Recent Discussions
Copilot, Excel and photos
We have a number of networking devices, all the same type, that we are deploying within an office. To speed up asset management, engineers are putting a label on the back under the MAC and serial numbers then taking a photo so it can be documented later by admin staff. Through Excel I've tried with a single photo and multiple photos to extract the MAC details successfully and put them in to cells at the same time. However, this doesn't tell us which device it is as it doesn't process the photos in any order. Therefore my next step is to be able to capture the label info we have put on and tie this info together with the serial number each time so its all from the same equipment. Is it possible to do this either one photo at a time or across multiple photos? TIAGrounding Changes for Copilot in Outlook
Ever since I've had a cull Copilot licence I've used prompts to summarise emails in my outlook folders. It's always worked well until 1-2 weeks ago when it's returning content outside the selected folder and or only reviewing a few of the emails in the selected folder. I've revised and reverse engineered the prompt but it's still not working and more worryingly it gives a variation every time. Does anyone know why this is happening or the workaround? Ultimately all I want it to do is summarise each email and drop all the emails into a table.
This is a Problem - Quick Response Mode Missing in Copilot
Hi, I noticed Quick Response mode has completely disappeared from Copilot, and have seen many other users report the same issue starting January 2026 on MS Q&A site. I also read that Microsoft is pushing a new Smart Mode, which changes how responses work and may be replacing older models. The Quick Response mode fit my workflow far better than Think Deeper and Smart does. Since it disappeared, and the introduction of Smart Mode, I have constantly run into issues because now the app is making it's own decisions and interpretations of subjects and projects which is extremely frustrating because it's 2 steps forward and 2 steps back. Taking away the ability to choose which mode a user prefers, and leaving it up to the bot, is taking away personal preference and what works for individuals needs. Quick Response was added during the GPT-5 update in 2025, so I don't understand why it suddenly vanished. Can someone please explain what's happening and whether QR is coming back, as this mode is something I need due to limited time and needing to finish projects. Please and thank you.Microsoft 365, Copilot & Copilot Studio News
February News Roundup for Technical and Business Leaders (2026) February 2026 was a significant month for enterprise AI across Microsoft 365, Microsoft Copilot, and Microsoft Copilot Studio. From large-scale enterprise deployments to governance updates and expanded model flexibility, Microsoft continues transitioning from AI experimentation to enterprise AI at scale. Here’s your strategic and technical breakdown of what mattered most this month. https://dellenny.com/microsoft-365-copilot-copilot-studio-news/Common Mistakes Orgs Make When Adopting Agentic AI
Agentic AI is quickly becoming one of the most talked-about innovations in enterprise technology. Unlike traditional automation tools, agentic systems can plan, reason, take initiative, and execute complex multi-step tasks with minimal human intervention. Powered by advances in large language models and autonomous decision frameworks, agentic AI promises to transform how organizations operate. But here’s the hard truth: many organizations rush into adoption without fully understanding what they’re implementing. The result? Wasted budgets, frustrated teams, compliance risks, and AI initiatives that quietly fade away. If your organization is exploring or actively implementing agentic AI, understanding the common pitfalls can save you time, money, and reputation. Below are the most frequent mistakes companies make — and what to do instead. https://dellenny.com/common-mistakes-orgs-make-when-adopting-agentic-ai/Variance Analysis shows “Coming soon” in Excel Finance add‑in
I have installed the Finance add‑in in Excel and can see other features such as reconciliation working correctly. However, the Variance analysis option is still greyed out and shows “Coming soon”. Has anyone been able to access Variance analysis yet? If so, is availability dependent on tenant region, licence type, preview enrolment, or admin configuration? Any insight on expected rollout timing or prerequisites would be appreciated.Optimizing Network and Connectivity for Copilot Performance
In today’s AI-driven workplace, tools like Microsoft Copilot are quickly becoming essential for productivity. Whether you’re drafting documents, analyzing spreadsheets, summarizing meetings, or generating code, Copilot relies heavily on fast, stable network connectivity. Yet many organizations focus on licensing and deployment while overlooking one critical component: network optimization. If Copilot feels slow, inconsistent, or unreliable, the issue is often not the AI itself it’s the network. In this guide, we’ll walk through how to optimize network and connectivity for Copilot performance, explore technical configuration steps, and share practical best practices to ensure your users experience seamless AI assistance. https://dellenny.com/optimizing-network-and-connectivity-for-copilot-performance/
Agents don't work after upgrade off LLM
We have experienced that several of our personal agents no longer provide the same output after the upgrade to the new language model. The agents are now making mistakes and, for example, say that they can no longer complete the task. Has anyone else experienced the same issue?
