Part 1 – Save time and be more productive at work with Copilot for Microsoft 365

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In this blog series, I’ll delve into the advantages of using Copilot for Microsoft 365. In this first post, I’ll discuss the common challenges we face in our daily tasks at work and how Copilot can help alleviate these burdens, save time and money, and boost our productivity.

We all feel the pressure of work. Information, deadlines, and constant communication can often overwhelm us. AI can help, not just by making work easier or faster, but by making it more fulfilling. When we don’t have to spend as much mental energy figuring out what happened in that meeting, catching up on emails, or finding that document from last week’s chat, we can focus more on the core of our work and the purpose behind it.

In recent years, the pace and volume of work have continued to increase. Data from searches across Microsoft 365 services reveals that on any given workday, Microsoft’s most active Microsoft 365 users:

  • Conduct 18 searches for what they need.
  • Receive over 250 emails.
  • Send or read nearly 150 chats.

Globally, Microsoft Teams users are now in three times as many meetings each week compared to 2020. Additionally, some people use 11 different apps on Windows in a single day to complete their tasks.

AI helps lighten the workload by boosting human abilities and speeding up natural creativity. When leaders learn to use AI effectively, they can enable their teams to embrace this new era of AI-powered productivity, bringing great benefits to their organisations.

Before diving into Copilot for Microsoft 365, let’s compile a list of tasks we typically handle each day at work. On an average workday, you might find yourself:

  1. Catching up on email threads among colleagues.
  2. Engaging in numerous Microsoft Teams chat conversations.
  3. Reviewing recordings of Teams meetings you missed due to other commitments.
  4. Sending various emails to colleagues and external partners.
  5. Creating PowerPoint presentations
  6. Analysing data in Excel, budgeting, transforming it into tables, graphs, or pie charts
  7. Locating emails and Teams messages where you’ve been directly mentioned with the @ symbol and tasked with specific actions to complete.
  8. Reviewing outstanding tasks from this or last week, including important actions assigned by your manager.
  9. Checking emails or Teams channels to ensure you haven’t missed any company announcements.
  10. Planning for the upcoming week’s tasks and meetings.
  11. Organising the next team get together and ensuring fun activities are arranged.
  12. Reading through a lengthy 100 page document in preparation for a meeting the next morning.
  13. Recalling the last time you had a meeting with a specific colleague.

I could list additional daily tasks, but you get the idea.

How can Copilot for Microsoft 365 help?

Copilot for Microsoft 365 isn’t just another feature introduced by Microsoft. It’s more than that, it’s your AI (Artificial Intelligence) powered Copilot that accompanies you, the Pilot, throughout your day to day interaction with Microsoft 365 apps such as Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Teams, Loop and Whiteboard. Copilot was developed to save time and make you more productive by being able to generate new content mimicking human behavior. This is known as Generative AI where machines are able to generate new unique content and respond like your interacting with a real human being.

Going back to the list of daily tasks I created at the beginning of this post. Well, Copilot can assist with addressing those challenges and more. Those challenges we are all aware of at the workplace where the pace of work is overtaking our ability to keep up with our daily tasks. Copilot for Microsoft 365 is designed to assist and reduce that burden, such as being able to generate new emails, summarise email threads, summarise a large word document, summarise team meetings you were not able to attend, create you a PowerPoint deck, generate a business proposal, generate a job advertisement, locate email and teams conversations where you were @ mentioned, list your outstanding tasks for the week and more!

Remember, Copilot for Microsoft 365 is not replacing you, it’s your Copilot and you’re the Pilot.

Image generated by Microsoft Copilot in Bing

Is Copilot the same as a search engine like Bing or Google?

Is Copilot the same as a search engine like Bing or Google? Not exactly. Copilot is more advanced than a search engine. When you use a search engine, you may ask a question like, “How do I fix this plumbing issue?” The search engine will then scour its index of relevant content and present a list of website links for you to explore. You then have to sift through these links to find the information you need or perform another search.

Copilot, on the other hand, uses a pre trained Large Language Model (LLM) to perform a similar task but with a twist. It doesn’t just find relevant content; it generates new content, providing a direct answer to your question, such as how to resolve the plumbing issue. This process is known as Generative AI. I’ll cover Large Language Models (LLMs) later in this blog series.

Here is a short video from Microsoft which summarises and provides an insight into Copilot.


