M365 News Roundup for August 2025
Two upcoming changes with impacts on eDiscovery and investigations, plus a lot more!
Before we get started with all the news from the M365 world in the last month, there are two upcoming rollouts that I suspect will be very important in terms of eDiscovery and data investigations.
The first one involves new audit activities related to screen-sharing in Teams meetings.
Teams admins will now be able to see telemetry for screen sharing.
Basically, audit logs for screen-sharing sessions in Teams will now also be available to Teams admins through the power of Microsoft Purview. These additional logs will help Teams admins answer critical questions regarding the identities of participants in a meeting where the screen was shared, who shared it, timestamps for when it started and when it stopped, when control was requested, taken, or given, if a request was accepted and who accepted it, and the identities of the people with whom the screen was shared.
If you consider the big questions we often get in legal situations like “who knew what, and when,” knowing who shared their screen, how long, and who was present, especially combined with the power of Copilot to read the text from the screen during a meeting and include it in a recap, well that might interest a few folks.
The second one that caught my eye this weekend involves a significant change to data storage when it comes to private channels in Teams:
To support growing usage and help simplify compliance, private channels will now use a group mailbox (like shared channels) instead of storing messages in individual user mailboxes.
As these features appear, I’ll take a deep look into the available data and what changes we’ll need to make in the future in terms of workflows. Suffice it to say, having private channel messages in the group mailbox instead of the individual user mailboxes may make collection simpler, in theory. We’ll see how it holds up in real life.
Now, if they could figure out how to let us use Planner and other apps in Shared/Private channels, we might be on to something!
Do you see these changes impacting your day-to-day workflows?
Copilot News:
This is a feature I find myself enjoying - Microsoft Introducing Copilot Memory: A More Productive and Personalized AI for the Way You Work.
I wrote about the potential impacts of auto-deletion policies on Copilot memory a couple of weeks back.
Speaking of features I enjoy - Unlocking Productivity: How Microsoft 365 Copilot Notebooks Transform Workflows.
Some good insight into security with Copilot - Microsoft Copilot and Data Security: Tracing AI’s Role in the Enterprise.
If you’re confused about agents - Intro to Customizing Microsoft 365 Copilot with Agents.
If you’re using Security Copilot - Microsoft Purview Powering Data Security and Compliance for Security Copilot.
Copilot Chat keeps changing, too:
Of course, not to be left out of the all-Copilot, all the time mode - Introducing Copilot Mode in Edge: A new way to browse the web.
Non-Copilot News:
I agree with this take. Buying an e5 license is just the start. Having someone figure out which tools you want to use and configure them properly is a much larger, and never-ending, job. - You Bought Microsoft E5. Is it delivering for you?
This is interesting. When a user departs, you can limit the sharing of any files from their OneDrive to a specific group, disabling all other sharing links.
Also from Jaime, on OneDrive - How to Manage OneDrive Storage Quotas Effectively.
For your information - Unlocking Productivity: SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive Best Practices for SMBs with M365 Business Premium.
Another change coming to Teams channels:
While we’re talking about Teams, this isn’t bad advice- Best Practices to Manage Large Teams in Microsoft Teams.
It’s August. You need to know what’s coming - Will Your eDiscovery Processes Still Work in the New Microsoft Purview UI?
There is a whole series on this topic. Worth a bookmark for when you need it. - Search and Purge using Microsoft Graph eDiscovery API.
Finally, you should set up an alert for any activity related to this account, right? - Send Alert for Break Glass Account Activity.
That’s all for this month! You may have noticed that I didn’t take a week off in July, what with all the changes, announcements, and follow-ups that I wanted to cover. I am taking next week off from the newsletter. Not because there isn’t more to share with you, but I’ll be in National Harbor, MD, at the ILTA Conference all week. It’s a busy week. IYKYK. 😏
I’m sure the week will inspire some new topic ideas, though.
What new features are causing you to rethink the way we work with M365 this month?