Are you ready to transform the way you work with Microsoft’s Office suite? Do you aspire to master applications like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to unleash your full potential? Have you ever struggled with document formatting, wished for stunning PivotTables, or wanted your presentations to shine like never before? It’s time to step up your game.
Imagine effortlessly creating SharePoint sites, managing Teams projects, and quickly extracting insights from complex data. What if reading and summarising lengthy documents could be a breeze, and collaborating with colleagues became a seamless experience? Microsoft Copilot is here to make these scenarios your reality.
In this guide, we will dive deep into the world of Microsoft Copilot, from readiness to deployment. We’ll explore how this revolutionary AI-powered technology is not just a game-changer but a securityconscious ally for your data
Microsoft Copilot is a set of tools to help people with creating documents, reading, and summarising emails, crafting presentations and much, much more. It is your ‘AI companion’!
Copilot can be used throughout Microsoft’s Office suite. It will be there to help you in Microsoft Teams, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word. So, whether you need help managing a PivotTable in Excel or keeping on top of your inbox, Copilot will be there to help you out.
Some of the powerful functions of Copilot include helpful things like quickly summarising long email threads or analysing great swathes of spreadsheet data, enabling users to become the gurus of these capabilities!
Copilot will be available as a chat interface, enabling it to answer questions and assist with tasks in Bing Chat.
It will also provide inspiration for creating sites and pages in SharePoint Online, as well as featuring templates for common team and organisational communication needs, making it easier than ever to get started.
Copilot in Microsoft Viva Goals will simplify goal setting and management for leaders. It can draft objectives and key results (OKRs) based on business plans, strategy papers, and more.
Copilot in Dynamics 365 Sales experiences will focus on enhancing seller productivity and effectiveness in their flow of work by enabling them to automate the sales process and augment seller actions and decisions with AI-powered insights and actions.
It works alongside users as they go about their daily work, available to them through the applications they are familiar with including Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc. Rather than taking over the work of content creation, it augments it by providing productivity assistance, powerful aids and intelligent insights.
Windows Copilot, distinct from Microsoft 365 Copilot (which will be discussed in greater detail later in this guide), is a feature that can be installed on Windows 11, offering centralised AI support for users.
It is designed to work with Bing Chat and can enable users to bring ideas to life, complete complex projects and collaborate instead of spending energy finding, launching, and working across multiple applications.
Invoking Windows Copilot is familiar and easy – the button is front and centre on the Windows 11 taskbar – simple to find and use.
Once open, the Windows Copilot side bar stays consistent across apps, programs, and windows, always available to act as a personal assistant. It has the capability to make every user a power user, helping them take action, customise their settings and seamlessly connect across their most-used apps, by enhancing the existing features of Windows, such as copy/paste, Snap Assist, Snipping Tool, and personalisation. For instance, you can ask Windows Copilot to copy, paste, rewrite, summarise, or explain your content.
Just like you would with Bing Chat, you can also ask Windows Copilot a range of questions from simple to complex. If you wanted to call your family in Spain, you can quickly check the local time to make sure you’re not waking them up in the middle of the night. If you want to plan a trip to visit them in Spain, you can ask Windows Copilot to find flights and accommodations for you.
Windows Copilot was announced on the Microsoft Blog in March 2023, exclusively for Windows 11. Microsoft has asserted that Windows will be the first ever platform to provide a centralised AI capability embedded into its OS.
With Bing and ChatGPT plugins in Windows Copilot, people will not only have access to augmented AI capabilities and experiences, but developers will also have new ways to reach and innovate for customers.
In simple terms, Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI-powered productivity tool that uses large language models (LLMs) and integrates your data with the Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 apps and services.
It works alongside popular Microsoft 365 apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more.
Microsoft 365 Copilot provides real-time intelligent assistance, enabling users to enhance their creativity, productivity, and skills.
The following table provides an indication of the key use cases that are expected to be supported initially within each workload or application:
Copilot in PowerPoint
Copilot in Excel
Copilot in Outlook
Copilot in Teams
Copilot in SharePoint
Copilot in Loop
Cross-app intelligence in Copilot
In simple terms, Microsoft 365 Copilot is an AI-powered productivity tool that uses large language models (LLMs) and integrates your data with the Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 apps and services.
It works alongside popular Microsoft 365 apps such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more.
