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

on
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...

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

on

 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.

Stay up to date, and get Microsoft's recommendations here.