M365 is Changing: Here’s What It Means for You

Mitch: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Make Others Successful, a podcast where we share insights, stories, and strategies about building a better workplace and getting the most out of your Microsoft tools. We have four of us today. We're all kinda gonna tackle the topic of Microsoft and apps and where things are and what's coming out, and we each kind of picked a couple topics that we want to highlight and and talk about. But before we dig into those specific ones, we want to do a little bit of a general overview of where is Microsoft at, what's like our feelings going on right now, are we excited, are we sad, are we hopeful, and kind of maybe just some high level, like, where does the ecosystem stand in our mind right now?

Because a lot of our podcast like our episodes talk about concepts and strategies and we don't always get technical in the tools, but we wanted to zoom out and say, okay, let's talk about Microsoft and those tools and and where they're at and dig into a few specifics that we thought are worth mentioning. Let's do intros quick to say hello to everybody. Matt, Dressel back from Japan.

Matt D.: Yep. Yep. I'm back in The United States again after being out for two weeks.

Mitch: My name's Mitch. I'm I am I have the privilege of being partners with these guys here.

Mike: Hi. I'm Mike. I'm kinda in charge of the apps and automation side here at Bulb.

Mitch: Do have an update on beekeeping for us? I I mean, I don't

Mike: know if it's that big of an update, really.

Mitch: I mean, you shared it with us.

Mike: I split a hive last night, so that was kinda cool.

Mitch: Split a hive because why did you split a hive?

Mike: Because it was apparently queenless. Yeah. And they were trying to build a new queen, so I took advantage of it and we'll see if I can turn turn one failing hive into two successful ones.

Mitch: Okay. We're gonna add honey to our storefront here soon.

Cam: Make bees.

Mike: I just like giving

Mitch: it away. I

Mike: just give it away.

Mitch: Okay. Last but not least, Cam.

Cam: I'm Cam. I'm a communication collaboration specialist here at Bulb.

Matt D.: Is this the first time you've been on the podcast? Two. This is my second one. Okay.

Mitch: I figured we'd give him around two. Yeah. Because, yeah, he's been digging into a lot of these updates. We've had him sorting through a lot of the Microsoft updates and figuring out what's worth talking about and what's not. So let's do Matt, this is going to be free form.

I'm going to give you just a general question. I just want whatever comes to your mind. Okay? What do we think about Microsoft right now in the state of the Microsoft three sixty five suite of tools?

Mike: Glad you asked him, not me. Yeah.

Matt D.: They are focusing a lot on Copilot, as I think everybody is aware of, specifically agents, specifically some new things. We're gonna get into some details on that. My feelings about it, I kind of wish they would focus on making some of their core tools better. You know, I think there's some long standing things that we have had issues with, that our customers have issues with, that are big points of concern that they aren't necessarily addressing. So I think some of the new stuff's really cool.

I think, like, there's some interesting stuff they're doing. I think it's positive in that regard, but I think it's at the expense a little bit of some addressing some some long standing issues.

Mitch: On that topic of, like, clear, it's copilot everything all the time. What's your perspective on they have, like, a paid copilot experience and then a way that they're, like, promoting copilot to people who don't have a license yet? Maybe explain what that looks like cause that's what people are gonna see. Like, they're gonna log in.

Matt D.: We're gonna get into that in a lot more detail a But, little bit yeah, I mean, Copilot and AI in particular, it is where Microsoft spent a bunch of money. It's where they continue to spend a bunch of money. If I were to talk about their main focuses, it's what you just talked about, which is better delineating between their paid service and their free service and making their free service more accessible and open to lots of people, which we're gonna get to in a little bit. But then also making that paid service more flexible, more extendable, more customizable, you know, primarily through agents. Like, when when you think about agents as the big is the term that you're gonna hear from them.

But it's really all about turning that into a superpower for a particular business need or a particular business focus. So those are some of the things you're gonna see, and that's where they spent a lot of their time over the last six months, year. And some of it's been a long time coming. They've talked about it for a long time, and it's only now becoming actually available to everyone, as is often the case now in the cloud world.

Mitch: Yeah. Okay. So I feel like there's there's a lot of good in that, but I feel like people are maybe tiring of I feel like they can't hear a sentence from someone that works at Microsoft that doesn't include the word Copilot in it. I know I grow tired of that a little bit, but hopefully the momentum is all worth it in the end.

Matt D.: I mean, it's the only thing I'll say about it is that there are some other things they're doing. There's some interesting improvements they're making to different tools that are and we're gonna talk about some of them today that are super powerful to people. But it's like ninety ten.

