“Bring your AI to work” is here: Microsoft edition - What Multiple Account Access to Copilot means

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Multiple Account Access to Copilot On October 1. 2025 Microsoft released a blog post explaining how employees now can use Copilot from their personal 365 plans to work on organizational data. This is of course, an extension of the already existing "Multi account" feature that was released for corporate accounts a "couple of months" ago. In other words, “bring your own Copilot” is now a real thing in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote on desktop and mobile, with enterprise protections intact. “Bring your AI to work” is an important topic, and banning AI altogether might not be the answer. Whether sanctioned or shadow, AI has already entered everyday knowledge work. Microsoft’s new multi‑account access offers a safer path where employees can use Copilot from their personal Microsoft 365 subscriptions on work files, while the file’s access, auditing, and compliance still flow through the work identity and tenant. That’s better than users copy‑pasting sensit...

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.