Is Copilot for Microsoft 365 free?
No, this particular service requires a license for each user who will be using Copilot in your organisation. Copilot for Microsoft 365 is available as an add-on plan with one of the following licensing prerequisites listed at the at the following Microsoft Learn page, Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 requirements.

Before exploring Copilot for Microsoft 365 within the various Microsoft 365 Apps, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Teams and Outlook, I explore how this AI Powered Copilot functions under the hood and provide a high level architecture overview through a number of diagrams.

Click the link below to progress to the next post. See you there 🙂

Copilot for Microsoft 365 under the hood

Part 2 – Copilot for Microsoft 365 under the hood

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In part one of this blog series, I provided a short introduction to Copilot for Microsoft 365. Here is the link to that post if you missed it, Save time and be more productive at work with Copilot for Microsoft 365 – Part 1

In part 2 of this blog series I explore how Copilot for Microsoft 365 works under the hood.

Once a user is assigned a Copilot for Microsoft 365 license, the Copilot icon becomes visible in the various Microsoft 365 Apps. We’ll explore and demo Copilot in a few 365 Apps in a later post.


Step 1

Andrew Doe, a Manager, returns from holiday to find a lengthy email discussion including a few attachments about a new office location project. Upon opening the email, he asks Copilot to summarise the conversation and identify any actions assigned to him which he needs to be aware of. As a user when we ask Copilot to do something, such as summarise an email or drafting an email, this is known as a prompt. More on prompts later.

The Summarise button will summarise the email conversation with the email thread.

However, if you wish to ask Copilot to check for any outstanding tasks in the last couple of weeks, there is a Copilot button which works across Outlook as a whole instead of focusing on one email thread. See image below.


Step 2

The Copilot orchestration engine receives the prompt from Andrew Doe’s Outlook application.


Step 3

The Copilot orchestration engine undergoes a task known as post-processing or grounding, during which it accesses Microsoft Graph and Semantic search. Microsoft Graph is basically your Microsoft 365 data, such as your calendar, SharePoint, OneDrive files, meetings, chats, and more. Additionally, Copilot can search other services using plugins and connectors, such as a Bing search plugin that allows access to internet content or third party applications such as ServiceNow. This grounding/post-processing step enhances the quality of the prompt, ensuring you receive relevant answers.



What is Semantic search?
The semantic index is a new feature of Microsoft 365 search that uses the Microsoft Graph to better interact with your personal and organisational data. Relevant information is obtained in the Microsoft Graph and semantic index to provide the Large Language Model (LLM) with more information to reason over. As an example, suppose you want Microsoft Copilot to locate an email where a colleague praised the design work of a vendor. Semantic index includes nearby words (for example, elated, excited, amazed) into the search to broaden the search area and give the best result. All of this work takes place behind the scenes to add relevance to results that you search for with Microsoft Copilot. Another example of Semantic search, it’s like a librarian who not only knows every book in the library but also understands the story behind your question. Traditional search is like looking for books with a specific title, while semantic search finds books by understanding the story you’re really interested in, even if the title is slightly off.



Step 4

The Copilot orchestration engine combines the user data retrieved from graph and Semantic search and sends the modified prompt to the Large Language Model (LLM).



What is a Large Language Model (LLM)?

There is a lot more to LLMs but to simplify, so this post is in a no way a deep dive into LLMs. Here are a few points about LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) represent a class of artificial intelligence models that specialise in understanding and generating human like text. In the context of Copilot for Microsoft 365, LLMs are the engine that drives Copilot for Microsoft 365’s capabilities. You may have heard/read about the company OpenAI who developed the popular ChatGPT service. Microsoft have invested billions of dollars into OpenAI and the LLMs they develop. The ChatGPT models are utilised by Microsoft, however, Microsoft privately hosts these models on the Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, so your company data is not shared with OpenAI. Microsoft aims to push the boundaries of AI research and development. By partnering with OpenAI, they can leverage cutting edge AI technologies and innovations. This collaboration is seen as a way to accelerate AI breakthroughs and ensure these benefits are broadly shared with the world.

A few points about LLMs below.

1. LLMs are used to understand user inputs and generate relevant responses.

2. LLMs allow computers to understand and generate language.

3. LLMs specialise in understanding and generating human like text.

4. Operate as generative AI, producing new content and can have a real conversation mimicking human behaviour. It can be difficult to tell whether you’re having a conversation with a human or a machine.