Mitch: Right?

Matt D.: Like, 90% of what they talk about and what they're doing is Copilot related and 10% is everything else. And I wish it was just a little more balanced.

Mitch: Yep. K. What are you guys' take? How do you feel about the Microsoft the lay of the land right now?

Mike: Oh, it's a little bit similar to what Matt said. I think in this scenario, it's a little bit more like they didn't finish the job on some of the other tools. Like, they had some really great momentum and some really cool things happening, then it's like, Copilot's a hot new thing, so then they just dropped the other stuff and just didn't finish it, which is a little bit different than what they've done in the past, which is build a mediocre tool, period. Right? Just good enough to get by and then that's all it ever was.

And you were stuck with it because you had all had to have all the other tools. In this case, we saw some real light at the end of a tunnel for some of those tools and we're very hopeful and it's like, oh, now you stopped. That's kinda That's kinda how I feel about it. Yep. But Copilot is interesting and exciting.

It's a little bit like some of us have changed our behavior when we approach search, when we're trying to do research and things like that. And Copilot or ChatGPT, for example, become like the de facto search engine.

Mitch: Mhmm.

Mike: And I think for what a lot of what we do, some things we're asking it to author for us, which is really handy, like code or something like that. Mhmm. But then other things, I like to be a little bit careful about it, that I'm still creating my own original thoughts. Sure. Because I don't wanna ever like, personally, I don't wanna lose that capability.

Mitch: Mhmm. So Anything to add?

Cam: Yeah. I mean, I would echo most of the thoughts here, having gone through lots and lots of Microsoft updates.

Mitch: How many do think you've been through?

Cam: Probably 300.

Mitch: Okay.

Matt D.: 350.

Mitch: At least.

Cam: They are literally copiloting all the things. Word and PowerPoint, and they're rebranding things that were machine learning and now they're Copilot. Like, if we can make it Copilot, if we can add it to Copilot, it's in Copilot now.

Mitch: Mhmm.

Matt D.: Or they're or they're updating Copilot to try to make it more palatable to people who were had objections to using Copilot. Yeah. Like, whatever value add that they can

Cam: put in Copilot, they're gonna put in Copilot. And I think I would echo, I wish that there was more traction, more moving forward in some of other tools. But I have been using Copilot, some of the tools we're gonna talk about. I just started having Copilot, like, kinda rephrase some of my writing to make it more concise and actionable. Super handy tool for somebody with dyslexia, like ADHD, dyslexia, makes my writing way more concise.

Mike: Mhmm.

Cam: But I have all of these thoughts, I need to get it down into something that is presentable. It's like a tool that I dreamed of for my whole life, which is like an awesome thing to see come to reality. But there's a lot of things in Copilot that is like, okay, we're gonna generate PowerPoint slides.

Mitch: Mhmm.

Cam: Cool. Yeah. I guess probably helpful for somebody.

Mitch: Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I I would kinda wrap up with saying, I agree. I think one of the like, we're alluding to tools that the thing that I am and this isn't news to Microsoft, if they're listening, so much momentum went away from Loop and onto other things that, man

Matt D.: It wasn't done.

Mitch: Yeah. It's not it's it's not done. I don't have control over making sure they know that, but they they feel like it's far enough that they can go focus on other things. So if they're listening, please revisit. Please I don't know.

There's there's I have no basis for anything. I have no I have no weight, but I can be a voice for you all, maybe, and say we want to see LOOP get a little bit further.

Matt D.: But don't do that if you're just going to make us pay for LOOP.

Mitch: Yeah. Oh my gosh. Loop Premium coming soon.

Matt D.: Yeah, I know. I worry about that. I worry about that.

Mike: Okay. Speaking of Loop, that's our first topic.

Matt D.: That's our first topic. Yeah.

Mitch: Oh, yeah.

Mike: It is.

Mitch: So, yes. Let's get into loop workspaces that are tied to a team. That is our first topic here.

Matt D.: Yeah.

Mitch: Matt, what changed and why does it matter?

Matt D.: Yeah. So this is actually probably the single biggest feature for us that makes it like really ready for the world. I think a lot of people thought.

Mitch: Let's say what it is.

Matt D.: Yeah. So the feature is basically you could always create a loop workspace, which effectively created like a mini SharePoint site or a mini location where you store things, but it would live on its own. So it lived divorce of everything else, which was a huge problem for us, and a huge problem for the way that we think people should should work. We really want that to be part of a team. We wanna be able to add people to a team in Teams and and then have it give you access to the loop workspace.

