Since its announcement in March, Microsoft 365 Copilot has experienced rapid growth. This blog post delves into the critical considerations your business should consider when implementing Copilot for Microsoft 365.
Technical Requirements
To leverage the power of Copilot, your business must meet certain technical requirements and enable specific features:
- Copilot users must possess a Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 license and an Azure Active Directory account. This grants them access to a suite of Microsoft 365 apps and services seamlessly integrating with Copilot, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, Outlook, Loop, and more.*
- Users must be on the Current Channel or the Monthly Enterprise Channel for Microsoft 365 apps to access Copilot. More information on this can be found here.
If you're not using Loop yet, now is the time to start!
In addition to these requirements, there are some essential recommendations to optimise your Copilot experience:
- Copilot services connect to endpoints within the Microsoft 365 endpoint taxonomy. Following Microsoft's network connectivity principles is advisable to enhance your Copilot experience, minimise latency, and improve network quality of service (QoS).
- Certain Copilot experiences necessitate a WebSocket connection from the device running the Microsoft 365 app to a Microsoft service. Therefore, ensure that WebSockets are unblocked from user endpoints.
- To harness cross-app intelligence experiences in Teams, plugins should be enabled in the Teams admin centre.
Permissions
Microsoft 365 Copilot relies on existing permissions and policies to deliver the most relevant information. This underscores the importance of having robust content management practices in place. Preventing content oversharing, intentional or accidental, is a common challenge for organisations. Learn more about detecting and preventing oversharing by referring to these pieces of content:
- Content management and security in SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams.
- How to get ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot.
- Get started with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
Security, Privacy, and Data Residency
Microsoft 365 Copilot is a tool that helps you work more efficiently using information from your Microsoft 365 account. It looks at your emails, chats, documents, meetings, contacts, and more, all within the Microsoft 365 system. It's important to know that Copilot doesn't use any publicly available services from OpenAI but instead uses secure Azure OpenAI services. This means that your data is always safe and protected within the Microsoft 365 system.
Copilot will work best if you have lots of data stored in Microsoft 365, like emails, files, and team chats. This way, Copilot can use all the information available to offer you more personalised and relevant suggestions. It's also good to know that Microsoft doesn't claim ownership of anything that Copilot generates.
If you're worried about where your data is stored, Microsoft has made sure that all calls to Copilot are routed to data centres closest to you. This means that your data stays within your region, and it's never written or stored outside of it.
Copilot License Management
If you're a Microsoft administrator, you can manage Copilot licenses in the Microsoft 365 admin centre. This lets you assign licenses to people or groups easily. There are a couple of ways to do this: Azure Active Directory or PowerShell. More options are expected to be added in the future. Unfortunately, we don't have pricing details available at this time.
Driving Copilot Adoption
To facilitate user adoption of Copilot, the Microsoft 365 admin centre offers valuable tools, including an onboarding guide. You can also encourage users to start learning about Copilot and AI fundamentals at the Microsoft AI help & learning site, where they can find information on Copilot's transformative potential for their work experience. We could also enable in-product prompts to inform you about Copilot's capabilities to ensure you don't miss any features.
Staying Up to Date
It's important to stay updated about Copilot's latest features and changes. To do this, you can use the Message Centre in the Microsoft 365 admin centre under Health > Message Centre. You can even assign the Message Centre reader role to non-administrators to ensure that anyone using Copilot stays up-to-date. Microsoft is also planning to add the Copilot service as a Preference option in the near future, allowing users focused on Copilot to tailor their communications accordingly.
Copilot promises to revolutionise how users interact with Microsoft products. However, enabling this feature is just the beginning. Considering your Microsoft tenant's ecosystem is essential to ensure that Copilot works with the correct data and serves the right users.
If you don't have the technical resource to help you get up and running with Copilot, rely on a Microsoft Modern Workplace specialist, like Netitude, to lend a helping hand. We can ensure you have the correct permissions and technology in place and provide ongoing IT and Microsoft support. Interested in learning more about how we can help? Book a call with an expert!
