Revolutionizing IT administration for small and medium sized businesses
At Ignite 2024, we announced the upcoming general availability of Copilot in the Microsoft 365 admin centers, a set of groundbreaking Copilot features that revolutionizes IT administration by leveraging generative AI to streamline and enhance the Microsoft 365 management experience. Designed to help IT access real-time, contextually-relevant information and enhance productivity and decision-making, we’ve begun by rolling out Copilot to the Microsoft 365 admin center, with Copilot in the specialized admin centers like Teams and SharePoint being added in the coming months. Empowering IT Admins in SMBs generative AI IT administration can pose numerous challenges for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). One of the primary hurdles is the need to manage a wide variety of tasks. With limited resources and smaller teams, IT admins often find themselves juggling multiple responsibilities, from ensuring cybersecurity and managing user access to maintaining hardware and software systems, and staying updated on the latest technological advancements. Microsoft 365 Copilot is already having an incredible impact boosting the productivity of employees in businesses of all sizes, and we’re excited to expand those capabilities to those who also have IT management responsibilities. If your organization has purchased 1 license of Microsoft 365 Copilot, anyone with access to the Microsoft 365 admin center can take advantage of these new AI-powered capabilities, without needing a Microsoft 365 Copilot license assigned to their account. You can access Copilot in the Microsoft 365 admin center by selecting the Copilot icon on the top ribbon. Copilot respects Role-based Access Controls (RBACs), only surfacing information that the user has access to, upholding privacy and security. Here are some of the most powerful ways you can use Microsoft 365 Copilot in the Microsoft 365 admin centers today! Focus on what’s most important in your tenant Microsoft 365 Copilot can quickly get a personalized and concise summary of key insights and trends across all admin areas, such as Service Health, Message Center, Experience Insights, and more all in one place so you can save time jumping from one report to another. Simply ask Copilot to “Recap relevant info from across the admin center”. Copilot checks your tenant status against current service advisories and quickly lets you know whether any of them affect your tenant. It also reviews all the updates from the message center and identifies messages that are most relevant to your tenant so you can immediately focus on what’s most important. Lastly, Copilot surfaces relevant information about your user groups and suggests action items based on recommended actions so you can ensure continuity through the lifecycle of the group and reduce risk of data access loss. Find relevant solutions in an instant Microsoft 365 Copilot taps into the wealth of support and technical articles that have been published to surface support and guidance for IT admins to quickly get help when needed. Following the example above, Copilot can identify service incidents that might be affecting your organization and even provide solutions to guide you on how to take action. For example, you can ask Copilot “How do I restore a deleted user?” or “How do I setup Multi-factor authentication?”. Copilot not only provides you with the steps, but surfacing links to the appropriate setting so you can take action, saving you time navigating the admin center. Optimize your admin workflow Copilot can help create more efficiency in your workflow by providing end-to-end guidance for tasks like deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot to your users by providing steps and guidance, including links to specific configurations where appropriate. Ask Copilot to “Review Copilot user readiness” and Copilot can check that the user has the appropriate device configuration and whether tenant policies are appropriately configured. It surfaces links to the configuration page, saving you time navigating, and also suggests recommended actions that help drive more adoption with your users. Try it out now Copilot in the Microsoft 365 admin center is simply the start. We continue to invest in delivering new skills for Copilot to help admins, and to more surfaces including the specialist admin centers. We invite you to try out these prompts and explore how Copilot can transform your IT administration workflow. Your feedback is invaluable, as it helps us refine and enhance these tools to better meet your needs so we encourage you to use the thumbs up/down button as you explore the feature. For more detailed guidance and to discover additional ways to leverage Copilot in the Microsoft 365 admin centers, please refer to this article.
