Microsoft 365 Copilot: New Navigation, Voice, and Context Enhancements Arriving Soon

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Here are three new updates to the user interface of Microsoft Copilot. These releases improve usability, expand interaction options, and streamline how users incorporate work content into prompts. All three of these features were actually announced "a long time ago", and the initial release started almost 6 months ago. But I guess the setup is complicated, as the rollout hasn't completed yet. This only proves the importance of paying attention to the official roadmap and the tenant message center in order to understand when features are being implemented for your organization. Timelines may continue to evolve as deployments progress, and this summary includes the official reference IDs and documentation links for verification. Refreshed Navigation Experience There is a redesigned navigation experience for the Microsoft 365 Copilot app heading your way, delivering a cleaner, more efficient layout. The update flattens the menu structure and groups related components to help...

Autumn summary of news related to Exchange

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Starting this post with two Exchange Online updates. 

Let me begin with a quick user tip: Finding the perfect time for a meeting with participants outside of the company can sometimes be a challenge. I have been using "Find Time" for a long time. But now that add-in is now being replaced by a native scheduling poll feature. Collaboration just got easier!

As many of you probably already know, Microsoft is starting their selective shut down of Basic Authentication on October the 1st (today) 2022. Working with customers I find that many of them have enabled MFA for their users, and these users will not be affected by the change. However, there are a lot of 3.rd party integrations out there, using EWS and other affected services. And these integrations will stop working once basic authentication is shut down.

I wanted to share two easy ways for an organization to figure out if they have such services running or not. 

The easy one requires licenses for conditional access, and use of  log analytics. Simply create a conditional access rule blocking all legacy authentication, and set it to report only. Within a day or two, you can go to the analytics part of conditional access and see how may "fails" there are. The report will identify any user-id being hit by the report only block.

The other method can be performed by filtering the sign-in logs in Azure AD. Head over to the Entra portal (entra.microsoft.com), open "monitoring and health" and select "sign-in logs". Add a filter called "client app", and use the filter to select on  all or any of the legacy protocols, "pro tip: I also add a filter for successful logins, failure attempts can also be password spraying"