Microsoft Ignite News
CoPilot, CoPilot, and CoPilot, but there was some other news.
This week would normally be a deep-dive post into a Purview eDiscovery feature. Still, with Ignite coming last week, we need to discuss that before we get back into regularly scheduled programming. This issue is also fully available to free subscribers and we’ll get back to premium issues next week.
As expected, Microsoft spent most of the Ignite Conference this week talking up CoPilot.
Tony Redmond’s Sub-head here says it best - Mentioning Copilot Becomes Compulsory at Ignite 2023.
I also agree that at least the online portions of Ignite were much more of a marketing event than an educational one.
Tony does a nice job wrapping up all CoPilot and AI-related announcements. Let’s face it, when you start the CEO’s keynote talking about how Microsft is now an AI company, it doesn’t take any expertise to know that they will live or die with AI at this point.
Though I can’t imagine what happened at OpenAI this week made Microsft very happy. There’s nothing like announcing you’re all-in on AI and your partnership with a company only to have that company force out its CEO and become a public mess a day later. I’m sure this situation isn’t over. Stay tuned.
In other news though:
This Ignite-related item details all of the recent changes and upcoming items in the Ediscovery world.
Some of the highlights to be aware of are going to be the ability to discover CoPilot interactions, a specific way to search and collect Forms data (I wonder if Forms data will also be subject to retention, as it hasn’t been in the past?), a PowerShell cmdlet to report on holds and release orphaned holds (Though I still want the holds report in the interface so Legal operations people don’t have to use PowerShell to see very basic information like what holds are in place.), and of course some of the features we’ve covered here recently that are in Preview, direct export from collection, and Guest Reviewers.
The new Microsoft Planner: A unified experience bringing together to-dos, tasks, plans and projects - as you may know, I’m a fan of Planner, so when I heard there was an overhaul coming next year, I was immediately nervous. I’m cautiously optimistic that this will be a good thing, simplifying the confusion around To-Do, Tasks, and Planner. On the other hand, rebranding Project for the Web to Planner as a premium version is going to cause just as much confusion.
Gain comprehensive data protection and efficient investigation with Microsoft Purview DLP - there’s a lot going on here and I was remiss recently when talking about the difficulties of eDiscovery when you only have an E3 license in not including some discussion of DLP and DLM. Not having access to those tools makes it difficult to manage and protect your data in the first place.
There were also announcements related to Information Protection as well.
Loop Workspaces are now generally available. - I’ll be revisiting the testing I did earlier this year when it was in preview to see if anything has changed.
SharePoint Premium seems to be some kind of rebrand of Syntex? Or have I gotten that wrong?
M365 Backup creates a question about eDiscovery in my mind, will the native eDiscovery tools be able to search backups?
Microsoft also announced a “Windows App”, which seems to be a remote desktop tool for PC and Macs. (Again, not to be confused with the actual Windows OS running on that remote desktop.)
Finally, we have to talk about that demo of Mesh in a Teams meeting. The 3D interactive space that I don’t see any business purpose for. (Do I really want team or client meetings around a virtual fire?) The lack of legs on the avatars wasn’t only distracting, it was disturbing. The idea that a user would hop over to another group having a different discussion, again I have to ask, why? Don’t we spend enough time in pointless meetings? Microsoft, just say no.
You can catch all the news that came from Ignite last week in the Book of News.
What were your biggest takeaways from the week? Did I miss anything important?