Microsoft 365 Copilot provides real-time intelligent assistance, enabling users to enhance their creativity, productivity, and skills.
The following table provides an indication of the key use cases that are expected to be supported initially within each workload or application:
With Copilot in Word, it’s easy to kick off the creative process so you never need start with a completely blank slate again. Copilot can generate a first draft to edit and refine — saving time in writing, research and editing time. Occasionally Copilot will be right, other times wrong — but it will generally put you further ahead. You remain in control as the author, driving your own personal ideas forward, and prompting Copilot to optimise, rewrite or provide suggestions. Copilot in PowerPoint helps you create professional, creative presentations with a simple prompt, adding relevant content from source documents you provide. Also, with Copilot in Excel, you can analyse trends and create professional-looking data visualisations easily.
Copilot reduces the time we often spend consumed with details and distractions by giving us a quick starting point. From summarising lengthy email threads to quickly drafting suggested replies, Copilot in Outlook helps you clear your inbox in minutes, not hours. Additionally, every meeting can be productive with Copilot in Teams. It can summarise key discussion points — including who said what and where people are aligned and where they disagree — and suggest action items, all in real time during a meeting. And with Copilot in Power Platform, anyone can automate repetitive tasks, create chatbots and go from an initial idea to a working app in minutes.
Data preparation in Microsoft 365 is essentially about using the tools provided to prepare for ‘just enough access’.
Significantly, Microsoft 365 Copilot uses your existing permissions and policies to deliver the most relevant information, building on top of Microsoft’s existing commitments to data security and
data privacy in the enterprise. This means it is important to have good content management practices in the first place. For many organisations, content oversharing, and data governance can be a challenge. Content oversharing is when content is shared beyond the needed audience either intentionally or accidentally.
The importance of information readiness cannot be overstated. It plays a critical role in ensuring that individuals have access to the specific data that is relevant to their roles, striking a delicate balance between providing valuable insights and preventing potential
missteps.
To illustrate this concept, consider the following scenario: a member of the sales team is in need of “strategic plans” for their company. While this may be crucial information for the leadership or the research team, it may not be suitable for the sales team to have unrestricted access to it. This is because they might inadvertently make promises based on information that won’t be implemented for another 3 or 4 years, due to a lack of context or awareness of future product plans. Therefore, it is imperative that when a person in sales searches for such information, they should only be presented with results that are directly pertinent to their role.
Conversely, when they search for content related to “sales”, they should be able to easily find information pertaining to budgets and current products. This distinction in access ensures that individuals are equipped with the information they need to perform their job effectively.
In essence, information readiness aims to empower individuals to carry out their responsibilities, but it does so with the intention of providing them with “just enough access” to the information that is directly relevant to their role and responsibilities. This approach ensures that individuals have the resources they need without overwhelming them with extraneous or potentially sensitive information.
There are also new tools already using AI including Microsoft Syntex which can help to get away from an ‘oversharing’ state to ‘just enough access’. Additionally, the new Syntex plugins for Microsoft 365 Copilot bring Syntex actions and skills into your Copilot experiences. To enhance Copilot, Syntex delivers critical content management skills for securing, grounding, and processing high value information.
Syntex plugins will make it easier than ever to bring AI-powered document processing like classification, content assembly and eSignature to Copilot. The Copilot experiences for Teams, Word, and more will be able to leverage organisational knowledge to work with files and documents quickly, accurately, and at scale.
Getting ready for Copilot actually consists of doing the things companies should be doing anyway, only now it’s even more important.
Maintaining good data hygiene is important from a data protection and security standpoint. It is important to implement actions that limit the radius of who can access or share sensitive files.
These actions should not just be limited to static files but should also extend to detecting and protecting data in emails in real time as well as the following:
In terms of SharePoint at the site and document library level there are actions that can be taken to look at your site labels, review the contents of sites and see who is using the content – audits, site membership, privacy settings and external file sharing settings.
It will be important to have sites correctly labelled with the appropriate access controls. Those protections then extend to the individual files and the individual communications themselves.
Microsoft Purview has a lot of tools for information protection and data security built in to actually identify sensitive information with classifiers e.g. bank statements, contracts, etc.
Microsoft Purview can parse content in document libraries and when it finds it, it can then label content as needed automatically e.g., general, confidential, highly confidential etc.