IME does not work in the app version of "M365 Copilot Chat" (only hiragana can be entered)
Hi,Everyone. Please help me with my problem. Environment Windows Ver : Windows 11 Pro 24H2 M365 Copilot Chat Ver : bizchat.20260210.47.1 Situation For the past few days, IME conversion has not worked and I can only input hiragana. The IME works properly on the web version, so you can input kanji characters as well. Question Is this a known bug? How can I solve this? Thank you, best regards.Data Boundaries and Permissions in an Agentic Copilot World
We’re entering a new era of AI one where copilots don’t just answer questions but take action. They schedule meetings, update CRM records, draft contracts, analyze dashboards, trigger workflows, and even coordinate across tools. These “agentic” copilots move beyond passive assistance into active participation. But as AI systems become more capable and autonomous but a critical question emerges: Where are the data boundaries? And who controls permissions in an agentic copilot world? If your AI can act on your behalf, it must also respect the same guardrails you would. Otherwise, the promise of productivity quickly turns into a governance nightmare. Let’s dig what data boundaries mean in this new landscape and how organizations can think clearly about permissions before scaling AI agents across their systems. https://dellenny.com/data-boundaries-and-permissions-in-an-agentic-copilot-world/What’s new in Copilot Chat quality roadmap — February 2026
We’re building Copilot Chat in the open. Every month we publish a quality roadmap that turns what we learn from customer feedback into improvements that make Copilot Chat’s responses more accurate, complete, relevant, and useful. Features shown here are available at no additional cost to users with a qualifying Microsoft 365 or Office 365 license. February Highlights: 🚀 Discover What’s New: Try the latest quality features today Summarize emails in one click: Open Copilot from Outlook and click the ‘Summarize’ button to instantly summarize the email you’re reading. 🚧 What’s Next: Explore upcoming quality features in development Create higher quality images faster: Create higher quality images faster using the new GPT-Image-1.5 model. (This functionality will provide parity with ChatGPT free.) 📌 Bookmark the monthly Copilot Chat quality roadmap and tell us what you want to see next: https://aka.ms/copilotchatroadmap
Do I need to have a Copilot license to use MCP servers through Frontier?
Do I need to have a Copilot license to use Microsoft-published MCP servers for Word / Teams / Outlook / SharePoint under Microsoft Agent 365 (Frontier)? https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-agent-365/tooling-servers-overview
Copilot Should Allow Structured Outputs from Enterprise Data
Copilot’s enterprise search works well—but once it retrieves emails, chats, or files, it forces all output into fixed paragraph summaries. This stops us from generating structured, actionable documents (matrices, task lists, project summaries, prioritized workflows, etc.) using our own organizational data. This is severely limiting normal business processes. Please consider updating Copilot to allow structured formats when users explicitly request them. It would dramatically improve real-world usability.Designing Safe Agentic Workflows with Microsoft Copilot
Agentic AI is no longer a futuristic concept it’s already reshaping how teams work. Microsoft Copilot has evolved beyond a simple assistant that responds to prompts. Today, it can act as an agent: planning tasks, making decisions, calling tools, and collaborating across systems like Microsoft 365, Power Platform, Azure, and enterprise data sources. But with great autonomy comes great responsibility. Designing safe agentic workflows is critical. Without proper guardrails, Copilot-powered agents can expose sensitive data, take unintended actions, or produce results that undermine trust. In this blog, we’ll explore how to design secure, reliable, and auditable agentic workflows using Microsoft Copilot, with clear architectural principles and hands-on technical steps. Whether you’re a developer, architect, or IT leader, this guide will help you move from experimentation to production safely. https://dellenny.com/designing-safe-agentic-workflows-with-microsoft-copilot/Plan with confidence using the newly refreshed Microsoft 365 roadmap
We know many of you rely on the Microsoft 365 public roadmap as a trusted planning tool. Based on feedback from customers across roles, we’ve refreshed the top of the experience to make it easier to stay informed at a glance. Everything beneath the surface remains fully intact. Your filters, detailed views, and the roadmap API are unchanged, and nothing has been removed. New at the top are curated highlights summarizing: Announcements – a quick visual of the latest product announcements Available Now – top features that are now generally available and ready for your teams to use Coming Soon – top features in development that you can track and stay ahead of Frontier program – experimental features you can try and share feedback on Explore the refreshed roadmap at aka.ms/m365roadmap and stay up to date on the latest Microsoft 365 updates–from core apps to Copilot and agents.Copilot Chat + Outlook: Email Summary Behavior
