Announcing general availability of organizational messages in the Microsoft 365 admin center
This past May, we released organizational messages in the Microsoft 365 admin center to public preview. Since then, we have added key capabilities based on customer feedback, like the ability to deliver messages in Windows 10. Today, at Ignite 2024 in Chicago, we are excited to announce that organizational messages is now generally available to commercial customers worldwide. Organizational messages enhances communication by empowering administrators, comms professionals, and organizational leaders to reach people in their organizations through the Microsoft products they use every day, like the Teams app and Windows interfaces. By bringing native, branded, and customized messages to enterprises, this feature provides an engagement platform that not only allows the enterprises to use their own voice, but also lets them leverage powerful locations, like anchored popups (“Taskbar”) within the Windows 10 and 11 interfaces to communicate with their users. Organizational messages enables enterprises to control such powerful short-form communications, giving them the opportunities to drive product adoption, urgent push notifications about service health, and other initiatives that matter to their organizations. Organizational messages provides a centralized experience for creating, managing and reviewing your messages. Here are some of the key features: Central management: View template-based organizational messages created from various admin experiences like Usage reports, Adoption Score or Advanced Deployment Guides, all from a single location within the Microsoft 365 admin center. Message creation: Users with an organizational messages writer role can create fully customized messages or customize template-based messages (message text or destination URLs) to suit your organization’s voice and message purpose.* Product locations: Choose from several Windows 10 and 11 locations or a Teams location to engage with your users in their flow of work. Message scheduling and urgent messages: Schedule any messages for delivery to your users during specific date ranges. Some Windows 10 and 11 interfaces can be programmed for urgent delivery. Flexible targeting: Focus messages to the right recipients using your existing user groups or more advanced attributes, such as department or location.* Approval workflow: Users with an organizational messages approver role can ensure that every custom message is reviewed and approved before being sent out. Message activity reporting: Track the effectiveness of your messages with detailed reporting to gauge the impact of your employee outreach. We believe that organizational messages will significantly enhance your ability to communicate with your organization. We look forward to seeing how you use this new feature to keep people in your organization informed and engaged. Learn more about organizational messages and let us know how you are using it in your organization. *Note: Availability of certain features, such as fully custom messages and Entra attribute-based targeting, depends on an enterprise’s licenses. Learn more about license requirements in the documentation here. Continue the conversation by joining us in the Microsoft 365 Tech Community! Whether you have product questions or just want to stay informed with the latest updates on new releases, tools, and blogs, Microsoft 365 Tech Community is your go-to resource to stay connected!Loop governance, lifecycle, manageability for IT Admins – Nov 2024
Dive into our latest update on Loop governance, lifecycle, and manageability tailored just IT admins! Discover how Loop's seamless integration with Microsoft 365 can transform your team's productivity with real-time co-authoring, versatile components, and enhanced security features. From Copilot Pages to comprehensive manageability roadmap items, this blog has everything you need to confidently pilot and fully enable Loop in your organization.
