Copilot in Outlook: Meeting Preparation Is About to Get Smarter

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Currently, the “Prepare for meetings with Copilot” feature requires at least three participants. Starting mid-October, this is changing. Copilot will soon support all meetings, including 1:1s. The rollout will begin in mid-October and is expected to complete by November 2025 according to the message center. With this update, you’ll also see new real-time insights in the Outlook meeting event form, summarizing relevant context, tasks, documents, and other resources. Plus, you’ll be able to chat with Copilot to confirm action items or better understand meeting goals. The more context Copilot has, the better it works. Meeting series with related emails, shared documents, Teams chats, and previous Copilot transcriptions deliver the richest experience. If your organization limits Copilot to in-meeting use only and deletes content afterward, you’ll miss out on much of this value. Here is a relevant " how to " guide for users.

Microsoft Teams: One-Way Lobby Chat

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Being able to communicate with meeting participants in the lobby has been a long awaited feature. And finally it seems it is on it's way. Coming in the June-July timeframe, the one-way chat to users in the lobby is being released to Teams. 

Once this feature is released, both Organizers and co-organizers of a meeting will see a new tab in the chat window. The new tab will be named Lobby, and is where messages can be sent to attendees currently in the lobby. The waiting attendees can not reply, and the message is not sticky. Meaning it will not be available to someone who enters after the message has been sent.

As with most features, also this can be controlled through the global meeting policies. The new setting will be called "Organizers can chat with lobby participants" and can be set to "On for everyone" or "On for everyone but anonymous users".

As an organizer of many meetings and user groups calls, I am really looking forward to this feature. It is always great to be able to acknowledge that you are aware of their presence in the lobby, and at what time you will let them in. 

This feature is related to the Roadmap ID 480716

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