Custom Engine Agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot

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Agents in BizChat has been available for some time already, but now there is an upcoming update to Agents. The introduction of “ custom engine agents ” in Microsoft 365 Copilot! These specialized agents can be built on any large language model (LLM), toolchain, or orchestration tool, tailored specifically for your domain or tenant workflows. Initially supported in Microsoft Teams, this feature will soon be available in Microsoft 365 Copilot Business Chat ( BizChat ).   The introduction of Custom engine agents enables your organization to create customized experiences using your own AI systems and orchestrators. You can design unique prompts, connect to any LLM, and integrate these custom agents with Microsoft 365 Copilot. After the rollout, users will be able to access these agents, provided they are enabled and deployed in the Microsoft 365 admin center under the Copilot tab.   You can read more about the feature on this page . Eligible users can create agents using Micros...

Microsoft has started to disable Basic Authentication (affecting Teams and Exchange Online)

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 Microsoft is serious about removing the Basic Authentication protocols from their services. The change was announced back in 2019, but has been delayed a couple of times. Earlier this fall Microsoft announced there would be on further delays, and that preparations for the change should be made.

Earlier this week I was notified about the coming change to my tenant through the Admin Message Center. 14 days from now, basic authentication will no longer be available to me: 

"14 days from today we're going to turn off Basic Authentication for POP3, IMAP4, Remote PowerShell, Exchange Web Services, Offline Address Book, MAPI, RPC and Exchange ActiveSync protocol in your tenant, and will also disable SMTP AUTH completely. Note: Based on our telemetry, no users in your tenant are currently using Basic Authentication with those protocols and so we expect there to be no impact to you."

This coming change can have a major impact on many organizations. As a consultant I am engaged in multiple companies facing the challenge of preparing for this change. It might seem trivial, but most organization have over time implemented many services that are using basic authentication without being aware of them. The best way of preparing for this is by starting to go through your sign-in logs in Azure AD and identify any user who use basic Authentication. Some of the things I have noticed are using basic authentication are: Many services reading calendar information (like switchboard integrations), printer services, old mobile devices (often up to date, but wrong configuration), Microsoft Teams Rooms not set up for modern authentication, 3rd party and self developed applications.

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