Ignite 2024 - What's new for Microsoft 365 and Copilot admins
Microsoft Ignite 2024 reaffirms that we're collectively experiencing an accelerated pace of technology innovation, rapid change, and unprecedented opportunities in the AI era - and this is just the beginning. Microsoft 365 Copilot offers organizations unparalleled benefits, from enhancing productivity and collaboration through Copilot experiences in Microsoft 365 apps, to streamlining workflows through function-specific agents. As we stand at the forefront of AI transformation, your role as IT leaders, admins, and AI champions has never been more crucial in driving secure administration, and successful adoption and impact with Microsoft 365 Copilot. Let's take a look at the announcements and product experiences we're building to help you make your Microsoft 365 Copilot journey successful. Supporting Copilot and AI administration with the new AI administrator role As emerging IT roles continue to take shape in light of your AI investments, we remain committed to helping you maintain security and control of your IT operations by ensuring the right people have the right levels of administrative access. You have been clear that AI administration will require a dedicated role to manage and oversee AI and Copilot administration in your organization. We've announced the availability of a new role called AI administrator scoped for administration of Microsoft 365 Copilot and enterprise AI services on Microsoft 365. Now, admin users assigned with the AI administrator role can efficiently administer Copilot without the vast permissions in the Global admin role. Transform your administrative experience with Copilot in Microsoft 365 admin centers Today, we are pleased to announce that Copilot in Microsoft 365 admin centers is targeted for general availability in January 2025. 1 Copilot skills and capabilities transform the IT admin experience by leveraging AI to optimize routine tasks, generate insights that enable better decision-making, and ensuring that IT professionals can understand and maximize the value of their Microsoft 365 subscriptions. Copilot will be available in the Microsoft 365 admin center, Teams admin center, and SharePoint admin center, as well as accessible directly from the Copilot business chat experience. Below, we explore the key features of Microsoft 365 Copilot that make it an indispensable tool for modern IT administration. Optimize routine tasks - Leverage natural language prompts to intelligently onboard new users, receive personalized summaries of trends and insights across key administrative areas, and simplified creation of PowerShell scripts using Copilot’s seamless integration and the context of your tenant and role. Generate insights faster - From licensing optimization across subscription types and workloads to troubleshooting specific issues like call quality in Teams, Copilot works across a broad range of data and key surface areas, bringing accessible and actionable insights into the admin center flow of work. Administrators and adoption specialists can quickly access and analyze critical data using Microsoft 365 Copilot, enhancing productivity and decision-making. Get More Out of Microsoft 365 - Microsoft 365 Copilot helps IT admins and adoption specialists understand the features and capabilities of their Microsoft 365 subscriptions, so you can unlock new ways of working both for the users of your organization and as an IT team. Organizations that have purchased any number of Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses for their tenant can take advantage of these new Microsoft 365 Copilot-powered administration capabilities to streamline and enhance the Microsoft 365 management experience. All users in your organization with an admin role assigned will be able to use Microsoft 365 Copilot in the admin center. Microsoft 365 Copilot respects role-based access controls (RBAC) within the admin center, only surfacing information and controls that the particular admin has access to. Enhancing Copilot administration with improvements to the Copilot admin page Last year, we introduced a dedicated page in the Microsoft 365 admin center for Copilot administration. We're continuing to invest in this experience to simplify and streamline Copilot administration by bringing forward important settings, insights, resources and actions into the centralized Copilot admin experience. Over the coming weeks, you will see a newly designed page organized by four key sections - Overview, Health, Discover and Settings. The Overview section will first offer a set of dynamic interactive recommended actions helping you streamline key Copilot admin workstreams like assigning licenses or driving awareness and adoption, and sharing key resources to users in your organization. For example, a new Copilot license assignment flow can help maximize Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption by helping you prioritize license assignment for your initial rollout to people in your organization who consistently use Microsoft 365 apps. 2 Success metrics and insights To help you track the Copilot success metrics that matter most, we're bringing forward key metrics that align to deployment success. These metrics help you quickly assess progress towards four objectives: maximizing license utilization, making Copilot a daily habit, demonstrating business impact, and improving user satisfaction. Once you’ve assigned Copilot licenses to users in your organization, it's important to first track simple license utilization and ensure that users are informed and empowered to leverage Copilot capabilities across Microsoft 365 apps. Starting with the Active users rate, this is the percentage of Copilot-enabled users who