action.

You can configure it with the appropriate inputs and outputs, and then that becomes one more tool at your agent disposal.

Intelligent Approvals in Agent Flows

Agent Flows is a new tool we have been seeing for few weeks now, Microsoft is actively working on it and at the Build Conference they presented Intelligent Approvals.

Intelligent Approvals inserts an AI-powered decision-making stage directly within the Advanced Approval action. You simply provide natural language business rules and select your desired AI model: the model then evaluates submitted materials—images, documents, databases, or knowledge articles—to deliver a transparent approve or reject decision, complete with a detailed rationale.

Analytics

Evaluation Capabilities

The challenge in building any kind of agent is making sure it responds accurately when users ask different types of questions.

This is where the new evaluation capabilities in Copilot Studio come in. Now you can run automated tests against your agent directly from the testing panel. You can upload your set of questions, import queries from the chat history or even generate questions using AI. You can review and edit each question before running the test. Then you can run the evaluation and get a visual summary of the evaluation results.

Publishing

Publishing to WhatsApp and SharePoint

You can now publish your agent to WhatsApp and, more importantly, you can publish it to SharePoint! That’s another long-waited feature, because so far it wasn’t possible to have a SharePoint Agent with actions and other advanced features, now finally you can.

Let me just point out here that if you create your SharePoint Agent from SharePoint, you can’t customize it in Copilot Studio yet. So this works only if you start from Copilot Studio and then publish to SharePoint, the vice versa is not possible yet.

Code Interpreter

Generate a chart via Python code

Copilot Studio agents can now generate charts, and that’s done using the new Code Interpreter feature. Python code is generated automatically in reply to a prompt, you can see it and reuse it, and then it executes and generates the chart as the user’s answer.

ALM

Source code integration

With native source control integration you can take your agents in your environment and connect it to a source control repository, such as Azure DevOps, and make commits from the UI directly, so that everything you do is source controlled and is managed in the same way that you would expect any software to be managed.

Edit agent in VS Code

And finally, for the real nerds, the extension to Visual Studio Code allows you to clone agents to your machine locally and start editing the code behind it!

You’ll get here syntax errors highlighting, auto complete, documentation and so forth.

Messing around with SharePoint Agents

A customer asked me a question about SharePoint Agents that I was unable to answer. Having then realised that perhaps SharePoint Agents are less trivial than I thought, I decided to take the question head-on, doing some tests to see if there was an answer that makes sense.

A few days ago I wrote an article on the Copilot Agents (you can find it here), and as you can see from reading it, I relegated the SharePoint Agents to the end, giving them just a standard paragraph that in truth adds nothing to what we have already known for a while.

But then it happened that during a demo the other day, a customer asked me a question about SharePoint Agents that I was unable to answer. Having then realised that perhaps SharePoint Agents are less trivial than I thought, I decided to take the question head-on that afternoon, doing some tests to see if there was an answer that makes sense.

This article is the result of those thoughts, and assumes a basic knowledge of SharePoint Agents.

The question

The customer’s question was: ‘Having one agent per SharePoint site seems excessive and unmanageable to me, how can I instead create my own “official” agent once, and make it the default agent for all SharePoint sites?’.

Let’s try to give an answer

I created a test site, called “Test Donald“:

The site collection has its own default SharePoint Agent, having the same name as the site. This default agent does not have a corresponding .agent file in the site. Nor is there an option to edit the default agent. As we already know, however, I can create more agents, therefore I created a second one:

The new agent can be created directly from the menu, or by selecting a library or documents in a library:

(there must be at least 1 document in the library, otherwise the ‘Create an agent’ button won’t appear).

Please note that it is not (yet) possible to customise a SharePoint Agent in Copilot Studio:

A SharePoint Agent published on one site can also be based on knowledge from other SharePoint sites, but it’s important to bear in mind that only a maximum of 20 knowledge sources can be added:

The Edit popup shows the location of the saved agent:

Navigating the link will lead to the location of the associated .agent file:

The new agent thus created is Personal and as such only accessible by the user who created it. When the site owner approves it, it becomes Published (Approved) at the site level and therefore accessible to the other (licensed) users of the site:

Once the agent has been approved, the relevant file is physically moved automatically by SharePoint to Site Assets > Copilots > Approved:

The newly approved agent can now be set as the site’s default agent:

There can only be one default agent for any given site:

Back to the question, then: can I configure a SharePoint Agent once and then have it as the site default agent on all sites?

