How to get ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot

Get information ready for search, put key prerequisites in place, and assign licenses to prepare for the next transformation in how we work with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Copilot leverages large language models that interact with your organization’s data using the Microsoft Graph to generate personalized experiences with related context, reducing the steps to find the information you need and generate content. By design, Copilot respects user-specific permissions to any content or information it retrieves, and only generates responses based on information that users explicitly have permission to access.

Join Jeremy Chapman, Director of Microsoft 365, as he shares admin steps to get started, by:

1. Getting your organization’s information ready for search — with Just Enough Access permissions in place. This is a best practice, whether you plan to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot or not.
2. Putting Microsoft 365 Copilot prerequisites in place. This includes the having the right Microsoft cloud apps and services running for each user with access to Microsoft 365 Copilot, and
3. Assigning Microsoft 365 Copilot licensing to users and groups to provide them access.

And finally, with everything prepared and ready, it’s important to have a plan in place to drive user adoption and optimize results by creating a center of excellence — as you would with other app and service — rollout to let people share easily share what’s working best for them and find help from internal champions.

Just Enough Access.

How to get your organization’s info ready for search used by Microsoft 365 Copilot. Allow access to the information users need — and nothing else. Check it out.

Copilot or not — get your information search ready.

Tools for visibility of how info is accessed and shared. Automated controls to identify oversharing and set the right permissions. Watch here.

Establish a Center of Excellence.

Better adoption and results for your Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout. Create a COE for internal users to share experiences and ask questions. See why.

Watch our video here.

QUICK LINKS:

00:00 — Introduction

01:48 — Step One: Get information ready to search

03:00 — Just Enough Access

03:34 — Tools to find info at risk for oversharing

04:54 — Step Two: Get prerequisites in place

06:00 — Step Three: Assign M365 Copilot licenses

07:20 — Establish a Center of Excellence

07:55 — Wrap up

Link References:

Prerequisites for Microsoft 365 Copilot and supported apps at https://aka.ms/M365CopilotPreReqs

Hands-on support with Microsoft FastTrack services at https://fasttrack.microsoft.com

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Video Transcript:

-Microsoft 365 Copilot is coming soon but is your organization ready? Today I’ll walk through the top three things that you can do to help get ready for the next transformation in how we work from getting your information ready for search, the key prerequisites and license assignment. As you recently demonstrated, Microsoft 365 Copilot leverages large language models that interact with your organization’s data, using the Microsoft Graph to generate personalized experiences with related context as you work, reducing the steps to find information you need to get up and running fast. To make this real, if we look at the Copilot experience in Microsoft Teams, it can help you catch up on something that you may have missed, pulling together information from multiple sources to bring you up to speed. Or in Word, Copilot can easily write an entirely new document, like a business proposal, leveraging content from your recent files.

-Now, a lot of the magic that makes this possible is the Microsoft 365 Copilot system on the backend. Now, this provides a powerful orchestration engine between the large language models, the Microsoft Graph and Microsoft 365 apps. The Microsoft Graph has long been foundational to Microsoft 365. It includes the information about relationships and activities of your organization’s data, and it works together with the Semantic Index for Copilot, and orchestrates information retrieval steps using search. Discovered information along with the original user prompt is then presented to the large language model to generate an informed response which is then returned back to the corresponding app. By design, Microsoft 365 Copilot respects user-specific permissions to any content or Graph information it retrieves and only generates responses based on information that you as a user explicitly have permission to access. And this really is the first thing that you can do to get ready for Copilot: get your information ready for search.

-Now, for example, if your organization already has the right information access controls and policies established, as your users search in places like SharePoint, then they’ll only have access to the information that they need and nothing else. So if your organization’s already doing this, you’re already one step ahead. If not, the good news is there are tools and controls that you can use to get visibility into how information is being shared. So you can put automated controls in place to ensure the right level of access and stop oversharing before you roll out Microsoft 365 Copilot. So just as you would prepare the information in your organization for search, the same principles apply for Copilot, again because Copilot will only retrieve information each user explicitly has access to. For example, if any given user within your organization has access to all or most internal information, then, by definition, using search, they will most likely have access to things like sites and files across the organization that they should not have access to.

