New Year, New Momentum: Here are three Copilot updates to get you started into 2026

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It's a new year, so I thought I'd start the year by mentioning three features already released, or soon going to be released. One of the features improves the workflow of sharing files with comments, the other improves the application specific Copilot, and the last feature makes it easer to find the nest available timeslot for a 1:1 meeting. As with all of my other posts, timelines can shift, and the timelines in this post is as written in the Message Center at the time of posting. AI-Summary experience when sharing files. With this new feature, copilot intent to help users share files with clearer context in just a few steps. Users will get the capability to generate a concise summary of a file and include it when sharing from the File Explorer share dialog or the OneDrive activity center. This will make it easier to share the context of a file and giving the receiver a faster understanding of what a document or file contains before they open it. General Availability announced...

More additions to the Backup-SfB script

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The Backup-SfB script was just released, and keen eyes might have noticed the version 4.00 has been updated to 4.00 C by the time of the release.
I had several beta testers run the 4.00 release, and most of them ran it without too many comments. But I received two important requests:

  1. Please try to minimize error output from the script
  2. I don't know how to capture certain devices.
So here are the three minor, yet important changes to the script

Backup Common Area and Analog Devices
This request was simple enough: Neither the user nor the db backups hold any information on Common area phones or Analog devices. That's why the "backup-basics" function now will run get-cscommonarephone and get-csanalogphones and pipe it to a couple of csv files in the bakcup directory. 
From these files, it should be easy enough to import the information required back into SfB upon restore through a script.

CS Announcements
Although this information is present in the CMS configuration, I was asked if not this could be added as a standalone extra in the same way as the polices and voice settings are.
As it only took two lines of code, I decided it was a good idea to do so.
Included in the bakup are now two new files. A list of unassigned number ranges, and a list of cs announcements (The voice prompts should already be a part of the file backup)

Error handling
Error handling isn't my strongest powershell skill. After all, I'm only a UC techie trying to learn this stuff. But I have been requested on several occasions to quiet down the blood red text in the output of the script. In order to do so, I have now set the default error and warning handling to -silentlycontinue, unless you use the -DebugSQL switch.

I have tried to capture any missing backup files we would expect, so please read the transcript for errors. And then run the script again, with the -debugsql switch to capture the real error.