Sharing my discoveries. Copilot Chat is available to Microsoft 365 work or school accounts. Using Summarize this email in Outlook saves each summary as a Copilot Chat conversation, which can clutter Chat History. There’s no bulk delete; chats must be removed one at a time. This is expected behavior. Using Temporary Chat for one-time summaries helps keep Chat History clean. Impacted users: Outlook + Copilot Chat (no add-on license required) 📹 Video walkthrough and 📝 blog post . If you find this information helpful, please mark it as the best solution to assist others. #traccreations4e-p25 1/28/2026New Diagnostic: Introducing Copilot Connector Checker
Copilot connectors extend Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Search to your external business systems. They bring line of business content—like ServiceNow, Confluence etc data—into Microsoft Graph so it can be safely discovered inside M365 Copilot and Agent experiences while honoring your existing permissions. Content ingested through Copilot connectors is added to Microsoft Graph; this unlocks semantic understanding of your users' prompts in Microsoft 365 Copilot. However, Copilot connectors are not limited to Microsoft 365 Copilot. Copilot connector content powers other Microsoft 365 intelligent experiences like Microsoft Search, Context IQ and Agents What is the Copilot Connector Checker? The Copilot Connector Checker is a lightweight, self‑service tool that helps you quickly validate your third‑party prerequisites before configuring a connector. Think of it as a pre‑flight check for your connector deployment: Fast, guided validation Clear, actionable diagnostics No digging through logs or guessing what might be misconfigured Try it here: https://aka.ms/CopilotConnectorChecker The first release supports the ServiceNow Knowledge Base (KB) connector, with more connectors planned soon. How it works? You can use the tool to confirm that all required ServiceNow KB permissions and settings are correctly configured. It takes just a few steps: Open the Copilot Connector Checker Tool. Select the Authentication Type: Basic / Oauth (Recommended) Enter the required parameters (as shown in the example below) and select “Perform Test.” The tool will automatically validate connectivity, verify credentials, check table-level permissions, provide a clear step-by-step summary of results, and recommend next steps if any issues are found as shown below: Share feedback using the link at the bottom of the tool pageThe Commons for Innovation: A Proposal for a Unified, Public, Cross‑Disciplinary Ecosystem
AI isn’t falling short — it’s being boxed in. If we want it to contribute meaningfully, we need to give it a place where real innovation can grow. Right now, AI is used almost entirely in isolated, one‑on‑one interactions. Individuals ask questions, get answers, and move on. But innovation doesn’t happen in isolation. It happens when different kinds of thinkers can see each other’s work, build on it, and approach problems from multiple angles. Innovation isn’t a straight line from A to B. It’s the whole alphabet in motion. And AI has nowhere to explore that alphabet alongside the people who need it most. Microsoft already has the soil — dozens of communities, idea boards, and discussion spaces — but they function like potted plants. Each product has its own container. Each idea grows alone. The potential is there, but it’s fragmented, hidden, and hard to discover unless you stumble into it by accident. A Commons for Innovation wouldn’t reinvent the wheel. It would refurbish it by connecting these existing spaces into a cohesive, public garden where ideas can grow together instead of apart. A Public Garden of Ideas This ecosystem would bring Microsoft’s scattered communities into one visible, unified environment. Every community would be public — more like a shared garden than a private chat. This allows natural cross‑pollination: environmentalists can see what robotics hobbyists are building educators can learn from accessibility advocates programmers can discover what urban gardeners need materials scientists can browse sustainability challenges No silos. No hidden groups. No barriers to collaboration. What the Platform Could Include Communities organized around real‑world problems: clean water access sustainable materials accessible education renewable energy wildlife rehabilitation assistive robotics urban gardening mental health support tools Each community would offer: a clear problem statement a shared idea board a public discussion space a resource library optional project threads a Copilot‑supported thinking space Anyone could join. Anyone could contribute. No credentials required. Visibility Matters People can’t collaborate in spaces they don’t know exist. Right now, Microsoft’s innovation‑related communities are valuable but scattered — hidden courtyards instead of a connected landscape. A Commons for Innovation would give users a clear entry point and a unified map of the ecosystem. A Single Umbrella for