Two Major Admin Control Updates for Copilot and Agent Management

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At Ignite Microsoft showcased and talked about two new admin controls for Copilot and Agents. These controls drew a significant amount of attention for their potential to simplify management and strengthen governance across Copilot experiences and AI agents. These capabilities are now emerging in preview, offering administrators early access to improved insights, expanded control surfaces, and more secure operational foundations. Copilot Overview Page Refresh in Microsoft 365 Admin Center First off is the redesigned landing page for Copilot in the Microsoft 365 Admin Center (MAC), giving admins an at-a-glance view of the Copilot journey across Chat, Agents, and M365 Copilot. This update  centralizes critical insights and success metrics, helping organizations accelerate adoption and maintain security posture. The refreshed page introduces success metrics such as Chat active users, assisted hours for licensed users, and satisfaction rate. Each Copilot pillar now includes multi‑...

Still installing OCS, and getting grey hairs

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I admit it, I guess I was a bit quick on that last post, when I said I did not run into any serious problems. Well, I did. Biggest problems though, were all related to naming conventions, certificates, and a very aggressive firewall on the brand new 2008 windows server.

- First of all the Firewall:
I was fooled by how easy the installation is, and I was not prompted for any errors. The databases and files were created as expected. The only problem was when I started to run the verification tools, and got error messages. I tried to Google the messages, and the answers indicated certificate problems. So I started all over again, being very careful about names and certificates (By the way; If your CA is a 2003 server, and the client is a Vista or 2008 machine. Make sure to search TechNet for CA updates to the website. And enable ssl on the CA site). After rebuilding the pool 3 times, I was pretty sure certificates weren’t the thing, even though the error message indicated the certificate. So what else could it be? In what way did this installation differ from the OCS 2007 installations I had made on 2003 servers? No...! It can't be that simple? Yes it was. As it turns out: Windows 2008 comes with the firewall turned on by default. Pretty nice actually. But if you're not aware of this, you're in for some grey hairs like me. 

Once the appropriate rules were enabled, the validation came through like a charm. Now most of the features are up and running.

My next project is to integrate the Exchange 2007, and really create that UC environment we need in the demo/lab here.