To answer the question, I have created a second site collection called ‘Test Donald 2’, thus a Documents Agent 2, which has both sites (Test Donald and Test Donald 2) as sources:

I then saved it, approved it, and set it as the default for Test Donald 2:

The next step then was to copy the relevant .agent file from Test Donald 2 to Test Donald:

The agent just copied appears correctly in the list as an approved agent on the Test Donald site:

And it is also possible to select it and set it as site default agent:

Conclusions

The answer then is Yes, you can have a default agent that is always the same on all SharePoint sites, provided you accept the following limitations:

  • 20-source limitation (inherent limitation of SharePoint Agents, at least for now).
  • Customisation in Copilot Studio not yet available.
  • Manual copying of the .agent file and manual approval as default agent.

The copying of the .agent file could be automated with a Power Automate flow associated with a provisioning process. However, approving it as the default agent currently is not possible via API.

An introduction to Microsoft 365 Copilot Agents

In this article, I will provide an overview of Copilot Agents, explaining what they are, which out-of-the-box agents Microsoft has released to date, what types of agents we can customize, and I will also explain what autonomous agents and SharePoint Agents are.

Creating, extending and customising Copilot agents is a fundamental process for adapting functionality to specific business or personal needs.

In this article, I will provide an overview of Copilot Agents, explaining what they are, which out-of-the-box agents Microsoft has released to date, what types of agents we can customize, and I will also explain what autonomous agents and SharePoint Agents are.

What are Copilot Agents?

Agents are scoped versions of Microsoft 365 Copilot that act as AI assistants to automate and run business processes. They enable customers to bring custom knowledge, skills, and process automation into Microsoft 365 Copilot for their specific needs. 

Pre-built Copilot agents

Microsoft has launched a wide range of pre-built agents that span multiple business functions. These agents can be deployed immediately or further configured by incorporating your organisation’s knowledge and skills.

At the time I’m writing they are all in preview. A brief description of the available pre-built agents is provided here below:

  • Website Q&A: Answers common questions from users using the content on your website.
  • Team Navigator: Assists employees in finding colleagues and their hierarchy within the organisation.
  • IT Helpdesk: Empowers employees to resolve issues and create/view support tickets.
  • Store Operations: Improves the efficiency of retail frontline workers by enabling easy access to store procedures and policies.
  • Case Management: Provides around-the-clock automated support to customers by understanding their issues and creating cases.
  • Safe Travels: Provides answers to common travel questions and related health and safety guidelines.
  • Inclusivity: Helps employees to have a safe place to ask questions and to learn how to activate inclusivity in a modern and diverse workforce.
  • Sustainability Insights: Enables users to easily get insights and data about a company’s sustainability goals and progress.
  • Weather: Gets the current weather conditions and forecast.
  • Benefits: Provides personalized information to your employees on benefits offered to them.
  • Citizen Services: Enables Public Sector Organizations to assist their citizens with information about services available to them.
  • Financial Insights: Helps financial services professionals get information from their organization’s financial documents.
  • Self-Help: Enables customer service agents to resolve issues faster.
  • Awards and Recognition: Streamlines the process of nominating and recognizing your employees for their contributions and achievements.
  • Leave Management: Streamlines the leave request and time-off process for your employees.
  • Wellness Check: Conducts automated wellness checks to gauge employee morale.
  • Sales Qualification: Enables sellers to focus their time on the highest priority sales opportunities.
  • Sales Order: Automates the order intake process from entry to confirmation by interacting with customers and capturing their preferences.
  • Supplier Communications: Autonomously manages collaboration with suppliers to confirm order delivery, while helping to prevent potential delays.
  • Finance Reconciliation: Helps teams prepare and cleanse data sets to simplify and reduce time spent on the financial period close process.
  • Account Reconciliation: Automates the matching and clearing of transactions between subledgers and the general ledger, helping accountants and controllers speed up the financial close process.
  • Time and Expense: Autonomously manages time entry, expense tracking, and approval workflows.
  • Customer Intent: Enables evergreen self-service by continuously discovering new intents from past and current customer conversations across all channels, mapping issues and corresponding resolutions maintained by the agent in a library.
  • Customer Knowledge Management: Helps ensure knowledge articles are kept perpetually up to date by analysing case notes, transcripts, summaries, and other artifacts from human-assisted cases to uncover insights.
  • Scheduling Operations: Enables dispatchers to provide optimized schedules for technicians, even as conditions change throughout the workday.