As with any new service or capability, there are a several prerequisites for Copilot deployment, these are:
In addition to the above prerequisites, it will be important to achieve the ‘just enough access’ position to ensure Copilot does not inadvertently expose unsecured information in the wrong way, therefore a primary prerequisite will be to ensure your environment has been prepared for ‘Information Readiness’.
An initial audit of your M365 data estate, data governance policies, controls and sharing settings should be considered as a minimum prior to deployment.
Microsoft 365 Copilot is a sophisticated processing and orchestration engine providing AI-powered productivity capabilities; however the importance of effective deployment cannot be overstated.
As with any application or solution capability, proper planning and preparation is absolutely vital to ensure an effective deployment and to enable secure, productive outcomes for end users.
To use Copilot, your organisation must meet some technical requirements and have some features enabled. Copilot users must have either a Microsoft 365 E3 or E5 license and an Azure Active Directory account, which gives them access to the Microsoft 365 apps and services that work with Copilot including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneDrive, Outlook, Loop, and more.
Once available to your organisation, your users will need to be on the Current Channel for Microsoft 365 apps to have access to Copilot in desktop clients.
In addition to the above prerequisites, it will be important to achieve the ‘just enough access’ position to ensure Copilot does not inadvertently expose unsecured information in the wrong way, therefore a primary prerequisite will be to ensure your environment has been prepared for ‘Copilot Readiness’.
An initial audit of your M365 data estate, data governance policies, controls and sharing settings should be considered as a minimum prior to deployment.
Before commencing a Copilot deployment, it is critical to ensure the organisation is ready for Copilot. As mentioned earlier in this guide, the importance of information architecture (assets), access control, classification and labelling, play a huge part in ensuring the productivity gains are achieved without compromising security or reputation.
The following steps summarise a suggested approach to Copilot deployment:
Get your information ready for the Copilot search
Get the prerequisites in place
Get Copilot in place
It will be vitally important to proactively drive user adoption of Copilot. This will entail following established best practices in driving services usage and adoption. Microsoft will be aiming to provide additional tools in the Microsoft 365 admin centre, including an onboarding guide and more help organisations get their users started and adopt Copilot once it is available.
Today, you can already help your users start learning about Copilot and AI fundamentals at the Microsoft AI help & learning site, where they can find more information about Copilot, how it can transform their work experience, and learn about the ethical principles and guidelines Microsoft follows when developing AI solutions.
The responses produced by Copilot aren’t guaranteed to be 100% factual, however Microsoft is continually improving those responses and users will still need to exercise their judgment when reviewing the output before sending them to others. Microsoft 365 Copilot capabilities provide useful drafts and summaries to help you achieve more while giving you a chance to review the generated content rather than fully automating those tasks.
Microsoft is continually improving their algorithms to proactively address issues, such as misinformation and disinformation, content blocking, data safety, and preventing the promotion of harmful or discriminatory content in line with their responsible AI principles.
Also, Microsoft doesn’t claim ownership of the output of the service. That said, neither do they make a determination on whether a customer’s output is copyright protected or enforceable against other users. This is because generative Microsoft Copilot may produce similar responses to similar prompts or queries from multiple customers. Consequently, multiple customers may have or claim rights in content that is the same or substantially similar.
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Are you tired of juggling multiple device management and application deployment solutions? Look no further than Microsoft Intune – the all-in-one cloud-based service that streamlines your IT tasks.
Zero Trust has now moved from being a buzzword to a strategic imperative for many organisations. With data breaches and cyber-attacks occurring every 7 mins in Australia1 raising customer and government authorities expectations for organisations to adhere to stronger cybersecurity programs, many organisations are shifting towards Zero Trust as the best practice.
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Are you tired of juggling multiple device management and application deployment solutions? Look no further than Microsoft Intune – the all-in-one cloud-based service that streamlines your IT tasks.
Zero Trust has now moved from being a buzzword to a strategic imperative for many organisations. With data breaches and cyber-attacks occurring every 7 mins in Australia1 raising customer and government authorities expectations for organisations to adhere to stronger cybersecurity programs, many organisations are shifting towards Zero Trust as the best practice.
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This comprehensive guide provides everything you need to get your organisation ready for and successfully deploy Copilot.
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