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Copilot for Microsoft 365 is now available for all businesses, large and small by John Callaham In November 2023, Microsoft officially launched Copilot for Microsoft 365 Enterprise customers, specifically for large companies that had signed up for Microsoft 365 E3 and E5 enterprise plans. The cost to access the Copilot generative AI features was set up as $30 a month per person. Today, Microsoft announced an expansion of that effort. Copilot for Microsoft 365 is now available for all businesses, both big and small. Now, customers with Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Business Standard plans can add Copilot and all of its features and uses. Like the Microsoft 365 Enterprise plans, the smaller Business Premium and Business Standard plans are $30 a month per person. Not only is the service expanding to more businesses, but Microsoft is also ditching the previous 300-seat minimum to get Copilot added to a Microsoft 365 business subscription. Now, there is no minimal seat amount needed, which means a single person who runs a business on their own can add Copilot with just one seat required. If any customers are still on the older Office 365 E3 and E5 plans, they can also access Copilot for the first time without the need to have a Microsoft 365 account. Finally, any commercial business customers can go through the many different Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider partners to subscribe to Copilot for Microsoft 365. Microsoft also offered up an update on Copilot for Microsoft 365 since it launched in November. Since it became generally available in late 2023, the list of companies that use the service has expanded to include Visa, BP, Honda, Pfizer, Accenture, KPMG, and PwC. These new announcements come on the same day as Microsoft's reveal of Copilot Pro. It will give individuals more features and more powerful access to the Copilot AI compared to the current free version for the cost of $20 a month.

Microsoft adds new work and school OneDrive features to help with syncing up file content by John Callaham Microsoft 365 Business and Education customers who sign in with an Entra ID can access the OneDrive cloud file storage service for uploading and saving files and sharing those files with others. Today, Microsoft announced a number of new and specific features for OneDrive Sync, which keeps your PC files synced up with your cloud-saved files. In a blog post, Microsoft has revealed that it has added some new protection against someone deleting a file on OneDrive that you might still need. It states: Now, when you or a coworker deletes a shared file, you will see a new confirmation dialog letting you know that if you delete the shared file, it will be deleted for ALL users. No more accidental deletions! Also, if you create a shortcut to a shared file or folder, and then decide to delete it, only the shortcut gets deleted, and the actual file or folder remains for others to access. There's also been a change to the File Explorer feature. The Home page now shows your Recommended, Recent, and Favorites files immediately. Also, Microsoft announced an upcoming feature, shown above, called a Details panel. It will offer info on a specific file without the need to actually open it, like a thumbnail, its current shared status, and more. The Details panel will be added in the coming months. Microsoft has also made some changes to the Sync Settings in OneDrive. It states: We’ve updated and simplified the Sync Settings menu so that the most relevant settings are on the front page, and less utilized settings are tucked away in the Advanced Settings or on secondary pages. If you are in a policy-controlled environment, many settings won’t be available for you to edit, but you can transparently see the details regarding your organizations’ policies. Finally, OneDrive will add a feature in December that will allow people to open any file on the desktop and make changes, and those changes will automatically be uploaded to the version of the file on OneDrive.

Microsoft 365 Copilot pricing will be $30 a month per user for commercial users by John Callaham In March, Microsoft 365 Copilot was officially announced. The new addition to the company's online productivity apps service was designed to help users by, for example, writing drafts of documents in Word, creating spreadsheets in Excel with new text prompts, and assisting with creating PowerPoint presentations. Microsoft has been slow to offer this new feature since then. It announced in May that had a Microsoft 365 Copilot Early Access program for 600 business customers. While we still don't have a specific launch date for general availability, today as part of Microsoft Inspire 2023, it did reveal the pricing for the service when it does launch publicly. Microsoft stated: Microsoft 365 Copilot will be available for commercial customers for $30 per user per month for Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium customers when broadly available. Microsoft also offered a quick summary of the service in its press release: Copilot puts thousands of skills at your command and can reason over all your content and context to take on any task. It's grounded in your business data in the Microsoft Graph — that’s all your emails, calendar, chats, documents and more. So, Copilot can generate an update from the morning’s meetings, emails and chats to send to the team; get you up to speed on project developments from the last week; or create a SWOT analysis from internal files and data from the web. Earlier this year, Microsoft released its annual Work Trends survey report. It claims that many of the employees who were surveyed believe that, instead of taking their jobs, generative AI features like the ones in Microsoft 365 Copilot will actually help them in their tasks. It will be interesting to see if that attitude holds when Microsoft 365 Copilot officially launches to the masses sometime later this year.