I wanna be able to, you know, relate these things, and you couldn't ever do that. That wasn't something at all that was possible.

Mitch: Like when someone gets added to your team and you want them to

Matt D.: have access to the loop. Or when the when you delete the team, you want the loop workspace to go away. Or when you like, there's so many scenarios that are valuable to this, and you couldn't do it. Like, there was no real integration between the two. And today, you can now do that.

You can, from the context of a channel in a team, create a loop workspace. That loop workspace will now be directly associated with that team. It respects all the security settings. It respects conditional access policies, sensitivity labels, anything else you might set on the team, the permissions. Like it's tightly coupled, which is a game changer.

You know, when you think, when you talk to an organization about, I have a mess of shared drives, I a mess of SharePoint sites, and I a mess of Teams, and I really like this loop thing. And you try to say, well, yeah, go create more loop workspaces. Well, that's just gonna create more of a mess. Now, the answer is no. You don't have to.

You have the team. The team has the loop workspace. It's all tied together, and it's really quite amazing. I there are some nuances. There's some things that we don't like about it.

We've had some feedback with Microsoft about it, specifically in the creation of it. Like, once it's created, everything's great. It's fine. But, like, creating it is a challenge. Also, there's no way to link a loop workspace or an existing loop workspace to your team.

So people who have bought into the concept like we have, you're stuck in this world where you have to move everything, which kind of is annoying. It's a single loop workspace right now.

Mike: Right?

Matt D.: It's a loop workspace per channel. So Okay. It's interesting because it's I say it's tied to the team, but it's actually tied to a channel. So you can have five channels and then five loop workspaces. But you can't have five loop workspaces per channel and you can't have, you know, like, the it's just and you can't have a one loop workspace For five channels.

For five channels or five teams.

Mitch: So

Matt D.: we're we we love the feature. We've moved everything over to it pretty much. There is some discussion in my head about about turning off the ability to create

Mitch: Just talk. Yeah.

Matt D.: I talk to myself all the time. About turning off the ability to create loop workspaces outside of Teams because quite frankly in our organization, I don't know why you'd ever wanna do it, really.

Cam: All of

Matt D.: our stuff is related to it.

Mitch: It's an IT setting you can disable

Cam: it. Yeah.

Matt D.: Correct. But but I've not turned it off yet. Yeah. You know, it's something I've considered turning off because because I feel so strongly about this. That wouldn't be right for probably everybody, but for us, in our case, I think it it may be a path that we go towards.

But, yeah. Yeah. I think it's a great feature. Not Copilot related, but it's a I think it's it's it's a highlight. Like, for us, for our customers, it's it's groundbreaking.

Mike: It matches our mindset and approach to knowledge management.

Matt D.: Correct. Yep.

Mitch: So, cool. So big change there. The only other nuance I was going to add was there's also no good way to migrate from one, from an existing Yeah. Mentioned that

Matt D.: a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. There's there's I produced a video about how to create them. I think we're we're probably gonna produce a little video about moving them because I think a lot of people are frustrated with that.

There's no silver bullet. There's no easy solution.

Mitch: Yeah.

Matt D.: But there's a couple little tricks that can make it a little easier for you.

Mitch: So for anyone listening, put a gate, an obstacle in front of creating a loop workspace. Don't go just create another one and start building stuff there.

Matt D.: Yep.

Mitch: Build it in the context of a team because there's not a good way for you to say, oh, shoot. I made a mistake. Let me go do it over here. So create it there first. And that's released everywhere.

Matt D.: Yeah. Everywhere. Everywhere.

Mike: Yep. So you'll see that.

Mitch: Cool. Let's just continue with Matt and talk about another CoPilot So two out of three two out of five of our topics here are not Yep. So we're gonna interweave them so we don't lose anybody here. There is a big change to Copilot and the app and the the the suite name and, like, Microsoft is trying to make everything Copilot, and in that move, they are coming out with the Copilot app. What does that mean?

And how should people be thinking about this?

Matt D.: Yeah. So that's a that's a very interesting conversation. We could go back a long ways around this. I'm probably gonna do a little bit of it. Basically, Microsoft has had a app, a site, whatever you wanna call it, for a long time.

Office three sixty five, the Office three sixty five app, that has been kind of the landing page or the homepage for everything Microsoft Office three sixty five, Microsoft three sixty five. It's existed for a very, very long time. It's It's

Mitch: got like recent documents Apps. Shortcuts to apps.