have used Copilot at least once over the past month. As you review each metric, you will see relevant insights and convenient links out to the respective admin center surfaces to take a closer look. For example, here you can view the total enabled and active users, the active user rate, an adoption chart showing enabled and active users for each Microsoft 365 app, and a link out to the Microsoft 365 Copilot usage report to view more usage insights. Similarly, we're including a view of Copilot assigned and available licenses with a link out to the license management page as you may need to assign additional licenses or make license assignment adjustments. Next, beyond usage, you will be able to view the AI assistance score, which helps you measure the extent to which users in your organization are making Microsoft 365 Copilot a daily habit. Part of the Microsoft 365 admin center Adoption Score suite of reports, AI assistance score is a new measure based on the number of days users in your organization are using Copilot over the past month. To get a score of 100, all licensed users must use Microsoft 365 Copilot for more than half of the working days over the past month. Below the AI assistance score metric, you will be able to view a time series to review how your score is tracking over time along with a peer benchmark to see how your organization compares with similar sized organizations in your industry. Here, we will also be surfacing insights to quickly gauge the most-used Copilot features that contribute to your score. Thirdly, you can see an estimate of the total hours people in your organization have been assisted by Copilot over the past 28 days, with a time series of this metric and relevant features. This metric can be used to demonstrate Copilot business impact and is made available via the Copilot Dashboard in Viva Insights, which is enabled by default for Global admins. Learn more about the Copilot assisted hours metric here. Connect to the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard for Microsoft 365 customers | Microsoft Learn. And lastly, to help assess user satisfaction with Copilot across the various Microsoft 365 products, we're planning to surface the percentage promoters metric based on in-app NPS surveys. Below, you can view more information on NPS trends over time, as well as Copilot help article views, along with quick links to dig into more detail in Product Feedback and Experience insights. Assess service health insights and change communications Moving to the Health section of the Copilot page, here you can review important information about the health of your environment and the status of the Microsoft 365 Copilot service. You can see key health indicators about the Copilot users in your organization, which inform you how well people are keeping up with Microsoft 365 app updates and how many of their devices are sending diagnostic data so that any Copilot reliability and performance issues can be detected and resolved. The Health section also gives you a view of upcoming Copilot-related changes from the message center and shows any active Copilot service health issues, to ensure you are informed about any developments in those areas. Explore Copilot capabilities, prepare for broader rollout, and review key resources In the Discover section of the Copilot page, we're surfacing resources to help you further explore Copilot capabilities, expand your rollout by understanding the number of users who are eligible for Copilot, and a set of key Copilot resources curated specifically for AI admins in your organization. Configure Copilot with a growing set of controls Based on customer feedback and as more options become available, we are continuing to build out the Settings section as your central place to manage Microsoft 365 Copilot configuration options. The Settings section of the Copilot page enables you to directly change Microsoft 365 Copilot settings and otherwise points you to the relevant admin centers and documentation to help you efficiently address options and settings to best suit the needs of your organization. Enhancements to usage and adoption reporting Understanding usage of Copilot with enterprise data protection Microsoft Copilot with enterprise data protection is available at no extra cost for users signed into their Entra account. Many of you have been eagerly anticipating a report to understand Copilot usage in your organization. We're excited to announce the availability of a new stand-alone report for Microsoft Copilot with enterprise data protection. Now, you’ll have visibility into the number of Microsoft Copilot active users, average daily active users, as well as totals and trends for the number of active users by app entry point. 3 Assessing usage of Microsoft 365 Copilot, agents, and connectors Not only is Microsoft 365 Copilot quickly proliferating across more Microsoft 365 apps, extensibility scenarios like declarative or custom engine agents as well as Microsoft Graph or Power Platform connectors are becoming an increasingly important part of enterprise AI transformation. We're continuing to enhance the Microsoft 365 Copilot usage report to surface more usage metrics that inform your licensing and adoption strategy decisions. In addition to Microsoft 365 Copilot enabled users, active users and the active user rate, we're expanding this set of top-line user metrics to include active agent and connector users. Below, in the Adoption by app chart, you will see additional apps including Microsoft Edge, Microsoft 365 App, and more. Secondly, to help you better understand how users in your organization are using Business Chat, we've included a dedicated chart for Business Chat adoption, displaying enabled and active users with breakdown by Business Chat (web) and Business Chat (work). Additionally, as IT and other functions are building and rolling out agents and connectors to expand the capabilities of Microsoft Copilot, we will be introducing a dedicated chart for active users of agents and connectors, showing summary and trend views. 