Microsoft will soon begin throttling Exchange mailboxes by Usama Jawad Microsoft's proprietary email hosting service Exchange Online - typically utilized by Outlook - has had an upper limit for emails received by "hot recipients" for quite some time. This term encompasses users who receive over 3,600 messages in their mailbox per hour. So far, this has been a soft-limit that Microsoft has not really enforced, but starting from April, this situation will change. Microsoft has stated that in order to optimize email flow across mailboxes and to ensure capacity across the Exchange services, it will begin enforcing its existing limit of being able to receive 3,600 messages per hour. The company says that when tenants and mailboxes go beyond this limit, services for other customers are disrupted as well, causing delays in emails being received due to network resources being utilized by "hot recipients". The Redmond tech giant says that once it begins to throttle tenants, emails sent to full mailboxes will receive a non-delivery report. The threshold will be automatically reset every hour. According to the dedicated webpage, this limit applies to all of the following subscriptions: Microsoft 365 Business Basic Microsoft 365 Business Standard Office Office 365 Enterprise E1 Office 365 Enterprise E3 Office 365 Enterprise E5 Office 365 Enterprise F3 As Microsoft begins to enforce this limit starting in April 2021, it has encouraged admins to keep an eye on activity across mailboxes. The firm will start with a higher threshold and keep lowering it incrementally until it reaches the official limit of 3,600 messages per hour so organizations have time to adapt to the change. Admins will also receive new insights and reports about the process in the Exchange Admin Center, allowing them to track mailboxes going over the threshold. Microsoft does not expect a significant number of mailboxes to be affected by this change.

Microsoft to introduce a 'Teams Pro' plan for added webinar capabilities for business users by Abhay Venkatesh Microsoft is set to introduce a new service plan for commercial Teams users called ‘Teams Pro’ that adds capabilities for those who want to use the collaboration tool for webinars. The company announced the introduction of the plan on the Microsoft 365 Message Center (as spotted by Petri), which is expected to roll out starting mid-March at the tenant level. The Teams Pro plan brings with it not just additional webinar capabilities – an announcement for which could be coming soon –, but also meeting intelligence. While it is not clear what the features entail apart from the current webinar capabilities, the mention of meeting intelligence might hint at features such as real-time speaker attributed live transcription tailored for webinars. It could also include Outlook’s meeting insights-like feature for summarizing content or serving quick files depending on the topics. For now, it is anybody’s guess what these meeting intelligence features are. As for availability, the new service plan will be available to Microsoft 365 E5, E3, A5, A3, Business Basic, Business Standard, and Office 365 licence holders. However, it is also not clear if the service plan will automatically be part of the subscription or if there will be additional costs associated with enabling the additional capabilities. The addition of a Teams Pro plan for improved webinar capabilities will further expand the usability of the Redmond giant’s collaboration platform, pitting it against the likes of Go To Webinar and Adobe Connect. The added integration with the firm suite of productivity apps and cloud storage offerings like OneDrive and SharePoint could also prove to make it a viable alternative for users already invested in the company’s services.

Microsoft offers 25% discount on Microsoft 365 Business Premium for SMBs by João Carrasqueira This week is Thanksgiving week in the United States, which means it's also Black Friday week, with discounts starting to pop up across different retailers for various products. What some might not know is that it's also Small Business Saturday week, and that comes with its own discounts, at least from Microsoft. The Redmond company has announced that, starting today and until November 30, small and medium-sized business (SMBs) can get a 25% discount on Microsoft 365 Business Premium for the first 25 seats. This plan is a rebranding of Microsoft 365 Business - the name change happened back in April - and it usually costs $20 per user per month on an annual commitment. With the discount, it comes down to $15. Microsoft 365 Business Premium is Microsoft's most complete package for businesses, including Intune and Azure Information Protection. These two things are the only major differences between Business Premium and Business Standard, with both including the major desktop Office apps, Teams, Exchange, OneDrive, and SharePoint. If you're interested, you can compare all Microsoft 365 Business plans here. The deal is only available in the United States, but on the bright side, you can get the discount even if you need more than 25 seats - but only those 25 will be discounted.