5. Provides the engine that drives Copilot capabilities. The LLM is what provides a response to our prompts/instructions we send it.

6. Instead of merely predicting or classifying, generative AI, like LLMs, can produce entirely new content.

LLM’s are trained using a large amount of data sourced from the Internet, books, conversations, movies and a lot more. An LLM can be used for all sorts of tasks including chat, translation, summarisation, brain storming, writing poems, code generation, writing a book, troubleshooting, writing a FAQ, image creation/detection and a lot more.

That’s where the name Large Language Model comes from. A large amount of work goes into training the LLM. In simple terms, a LLM is a super intelligent auto complete so if we input Roses are _______. The LLM will respond with the next word of Red. At the time of training these models, the LLM will make errors and is then trained/corrected. For example, if an LLM responded with Roses are Green, the team of data analysts would retrain the LLM with the correct answer and this process continues as the LLM fine tunes itself and gets better.

We can compare an LLM to how neurons/brain cells work in the human brain. In the human brain there are some 80 – 100 billion neurons with 100 trillion connections to each other. The brain is structured so that each neuron is connected to thousands of other cells. Human brain cells form a very complex and highly interconnected network which send electrical signals to each other to allow us humans to process information.


Let’s take an example of a toddler/baby who is shown a picture of a dog. At first the baby will make mistakes when learning to identify the differences between animals. When a baby incorrectly identifies a dog as a cat, a parent or teacher may correct the toddler and the more practice the baby gets overtime by viewing pictures of different animals or seeing animals in the real world, the neurons in the brain adjust, allowing the toddler to get better at identifying animals correctly.

Data scientists created LLM’s in a similar way to how the brain works. An LLM is like a human brain made up of a neural network, each neuron is connected to the others. As mentioned earlier, the LLM is pre-trained on a large amount of data. For example, an LLM can be provided with pictures of thousands or even millions of pictures of a dog and then is trained on how to identify the correct one. When an LLM makes a mistake in identifying an animal, it is corrected and the neural networks start to adjust and this process continues as the LLM learns. Similar to the way we learn as humans.

In the diagram below each circle below represents a neuron. When we provide an input we expect to receive an output. Under the hood we have the hidden layer where all the processing takes place before we are provide with the result, known as the output. Simply put, as we make mistakes and learn, neurons are activated/deactivated.


Scientists discovered that the neural network within a large language model (LLM) can be structured to allow neurons to loop back into previous layers, enabling two way communication similar to human neurons. This breakthrough led to more complex behaviors in LLMs, culminating in the development of ChatGPT by the company OpenAI, which can engage in human like conversations. Microsoft invested in OpenAI and use the LLMs in their products. As you’ll appreciate, there is a lot more to this topic and the information I have provided is basic, but I hope this provides you with a simple overview.


Step 5

The LLM (Large Language Model) retrieves the prompt from the Copilot orchestration engine and generates a response. It then returns the response to the Copilot orchestration engine.


Step 6

Copilot takes the response from the LLM and post-processes it. The post-processing involves aditional grounding calls to graph, security, compliance, privacy and responsible AI checks. This is a final check before it is safe to forward the generated response from the LLM to the user Andrew.


Final Diagram


Stay tuned for the next post where I will explore Copilot in several 365 Apps

Configure mailbox permission alert Microsoft 365

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In this blog post I will go through the process of configuring an alert within the Microsoft 365 Compliance portal which will trigger an email whenever permissions are assigned to a mailbox.

  1. From the 365 Admin Center locate and click Compliance or visit the Compliance Admin Center directly via Security & Compliance (compliance.microsoft.com)

2. Click Policies

3. Expand Alert and click Office 365 alert

4. Click New Alert Policy

5. Complete details as required (Demo info below). Click Next

6. There are a number of activities to choose from. For the purpose of this demo, I have selected Granted Mailbox Permission

7. You could also add a condition based on IP address and username. For example, if you want to be alerted when a particular group of users assign permissions, you can do so here. Ignore the conditions box if you would like an alert to be triggered when any user in the organisation performs the action.

8. Click next and select your notification groups or emails. Click Next, review settings and click finish

That’s your mailbox permissions alert configured