How do I create a Copilot Agent?

Before diving into how we can extend Copilot, it is essential to understand two concepts:

  • the anatomy of Microsoft 365 Copilot,
  • the two main types of agents that we can create: Declarative Agents and Custom Engine Agents.

Anatomy of Microsoft 365 Copilot

Foundation Models

Foundation models are large language models (LLMs) that form the core of Copilot’s capabilities. These models, such as GPT-4, are trained on vast amounts of data and use deep learning techniques to understand, summarize, predict, and generate content. They provide the underlying AI intelligence that powers Copilot’s functionality.

User Experience

The user experience component focuses on how users interact with Copilot within Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. It ensures that the integration is seamless and intuitive, allowing users to leverage Copilot’s capabilities without disrupting their workflow. This includes features like drafting, summarizing, and answering questions in the context of the user’s work.

Orchestrator

The orchestrator is responsible for coordinating the various components of Copilot and ensuring that they work together harmoniously. It manages the flow of information between the foundation models, user data, and the Microsoft 365 apps, ensuring that responses are accurate and relevant to the user’s context.

Knowledge

The knowledge component involves the integration of Microsoft Graph, which includes information about users, activities, and organizational data. This allows Copilot to access and utilize relevant data from emails, chats, documents, and meetings to provide contextually appropriate responses and insights.

Skills

Skills refer to the specific capabilities and functionalities that Copilot offers within different Microsoft 365 apps. For example, in Word, Copilot can help users create, understand, and edit documents; in Excel, it can assist with data analysis and visualization; and in Teams, it can facilitate communication and collaboration.

Declarative Agents

Declarative agents are designed to be configured through predefined rules and well-defined scenarios. These agents function on the basis of declarations of intent and specific conditions that guide their behaviour.

  • Ease of Use: They do not require in-depth programming knowledge.
  • Speed of Implementation: They can be set up quickly using intuitive graphical interfaces.
  • Limitations: They might be less flexible when it comes to handling complex scenarios outside the preset rules.

Custom Engine Agents

Custom engine agents offer the highest level of control and customisation.

  • Flexibility: They allow detailed customisation by writing code and integrating advanced algorithms.
  • Power: They can handle complex and dynamic scenarios requiring sophisticated and adaptive logic.
  • Development Effort: They require more technical expertise and more time for development and maintenance.

Blue pill or pink pill…?

When it comes to extending Copilot, you can decide to swallow the blue pill or swallow the pink pill…

Staying on the Blue side of things, you’re going to reuse the foundations of Copilot: you’re going to reuse the UI, you’re going to reuse the templates and also the Microsoft Orchestrator. You’re going to add Knowledge and Skills instead.

On the other hand, if you swallow the pink pill, you are going to completely replace the Copilot engine with your own custom.

Swallowing the blue pill: creating a Declarative Agent

Declarative agents are a collection of custom knowledge and custom skills hosted on the Microsoft 365 Copilot orchestrator and foundation models.

You can add knowledge to Declarative Agents via connectors, and skills via plugins.

Adding Knowledge

Graph Connectors

Microsoft Graph Connectors provide a platform to ingest your unstructured data into Microsoft Graph, so that Copilot can reason over the entirety of your enterprise content. Microsoft Graph Connectors existed before Copilot, in fact it powers other Microsoft 365 experiences, like Microsoft Search.

Power Platform Connectors

Power Platform Connectors are essentially API wrappers that allow Copilot Agents to interact with various external services and applications. These connectors enable Copilot to perform a wide range of tasks by connecting to services both within the Microsoft ecosystem (like Office 365, SharePoint, Dynamics 365) and outside it (such as Twitter, Google services, Salesforce). There are three main types of connectors:

  1. Standard Connectors: These are included with all Copilot Studio plans and cover common services in Copilot Studio.
  2. Premium Connectors: Available in select Copilot Studio plans, these offer more advanced functionalities in Copilot Studio.
  3. Custom Connectors: These allow you to connect to any publicly available API for services not covered by existing connectors in Copilot Studio.

By leveraging these connectors, Copilot Agents can access and utilise data from various sources, enhancing their capabilities and making them more dynamic and responsive to specific business needs.

Adding Skills

Plugins

Plugins don’t ingest data, they look directly in real-time at the external systems, they can also interact with the external systems, that is not only read data but also write data.