Microsoft Lists integration in Teams is now generally available for businesses by Abhay Venkatesh Microsoft announced Lists, a project management and organization tool, back during Build conference this year. The app competes with the likes of Trello and comes in the form of a web app and mobile applications. The web app is called ‘Lists home’ and began rolling out to users in July. The tool is a more robust task management offering and helps businesses track not just projects, but also a host of other variables such as issues, patients, and more. The Redmond giant today announced that Lists in Teams is now generally available. The integration with Teams brings the ability to directly create lists from the firm’s collaboration app. The tool offers eight standard templates and three industry specific ones – Patients, Loans, and Incidents. It also lets them create lists from other sources such as Excel tables. Users can also add existing lists as new tabs in Teams. The app also allows users to start conversations in channels on individual Lists items. This allows for collaboration within each list, making it easy to track feedback or change requests for each item. Since the conversations are considered channel messages, it supports all rich text options and mentions. Lists integration with Teams also works on the Teams Android and iOS apps. A dedicated Lists app for mobile platforms is expected to be released by the end of the year. However, for Microsoft 365 business customers, the integration into the Teams app brings a lot of the service’s functionality – with the app letting users create new lists and manage tasks right from Teams. While Lists in Teams is automatically enabled by default, Microsoft has also provided support documentation for admins to help enable or disable the integration.

Windows Server 2019 Essentials will be the last such edition for small businesses by Steven Parker Microsoft has announced that the Windows Server 2019 Essentials SKU from the Server family will be the last such edition to cater to small businesses of 25 users and under, or 50 devices. The company said that it had "collaborated with the MVP community and other influencers" and came to the decision to release one final version of on-premises server for small businesses, after which the company advises small businesses to make use of Microsoft 365, which offers Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security. Microsoft further points out that customers that are currently using Windows Server 2016 Essentials will be supported according to Long Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) servicing timeline, this would also apply to those that update to the 2019 edition. Windows Server 2019 Essentials will offer the same features as that from the 2016 edition, but also includes "new hardware support and features and improvements like Windows Server 2019 Standard, including Storage Migration Services, System Insights, and many more." Microsoft also states that the Essentials Experience role has been dropped from the update, the company says that the Windows Admin Center replaces it. Windows Server 2019 Essentials will be released alongside the other Windows Server 2019 editions "later this year"; right now Server 2019 is still in preview, with the latest 17744 build being made available just over a week ago with Hyper-V improvements the highlight of that release.

Microsoft is adding new security features to Microsoft 365 Business by Rich Woods Microsoft is announcing new security features for its Microsoft 365 Business plans today, saying that it conducted a survey and found that 71% of small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) feel vulnerable to a cyberattack. It said that 87% have already been breached, and most worryingly, 60% of SMBs that experience such a breach go out of business within six months. The company estimates that it costs an average of $140,000 to recover from such an event, in order to stay in business. Microsoft says that 41% of SMBs can remotely remove data from a stolen device, and half use email encryption. These are things that the firm aims to fix with its announcements for Microsoft 365 Business today. One thing that Microsoft is aiming to do here is protect users from phishing emails. After all, the end user is usually the most vulnerable point in any organization. The company says it will be using machine learning to detect phishing emails, and it will automatically check links to make sure that they're safe. You'll also be able to make sure that your emails can't be forwarded to other users. Businesses will be able to set data loss prevention policies as well, which helps to "identify, monitor, and protect sensitive information". For example, users will be able to protect a sensitive file by not allowing users to save it to their personal cloud storage, or remove it from the company's systems. Email archiving is another new feature that will be included, which will obviously help in the preservation of data, and businesses will be able to enforce BitLocker device encryption on all of their devices. If some of this sounds familiar, that's because it is. Microsoft is already offering this stuff in its M365 Enterprise plans, and that was announced at Ignite last September. The company saw the importance of small businesses after conducting the study mentioned above, but it was also important to introduce the features in a way that's not too hard to implement for a company that doesn't have a large IT department.