M365 Purview News October 2023
CoPilot is Coming
It was difficult to find a lot of news about M365 since Microsoft made the announcement that they’d be releasing CoPilot next month. It has dominated the news cycle and drowned out any other news about M365.
Given the hype over Generative AI in addition to the large userbase that Microsoft has for Windows 11 and M365, the media attention is understandable.
On the eDiscovery front, I’m not sure it has a ton of obvious impact. Drafts, summaries, meeting notes, etc. written by AI are just documents after all. We may have to have another think on the idea of custodians though. I’ve already been on that for a couple of years now, as collaborative platforms have made it more likely that attachments or linked files have been edited many times by many people, so who really “owns” it is a legitimate question. With AI tools, we move beyond that into documents that were first created by AI and not written by anyone, thus not owned or necessarily familiar to anyone.
We might even have to answer an existential question, if CoPilot writes a summary that no one reads, is it really evidence? Especially if your eDiscovery searches unearth what looks like proof that one side in a dispute “knew” something. Can you prove anyone saw it?
Or maybe I’ve been in this industry too long not to go looking for all the loopholes. ;-)
The larger question I have is about that hype and the resources Microsoft is throwing at both CoPilot and Teams Premium. First, let me just say that Microsoft can, and will, focus on products that will increase their bottom line. Both of these bring in extra subscription revenue and will, of course, be prioritized. I can’t help but wonder if some of their other tools, especially things like eDiscovery, might wind up with even slower feature development moving forward.
That would be unfortunate when there are still gaps to fill on some of those Purview products.
For more on CoPilot here are a couple of links to read about some of the best features:
One last thing on CoPilot that we should at least give a thought to. All that work to create large language models is going to require a lot of energy. - Microsoft Needs So Much Power to Train AI That It's Considering Small Nuclear Reactors.
That’s a lot to think about.
What are your thoughts on CoPilot? Will you be subscribing? Will your workplace consider it, or is it going to play a bit of a waiting game before committing to the price tag?
As mentioned, there’s also quite a bit coming to Teams Premium soon, and it sounds a lot like the metaverse. I’m not so sure the business world is ready for team meetings in 3D spaces. I’m not really sure how that makes meetings better, but it’s coming - Connect in new ways with Microsoft Mesh
Personally, I feel like in a professional setting if you were calling a project update or team meeting and I logged in to find it occurring in a 3D space with avatars, I’d be tempted to log out and do some serious work. But, I’m old. So maybe I just don’t get it.
Other Microsoft news getting my attention this month:
Zoom CEO calls on US to investigate Microsoft’s Teams bundling - after offering to unbundle Teams to satisfy EU regulators, this was obviously coming.
Microsoft warns about a new malware threat that's being distributed via Teams chats
It turns out, not everyone will have access to Loop workspaces - Microsoft Limits Loop App to Microsoft 365 SKUs
Get ready to update documentation as Microsoft continues renaming products - Introducing Town Halls in Microsoft Teams and Retiring Microsoft Teams Live Events. Will it change anything from a data storage and eDiscovery perspective?
Speaking of the eDiscovery perspective, Planner and To-Do, and how they interact with Outlook tasks and mailboxes have always been some of the more interesting challenges I’ve seen when testing. Planner tasks have always lived in Azure unless they were assigned to a user at which point a copy would find its way (slowly) to that user’s mailbox. What will happen later this month when this hits customer tenants? - Microsoft Planner to Add Support for New Personal Plans. I really like Planner for task management so I’m looking forward to seeing what changes Personal Plans bring to the table, as well as how it impacts the storage of tasks. I also wonder if this points to the end of To-Do as a usable product for business users.
That’s it for this month’s free M365 news issue. As always, if you find this useful, please refer a friend. It could get you a free subscription to all the paid newsletters as a reward.