There are 3 types of plugin:

  • Copilot Studio Actions: plugins that extend the functionality of Microsoft 365 Copilot, allowing users to perform specific tasks, retrieve data, and interact with external systems. By leveraging a low-code interface, Copilot Studio makes it accessible for users without extensive technical knowledge to create and manage these actions.
  • Message Extensions: they are the well known search and action capability for Microsoft Teams, that now work also as plugins for Copilot agents.
  • API Plugins: they enable declarative agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot to interact with REST APIs that have an OpenAPI description.

The pink pill: Custom Engine Agents

Custom engine agents are developed using custom foundation models and orchestrators and can be tailored to specific enterprise needs with your own stack. Custom engine agents currently work as standalone Teams apps.

These are an evolution of Microsoft Teams bots and, just like before, you can use Teams AI Library and Teams Toolkit to create them. I intend to come back to Custom Engine Agents with a dedicated article.

Declarative? or Custom Engine?

When to create a declarative agent:

  • You want to take advantage of Copilot’s model and orchestrator.
  • You have external data that you want to make available to Copilot to reason over via a Microsoft Graph connector.
  • You have an existing API that could be used as an API plugin for read and write access to real-time data.
  • You have an existing Teams message extension that you can use as a plugin.

When to build a custom agent:

  • You want to use specific models for your service.
  • You need agentic AI support.
  • You want your service to be independent from Microsoft 365 Copilot, accessible to all Microsoft 365 users regardless of their Copilot licensing status.

Autonomous Agents

An autonomous agent is an AI system that can perform complex tasks independently, that is without direct human intervention.

Let’s see a typical example of an autonomous agent created with Copilot: a prospective client sends you an email requesting an engagement. As soon as the email is received, the agent gets to work, extracting the relevant details.

It then follows a series of steps, including verifying any previous engagement with this customer, validating the industry sector, summarising the client needs, it then writes and sends an email to the relevant expert in your organisation, with all the client details.

The particular feature that makes a Copilot Agent an autonomous agent is the fact that it can activate by itself: this is possible thanks to the event triggers, defined in Copilot Studio, which may kind of remind you the Power Automate triggers.

SharePoint Agents

SharePoint Agents are a specialised type of agents, tailored on SharePoint Online and that can be created outside of Copilot Studio. Every SharePoint site includes an agent scoped for the site’s content, ready to assist you instantly. These ready-made agents are an easy starting point to get answers without combing through the site or digging around with search—they can be used immediately without any customization.

For specific projects or tasks, any SharePoint user can create a customized agent based on the relevant files, folders, or sites, with just one click. 

The SharePoint Agents can easily be shared via email or within Teams chats. Not only are coworkers able to use the agent that you shared, but @mentioning the agent in a group chat setting gives the team a subject matter expert ready to assist and facilitate collaboration.  

They adhere to existing SharePoint user permissions, they don’t broadly share the files you selected whenever you share the agent with others in your organization.

Agents created using SharePoint data are file-based. They are stored within the same site where they were created. Since they are files, you can manage them just like you manage other files. You can copy, move, delete, or archive them.  

A recap of #MSIgnite news for Modern Work

This article is a summary of all the news and previews about Modern Work presented by Microsoft at the Ignite 2024 event.

Introduction

This article is a summary of all the news and previews about Modern Work presented by Microsoft at the Ignite 2024 event.

Microsoft Teams

Analyse Screen-Shared Content (Public Preview Q1 2025)

Copilot’s ability to reason over any content shared on screen will help ensure that no meeting details are overlooked.

Users will be able to ask Copilot to summarize screenshared content, (i.e., “Which products had the highest sales?”), consolidate insights across both the conversation and presentation (i.e., “What was the feedback per slide?”) and draft new content based on the entire meeting (i.e., “Rewrite the spreadsheet as a table with only the rows that are On Track”).

Interpreter Agent (Public Preview Q1 2025)

The Interpreter agent in Teams provides real-time speech-to-speech interpretation during meetings, and you can opt to have it simulate your speaking voice for a more personal and engaging experience.

Project Manager Agent (Public Preview)

With this new feature, users can create Project Manager plans in Planner in Microsoft Teams, with  features that are not available in traditional plans:

•Assign tasks to Project Manager.

•Complete tasks and generate outputs for teams to collaborate on.