4 To provide more visibility into agent and connector activity, you will be able to track active agents and connectors with segmentation by the organization that built them, namely: your organization, Microsoft, or Microsoft partners. Additionally, you will be able to view agent and connector details such as App or Connector ID, Name, Publisher, Active users and the Last activity date. Driving Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption To help accelerate your digital transformation, Adoption Score offers a set of insights across both People Experiences and Technology Experiences. People Experiences covers how people are using Microsoft 365 to drive better communication, meetings, collaboration, teamwork and mobility. Technology Experiences, on the other hand, covers how technology is an enabler of productivity in your organization. As you saw in the Copilot admin page above, the AI assistance score represents the extent to which users in your organization are making Microsoft 365 Copilot a daily habit. In addition to this improved scoring model and peer benchmarking, the AI assistance report offers a deeper dive into the usage patterns that impact your score including a chart summarizing the count of users by number of days with Microsoft 365 use, and detailed feature-level user counts across Microsoft 365 Copilot capabilities.5 Additionally, to help drive adoption of Microsoft 365 Copilot and improve your score you will be able to initiate organizational messages right from this page to reach users through surfaces like Windows and Microsoft Teams with short form adoption communications and resources. For example, you can initiate a message to users encouraging them to use Copilot in Teams. The message authoring experience allows you to choose from three pre-built message options, exclude sensitive groups, and set the timeframe for the message. After the message is scheduled, you can view results (e.g. number of impressions and clicks) by navigating to the full organizational messages experience, which is now generally available within the Microsoft 365 admin center. Communicating with users in their flow of work Communication with your users plays an important role in successful product adoption. As customers have started to use organizational messages throughout the Microsoft 365 admin center, you've been asking for a way to create and manage these messages in a centralized way. This past May, we shipped this centralized experience to public preview. For those who participated in the preview, your feedback and suggestions have been invaluable in helping us refine the experience over the past several months. We're excited to share that organizational messages in the Microsoft 365 admin center is now generally available, allowing commercial customers world-wide to create fully customized or premade messages and review their team’s messages in a single experience. Learn more about the GA announcement here. Conclusion By empowering your organization to leverage the power of AI through effective administration and adoption efforts, you are not only ensuring secure integration and optimal performance but also paving the way for a future where AI-driven work activities become the norm. Your expertise and dedication are key to unlocking the full potential of Microsoft 365 Copilot, making you an integral part of this exciting journey towards a smarter, more efficient workplace. We look forward to innovating with you, to push the boundaries of what's possible in the AI era. To those of you joining us at Ignite 2024, whether digitally or in-person, we thank you and look forward to your continued partnership as we look forward to another formative year in the AI era. Continue the conversation by joining us in the Microsoft 365 Tech Community! Whether you have product questions or just want to stay informed with the latest updates on new releases, tools, and blogs, Microsoft 365 Tech Community is your go-to resource to stay connected! Footnotes The January 2025 GA release of Microsoft 365 Copilot for admins will support the Microsoft 365 admin center. Support for additional Microsoft admin centers will follow later in the year. Admins will have the ability to enable or disable this feature for use in their organization. We will provide more details on this setting via the message center and Learn page documentation in the coming weeks. Upon initial release, the Microsoft Copilot with enterprise data protection usage report will be limited to usage data for Microsoft 365 users using Copilot in Edge and the Microsoft 365 App. As we continue to improve this report, Microsoft Copilot usage data for all Entra users will be added to the report as well as Microsoft Copilot in additional surfaces such as Teams and Outlook. The initial release of this update will be limited to usage of agents built by your organization via Copilot Studio (including agent builder) and Teams Toolkit. In the coming months we will deliver information on the usage of other agent types (e.g., agents built by Microsoft and Microsoft Partners) as well as usage of connectors. As of this post, AI assistance score is in Public Preview and is targeted for general availability release in CY 2025 Q1. The general availability release will not initially include Group Level Aggregates (the ability to filter metrics by Entra attributes such as Department and Country) but this capability will be added over time.