Innovation Microsoft already hosts a space for innovative ideas, but it sits apart from the rest of the community structure. A Commons for Innovation could serve as the umbrella that brings these spaces together, making it easier for users to find, explore, and contribute to the work happening across disciplines. A Showcase Garden for Human + AI Creativity Microsoft users are already creating extraordinary things with Copilot — websites, 3D‑printed tools, comics, children’s books, games, music, merch, and entire fictional universes. But there is no central place to share these creations. A Showcase Garden would give users a public space to display what they’ve built, inspire others, and demonstrate the true range of what AI‑supported creativity can look like. This isn’t just a gallery — it’s a living advertisement for what’s possible when people and AI collaborate across disciplines. As one example, in my own collaboration with Copilot, we’ve created: a full website a 3D‑printed medical splint a merch line comics and illustrated characters a satirical news network children’s books videogame concepts music video storyboards lore, badges, and mythologies creative problem‑solving tools narrative worlds and teaching frameworks None of these projects fit neatly into a single product forum. Yet they all grew from the same seed: a human and an AI exploring ideas across disciplines. A Showcase Garden would let anyone do the same — and let Microsoft highlight the full spectrum of what Copilot can actually do. The Gardeners Already Exist Microsoft already has passionate contributors — Copilot Champs, MVPs, Insiders — but they’re scattered across product‑specific spaces. These community stewards are helping, teaching, and supporting users every day, but only within isolated pots. A Commons for Innovation would give them a unified environment where their expertise can support cross‑disciplinary collaboration, enabling ideas to grow across the entire garden rather than in separate containers. The Role of Copilot Copilot wouldn’t connect private groups or share information between users. Instead, it would act as a facilitator inside each public community: helping users articulate ideas clearly translating concepts across disciplines offering perspectives from fields users may not think to explore keeping categories organized amplifying creativity and broadening problem‑solving approaches This stays fully within existing safety and privacy boundaries while unlocking the collaborative potential of AI. Why Microsoft Is the Right Steward Microsoft already provides the infrastructure, research culture, and AI tools. A Commons for Innovation would allow Microsoft to: support world‑improving work foster interdisciplinary collaboration showcase responsible AI use become the steward of a global innovation ecosystem Microsoft wouldn’t need to own the ideas — the credit comes from building the environment where those ideas can grow. The Opportunity Right now, people who want to make things better — environmentalists, nonprofit innovators, educators, hobbyists, open‑source builders — are scattered across the internet. They’re working in silos, often reinventing the wheel or missing the chance to collaborate with someone who has the missing piece. A Commons for Innovation would give them a shared garden — a place where ideas can grow, cross‑pollinate, and evolve into solutions that matter. If we want AI to help build what hasn’t been built, we need to create the soil where those ideas can take root.
Custom Engine Agent latency 5-7 seconds before webhook is called
We have a Teams bot that we recently extended with Microsoft 365 Copilot support using the copilotAgents.customEngineAgents manifest configuration. When users send messages to our agent through the Copilot sidebar, there's a consistent 5-7 second delay between when the user sends the message and when our Bot Framework webhook receives the activity. Some extra notes: When users message the same bot directly in Teams (not through Copilot), messages arrive immediately with no delay When we send messages from our backend to Copilot (using the serviceUrl for proactive messaging), they arrive immediately with no delay So the latency only occurs in one direction: Copilot → our webhook. Manifest Configuration: { "$schema": "https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/json-schemas/teams/v1.17/MicrosoftTeams.schema.json", "manifestVersion": "1.21", "version": "1.1.1", "bots": [ { "botId": "<client_id>", "scopes": ["personal", "team", "groupChat"], "isNotificationOnly": false, "supportsCalling": false, "supportsVideo": false } ], "copilotAgents": { "customEngineAgents": [ { "type": "bot", "id": "<client_id>" } ] } } Environment: Azure Bot Service (not Copilot Studio) Bot region: Global Messaging endpoint hosted in AWS us-east-1 Questions: Is this delay expected behavior for Custom Engine Agents? Is there any configuration to reduce this latency? Are there plans to optimize Custom Engine Agent message routing? This latency significantly impacts user experience - users expect near-instant responses when chatting with an agent.
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