•A Whiteboard tab will be available in Planner so users can create whiteboards directly in the plan, and users can convert sticky notes into tasks within the plans.

Other OOB Agents

Facilitator Agent (Public Preview)

Takes real-time notes during Teams meetings, allowing everyone to co-author and collaborate seamlessly.

Shares an UpToDate summary of important information in Teams chats as the conversation happens, including key decisions, actions items, and open questions to resolve.

Employee Self-Service Agent (expected Q2 2025)

Expedites answers to common workplace-related questions and takes action on key HR and IT tasks.

Customizable in Copilot Studio with OOB tools/resources to connect to knowledge bases & HR/IT systems.

Storyline (Private Preview)

Storyline in Microsoft Teams will simplify the ways that leaders and employees share and connect with colleagues across the company, increasing visibility and engagement. Employee communications are often scattered across multiple places, leading to frustration, delays and overload.

(Unconfirmed) Integration of communities is coming in 2025, enabling you to connect, communicate and collaborate from 1:1 to group chats to channels to org-wide communities, all in one place.

Microsoft Places

Places is now fully integrated with Teams and Outlook calendar.

•Recommended in-office day with Copilot.

•Managed booking with Copilot.

•Workplace presence.

•Places finder.

•Automatically reserve a desk on plug-in.

•Space analytics.

Other Microsoft Teams Announcements

•iPad Enhancements: multiple Teams windows.

•Threaded conversations.

•Automatic upgrade of meeting sensitivity based on single shared file sensitivity.

•New opt-in Calendar experience.

•New optimizations for VDI.

•Teams phone: the Queues app creates workspaces for automatically manage calls in Teams.

•Security enhancements: Preventing Bots from automatically join a meeting (by using captcha). Email verification for external users.

•Other Copilot enhancements: Copilot can now reason over up to 8 hours of meeting content.

SharePoint Online

SharePoint Agents

Every SharePoint site includes an agent scoped for the site’s content, ready to assist you instantly. These ready-made agents are an easy starting point to get answers without combing through the site or digging around with search—they can be used immediately without any customization.

For specific projects or tasks, any SharePoint user can create a customized agent based on the relevant files, folders, or sites, with just one click. 

Find all the agents that you work with, including those that others shared with you, from the Copilot icon in the top ribbon. 

Agents can easily be shared via email or within Teams chats. Not only are coworkers able to use the agent that you shared, but @mentioning the agent in a group chat setting gives the team a subject matter expert ready to assist and facilitate collaboration.  

Agents in SharePoint adhere to existing SharePoint user permissions, they don’t broadly share the files you selected whenever you share the agent with others in your organization.

Agents created using SharePoint data are file-based. They are stored within the same site where they were created. Since they are files, you can manage them just like you manage other files. You can copy, move, delete, or archive them.  

Copilot

Copilot in Power Point (Available January 2025)

With a simple prompt and a file, Narrative Builder transforms your work into a compelling narrative. This gives you the flexibility to steer the story up front.

You will be able to include one Word documents and encrypted Word document, and Copilot will pull in information from the text in your document.

Copilot Actions (Private Preview)

With Copilot Actions, anyone can easily delegate tasks to Copilot.

These customizable prompt templates can be automated, used on demand or triggered by specific events to gather information and present it in specified formats, such as emails or Word documents.

Copilot Studio

Improved Extension Builder

As a user, you can create extensions conversationally and those extensions become immediately live to use or to be shared with others.

Improvements in answers quality

•Upgraded to GPT-4o and 4o-mini.

•Ability to reason over images and tables in files.

•Improved multi-language support.

•New knowledge curation experience: Customers can now directly control how their agents use their knowledge.

Autonomous Agents

Now they can be triggered by events, not just conversations.

Support for voice interactions

Copilot Studio now supports interactive voice response (IVR) capabilities, including speech and dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) input, context variables, call transfer, and speech and DTMF customization.

New PAYG service on December the 1st

Data Governance

Permission State Report

Identify overshared sites with Permission State Report.

Scalable actions:

-Site Access Review.

-Restricted Access Control.

-Restrict Content Discovery.

Restricted Access Control

Available as part of SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM), Restricted Access Control policies allow you to restrict access to specific sites and content exclusively to designated user groups: this ensures that only authorized users can access sensitive information, even if individual files or folders have been overshared.  

Restricted Content Discovery

Restricted Content Discovery allows you to configure policies to restrict search and Copilot from reasoning over select data sites, leaving the site access unchanged but preventing the site’s content from being surfaced by Copilot or organization-wide search. 

