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...

Normalization rules order

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I was troubleshooting a customer's normalization rules for international dialing, when I came the following conclusion: The order of the normalization rules in the DialPlan is important when you have more than one possible match.

In my setup, I was trying to accommodate how users might possibly try to dial an international number in different ways. Some users might have figured out how to use the + in their contact cards, or when dialing, and those are of no concern. But others will still tend to use "old-style" with a prefix, or forget the "+" all together.

For this I "always" create two simple rules:
One matching any number string longer than 8 digits (No extension in Norway is longer than 8 digits), and adding a + to it. This will Normalize any international number not beginning with a "+" and adding the "+" before routing.
New-CsVoiceNormalizationRule -Identity "Global/NO_INT_Digits" -Pattern '^(\d{8}\d+)$' -Translation '+$1'
The second rule was made to accommodate those who were dialing with the international prefix in front of the number (00)
New-CsVoiceNormalizationRule -Identity "Global/NO_INT_Digits00" -Pattern '^00(\d{8}\d+)$' -Translation '+$1'

What I have not considered before, is the order of which these commands are written. If you enter them in the order I have shown you here, the first rule will always take effect, and the stripping of 00 in the second rule, will never work.

So from now on, I will always add the most specific rule first, then the general rule.

Here's the "complete" list I usually use here in Norway:

New-CsVoiceNormalizationRule -Identity "Global/NO_3_Digits" -Pattern '^(1\d{2})$' -Translation '+47$1'
New-CsVoiceNormalizationRule -Identity "Global/NO_4_Digits" -Pattern '^(18\d{2})$' -Translation '+47$1'
New-CsVoiceNormalizationRule -Identity "Global/NO_5_Digits" -Pattern '^(0\d{4})$' -Translation '+47$1'
New-CsVoiceNormalizationRule -Identity "Global/NO_8_Digits" -Pattern '^(\d{8})$' -Translation '+47$1'
New-CsVoiceNormalizationRule -Identity "Global/NO_INT_Digits00" -Pattern '^00(\d{8}\d+)$' -Translation '+$1'
New-CsVoiceNormalizationRule -Identity "$Global/NO_INT_Digits" -Pattern '^(\d{8}\d+)$' -Translation '+$1'

Hope this saves you from some troubleshooting: Plan your Normalization rules carefully :)