One Huge Challenge with M365 for Admins – An Example

I wrote earlier this week about Microsoft’s announcement of Copilot Agents and what they hope users will get out of them.

That post was focused on AI and jobs, but this one is for the Admins out there. Tony Redmond put it succinctly in his post about Copilot Wave 2:

Rolling out any new technology takes preparation. Introducing Copilot agents to the average user, even those who have been using Microsoft 365 Copilot for several months, is probably not a good idea if it’s not backed up with support and user training. And the work to rein in poorly managed SharePoint sites and reduce oversharing and digital rot to an acceptable level might not yet be complete. Adding agents to the mix seems like a stretch.

The fact that Microsoft plans to introduce Copilot agents in SharePoint fully-enabled and ready to go with no ability for a tenant to disable the feature on a tenant-wide or per-user basis speaks well for Microsoft’s confidence that these agents are a good thing. However, it’s also regrettable that Microsoft won’t deliver basic tenant management controls for new features. The assumption is always that customers will love the new technology and take to it like a duck to water. Unhappily, that rose-tinted view seldom endures past its first collision with the harsh realities of daily operations.

This has always been true of M365 features. They roll out when they roll out, and IT Teams will have zero lag between when they see it and when all of their users see it. Recently, I’ve been dealing with this myself, with users being able to create and share SharePoint pages from OneDrive and changes to Loop in terms of storage.

In the first case, at least one user started playing with SharePoint pages before I even realized the feature was there. In the second, Loop Workspaces created in the Loop app were no longer stored in OneDrive or SharePoint but in SharePoint embedded in a pay-as-you-go Azure storage location. It’s not much money, but it’s the realization that as we struggle to understand all the new things Microsoft is rolling out, that delay might create Azure charges.

By the way, I have the same question about agents and whether there might be a charge beyond a certain number of interactions. Microsoft did not include any licensing or cost information in the announcement, just that we’ll see it in mid-October.

Let’s not even talk about the various other changes I’m trying to get documented and communicated before users and IT support teams see them in the wild, including a large number of announcements from this week about Copilot aside from agents, like the roll-out of the new Purview portal, and dozens of other small changes that may impact how users work or how we set policies.

I’m not saying this to complain; I’m pointing out that this is a fact of life for the IT staff running M365 and many other cloud services.

It’s a huge challenge. We have no control over updates, and Microsoft is increasingly releasing new features before they build out the compliance tools that would allow us to manage them. As Tony pointed out above, agents may have critical impacts on current security and data privacy work. No matter, it’s coming. Figure it out.

As I mentioned during the ILTA session last month, I don’t see how organizations will function without a dedicated staff to monitor and communicate changes. Consider just how much work is involved in understanding Copilot and all of the compliance issues surrounding the use of AI, then consider how fast Microsoft is rolling out new Copilot features. It’s been a moving target since day one.

It’s only a small part of the M365 environment.

Are you struggling to stay in front of all the M365 changes, too?

Good luck to us all!

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