Oversharing Assessment (Public Preview)

Available as part of Purview, this oversharing assessment provides recommendations on how to mitigate oversharing risks with a few clicks, such as applying a sensitivity label to overshared content, using SharePoint Access Management to add the site to restricted content discovery or start a new site access review. Admins can run the assessment before a Copilot deployment to identify and mitigate risks such as unlabeled files accessed by users. Post-deployment, the assessment will identify risks such as sensitive data referenced in Copilot responses.

DLP for Microsoft 365 Copilot

This new DLP aims at reducing the risk of AI-related oversharing at scale. This new capability prevents Microsoft 365 Business Chat from creating summaries or responses using a document’s contents. It works with Office files and PDFs stored in SharePoint or OneDrive and uses the file’s sensitivity label to prevent these actions. This helps ensure that potentially sensitive content within labeled documents is not processed by Copilot and responses are not available to copy and paste into other applications.  

Oversharing Blueprint

Available at https://aka.ms/Copilot/OversharingBlueprintLearn, this new blueprint by Microsoft provides a recommended path to address internal oversharing concerns during a Microsoft 365 Copilot deployment. The blueprint breaks the deployment journey into three phases: Pilot, Deployment, and Operation after initial deployment. The blueprint also includes the new SAM and Purview capabilities previously covered in this blog post.

Adoption & Measuring

Copilot Prompt Gallery

Provided as both a website (Copilot Prompt Gallery) and a feature in Copilot, Prompt Gallery is a comprehensive repository that provides users with access to a catalog of prompts. It includes prompts created by Microsoft that highlight key scenarios and capabilities of Copilot, designed to help users understand and use Copilot more effectively.

Copilot Analytics (GA early 2025)

•A component of the new Copilot Control System, designed for IT to confidently adopt and accelerate the business value of Copilot and agents.

•Can be accessed via Microsoft 365 admin center, the Copilot Dashboard and Viva Insights.

•Contains 2 components: Copilot Business impact Report, and Viva Insights dashboards.

Microsoft 365 Agents SDK

This new SDK provides interoperability with Copilot Studio in two ways:

•Developers can add functionality and extend an existing agent built using Copilot Studio using skills, allowing a maker to delegate work to other agent functionality.

•Secondly, a developer can connect to a Copilot Studio agent from code, providing the developers with all the functionality within the Copilot Studio ecosystem, including over 1000 connectors.

The Modern Intranet – Part 3: The Publishing Portal

< Part 2 – The role of SharePoint

Introduction

In this article, I will describe the information architecture and design phases of a SharePoint Online publishing portal. I will adopt an agile approach and provide simple and realistic guidelines based on my real-world experience as a Microsoft technologies consultant. For those interested in delving into the theoretical aspects, I recommend referring to the official documentation available on the Microsoft website.

Information Architecture

Information Architecture in SharePoint Online involves the deliberate organisation of sites, navigation, and content to ensure that users can easily find, access, and interact with information. It aims to create a logical and intuitive structure that aligns with the organisation’s goals and user needs. Let’s take a concise look at how to structure the high-level architecture and explore the best practices for the following aspects:

  • the portal’s site structure
  • the navigation
  • the content

The Sites Structure

One of the main differences between SharePoint Online and its on-premise predecessors is the fact that now the subsites have been pretty much deprecated. Rather than having a hierarchy of sites and subsites, in SharePoint Online it’s prereable to have a flat site structure.

There are several reasons why Microsoft has pushed for a flat site structure in SharePoint Online. Firstly, it promotes simplicity and ease of use by minimising complexity and reducing the number of clicks required to access information. Secondly, it enhances content discoverability and searchability.

On the other hand, the administration is somewhat affected when using a flat structure, as each site would have its own set of permissions, and the concept of permissions inheritance is no longer applicable. However, this is not necessarily a disadvantage.

The Home Site

The Home Site acts as the main gateway to the publishing portal, offering employees a personalized and captivating experience for accessing news, resources, and crucial information. Its structure can be seen in the diagram provided below at a very high level:

In one of the upcoming articles in this series, we will explore how to enhance and reinforce the concept of intranet’s home, using Microsoft Viva. However, for now, let’s keep it simple and let’s just assume that our entry point is the SharePoint Online Home Site.