-Now, solving for this is an overall information access challenge not unique to Microsoft 365 Copilot. The recommended approach here is to achieve what’s called just enough access for each user within your organization to get their work done. Now, this would mean that if any given user searches for information they shouldn’t have access to, it simply won’t be found or retrieved. But if they search for information that they need to do their jobs with and have access to, that information can be found and is surfaced to them. If you have concerns that your internal information is currently overshared, and most people within your organization may have too much access to sensitive information, let’s dive deep on the things that you can do to address this.

-First, at the file level, Microsoft Purview’s Information Protection, along with its data classification controls, integrated content labeling and corresponding data loss prevention policies can help you identify files in Microsoft Teams, in SharePoint sites, as well as OneDrive locations and within email and even in chat conversations either containing sensitive information or classified content, then automatically apply controls to limit their access.

-Then moving up to the site team and container level within Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, you can audit access to shared content at the site and team level and enforce restrictions that will limit information discovery to only those who should have access. To help automate this process even more, Microsoft Syntex provides advanced management capabilities to help find potential oversharing with your SharePoint and Microsoft Teams files. Then put controls in place, like requiring site access reviews by site owners or restricting access to defined security groups from one central place. These are just a few options. Once you have the controls in place, you can validate your access using search in the context of users with different roles, in different departments or geographical locations. So whether or not you plan to use Microsoft 365 Copilot broadly, getting to just enough access will improve your overall information protection.

-Now, the second thing to prepare for Microsoft 365 Copilot is to get the prerequisites in place and the third is to assign Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses. And I put these two items together because you can use the new Microsoft 365 Copilot setup guide as a wizard-based experience in the Microsoft 365 admin center to help with both. Now, you’ll find the wizard in the Setup page under Apps and Email, and once you get started, you’ll see it lists out which apps and services you need in place for the full Copilot experience, in addition to having the right Microsoft 365 Enterprise licenses in place, including access to Microsoft 365 Apps for Enterprise and Web Experiences, a work account in Azure Active Directory, files in OneDrive, the new Outlook app for email, Microsoft Teams apps across platforms and the new Microsoft Loop experience and Semantic Index for Copilot. And for a comprehensive list, you can find the prerequisites for Microsoft 365 Copilot and supported apps at aka.ms/365CopilotPreReqs.

-Next, the third thing to do is to assign Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses to users, which can also be done here from the setup guide wizard. So in Licenses, you’ll see a listing of available Microsoft 365 Enterprise and Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses that you can assign right from here. Note that users that you assign Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses to will also need Microsoft 365 Enterprise licenses assigned to them. You can do that right from here or you can use the Microsoft 365 admin center or other license assignment approaches as you would for any other Microsoft 365 service. In my case, I can see that I have 20 available licenses for Microsoft 365 Copilot. So I’ll select it and now I can assign licenses, and these are my available groups, and I’ll choose this group with nine members and assign. Then in email announcement, you’ll see the email template provided to help inform and guide users with getting started information across all the apps, and we’ll touch more on that in a second, and I can even send the email to other recipients I select from here.

-And finally, you’ll see additional resources where to get more information. After you’ve completed these three primary steps for Microsoft 365 Copilot, there’s even more that you can do as an admin to contribute to a successful rollout, just like you would as you deploy other new apps and services to drive awareness and adoption. Establishing a center of excellence for your internal users to share their experiences and ask questions is a great way to find and work with internal champions as you roll out any new service or set of capabilities. Giving people the ability to share what’s working best for them, such as the prompts and details that people can use for generating great content and responses using Copilot can really go a long way to drive better adoption and results, as well as build a strong internal community.

-So those were a few things you can do as an admin to get ready for the next transformation in how we work with Microsoft 365 Copilot. For even more hands-on support, you can engage with Microsoft FastTrack Services to help prepare and you can find out more at fasttrack.microsoft.com. And keep checking back to Microsoft Mechanics for the latest on Copilot, along with the additional policies and controls that are coming soon. Be sure to subscribe to our channel and thanks for watching.