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The Hub Sites

A hub site serves as a tool for organising and connecting related sites, bringing together content, navigation, and search. By creating a hub site, we can establish a unified experience, share common resources, and promote collaboration among teams or departments.

The simplest scenario is an organisation having only one hub consisting of the Home Site plus a few departmental sites. More complex scenarios may involve multiple hubs (e.g., one per department) and/or hubs for publishing content based on areas, topics, or teams.

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The Navigation

Navigation plays a crucial role in guiding users to relevant content and navigating the site structure ensuring a seamless user experience. From an information architecture perspective, a SharePoint Online intranet employs three key navigation elements: Global navigation, Hub navigation, and Local navigation.

Global navigation

Global navigation serves as the primary navigation mechanism across the entire Intranet. It helps users quickly navigate to important areas, such as the organisation’s Home site, team sites, or specific departments. It ensures consistent access to critical resources and delivers a sense of unity throughout the platform.

Hub navigation

Hub navigation serves as a secondary navigation layer specific to the hub. It facilitates navigation within the hub and provides contextually relevant links to associated sites, enabling users to seamlessly navigate between different sites within the hub’s ecosystem.

Local navigation

Local navigation focuses on providing navigation elements within individual sites. It helps users explore the content and structure of a specific site, allowing users to navigate between different sections, libraries, lists, or pages within the site. Local navigation enhances discoverability and enables users to find and access content within the context of their current location.

The Content Architecture

When designing the content architecture, several considerations can ensure an organised and efficient structure. Firstly, it is important to grasp the content requirements and the intended purpose of the intranet area that is going to host it. This understanding will guide the creation of a logical and intuitive structure. Begin by identifying the major content categories or topics and create top-level hubs or sites accordingly. Within each hub or site, further break down the content into sites, document libraries, lists, and pages based on their specific characteristics or usage patterns.

To enhance discoverability and navigation, implement metadata to tag and classify the content. This allows users to filter, sort, and search for information more effectively. Take advantage of content types to enforce consistency and standardisation across similar types of content, ensuring that the appropriate metadata fields are associated with each content type.

Consider implementing a content approval flow to govern the publishing process and ensure content quality and accuracy. This flow can involve multiple stakeholders and include various stages such as creation, review, approval, and publishing. Additionally, leverage version control to track changes and enable easy rollbacks if needed.

Last but not least, regularly assess the content structure to ensure it aligns with evolving business needs.

Roles in Content Architecture

Content creators – Content creators are responsible for keeping content updated and publishing news.

Content consumers – Content consumers are not represented in the counts as anyone who is using and viewing content throughout the three levels of navigation.

Owners – Intranet owners, departmental business owners, hub owners, and site owners should regularly engage with content consumer to ensure the right content is findable and usable. Content creators partner with site owners during the implementation and management stages.

Design

After defining the information architecture, attention turns to design. This encompasses the following elements:

  • Visual design: selecting appropriate themes, colour schemes, and layouts that align with the organisation’s branding and create a cohesive user interface.
  • Functionality and features: during the Design phase, it is important to gain an understanding of the available off-the-shelf building blocks (site templates, site designs, themes, web parts, page templates) to determine if and what level of customisation will be required.

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Site Templates and Site Designs

Sometimes, people tend to confuse the two terms. Therefore, let’s provide their definitions:

  • Site Template: in its most basic form, site templates are the key to the different types of sites you can create in SharePoint Online. Excluding the old backward compatible site templates (a.k.a. “Classic” site templates), there are only two site templates in SharePoint Online: “Team Sites” and “Communication Sites”. At a high level, the Communication Site is the preferred site template for publishing portals, while the Team Site template is more suitable for collaboration scenarios.
  • Site Design: a predefined set of actions that can be used to create new sites in SharePoint Online. A Site Design runs on top of an existing Site Template to create a new site or re-design an existing site.

Designing the Home Site

Microsoft have provided the SharePoint Lookbook which is an amazing resource with a variety of site designs to choose from. These include:

  • Organization
  • Department
  • Team
  • Community
  • Solutions
  • Schools

My advice here is always to go for an off-the-shelf solution. Therefore, simply choose one of the “Organization” site designs as a starting point for the intranet’s homepage.

The second step is to customize the site design to change the site logo and align the theme’s colors according to the company’s branding.

Next, implement the content architecture amending the home page’s layout and creating any other necessary pages, libraries and lists. Then, define the site’s Local Navigation.