Matt D.: Shortcuts to apps. Yes. Software downloads. Software yeah. It's it's a it's like a landing page for Office three sixty five.

For you. Problem is, I don't know all the details, but I know from my experience and when I've when I've talked to people, it wasn't used for very much. Right? Like for me, it was a it was the one URL. It was a short URL that I could use to launch and I could get to any app.

I wouldn't have to remember what it was. It was also a nice place where I could send people to. It was easy for people to remember. And it wasn't, you know, if you wanna send somebody to SharePoint, you gotta remember, what's my domain for my SharePoint? You know, balddigital.sharepoint.com, whatever that might be.

So it was just an easy way to send people to things. And they also had a desktop app, so you could access that desktop app. Because of the lack of use, I think, is part of it, but then also because Copilot is becoming the centralized focus of the la when you think about launching and you think about accessing all of your things, Copilot is a big piece of that. They rebranded it all. So they rebranded it all to instead of Microsoft three sixty five app, it's the Copilot.

Microsoft three sixty five Copilot app, I think is what it is.

Mitch: Yes. Which

Matt D.: is not to be confused with Copilot for Microsoft three sixty five, which is a license and a product. But basically, they didn't change very much about the functionality. They just renamed it. And then subsequent to that, they added Copilot into it, and they also started to do things like make it available to everyone. So for a while, you could use it, you could use this app and it was Copilot, But only people who could use the Copilot features of it were people who had Microsoft three sixty five Copilot licenses.

Now, as of today, this new app is really all about accessing Microsoft three sixty five and Office three sixty five with a prominent focus on Copilot being the launching pad. So when you open it up, you've got a prominent Copilot search and Copilot prompt interface. You've got prominent access to all of your agents. You've got prominent access to all of these different things, and it's for everybody. So no matter what license you have, you can open this app, you can use Copilot, the free version of Copilot.

You can get access to agents, which we're gonna talk about in a second. But it's really this relaunching and this focus on this new app. I love it. I have been using it for quite a long time now. I think it's really, really amazing.

Mostly because it solves my problem of, you know, I don't know if people remember Copilot used to be this thing that was in my system tray that you could kinda double click and it opened up in a like a

Mitch: You might Cortana.

Matt D.: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We're not even gonna no. Don't get me distracted.

But like, it used to be this thing and then it was, you know, it was a little bit different. It was it keeps evolving and it never quite felt right to me. It never felt useful. It was an effort to use. It was work to use.

Now it feels like it I I'm in it all the time. I use it all the time. It is my go to location. I I'm I've never been a huge ChatGPT user, but from what I have seen and what when people I've worked with who use ChatGPT often, I'm using this new tool much like they would use the ChatGPT app or interface in what they were doing. Right?

But it also has a bunch of other things. So it's deeply integrated Microsoft three sixty five. It's got the agents. It's got all these other things. So I'm using it all the time, and I think it's pretty amazing.

That's the Microsoft three sixty five Copilot app.

Mitch: Let let's pause on I know you wanna talk about agents, but I want other people's Yeah. Perspective on the app a little bit too. Have you guys used it? What are your thoughts?

Cam: Yeah. I've used it. I think it's a huge improvement from what it was historically. I think the old site I would use to download desktop versions of the Microsoft Suite and a jumping off point to find where to re up my, like, multi authentication method.

Mitch: Mhmm.

Cam: It's like you can go up and click on your little face and change everything, but this is much more useful. It is a place that I go every day, multiple times a day. It hosts relevant information to me. The agents are very, very useful. We're gonna touch on a couple that Microsoft gives you and then a couple on agent building.

It's a great upgrade. I think it was worth upgrading.

Mitch: I'll be I'll be play devil's advocate a tiny bit. In some respects, this app, like, taking away that landing page can feel to a lot of people like Copilot is being shoved down everybody's throats. Yeah. Like, it is, like, right there.

Matt D.: They would

Mitch: be the time, every time. So, yes, there's like there's that initial friction that someone has to kinda understand Microsoft's trying to push something. It's probably going to be better for you in the long run, but there's that

Cam: Doesn't feel like you have a choice. Yeah. Feels

Mitch: like You're being forced

Cam: to everywhere push and

Mitch: Yeah.

Cam: It feels like it's being shoved down everybody's throat and they would be right. Yeah. It's everywhere.

Mitch: But The one thing it doesn't do for me yet in thinking about the old landing page versus this one is they have hidden away quite poorly all the apps. I used that, like, office.com as a landing page for clicking the waffle menu and seeing all my apps and getting to apps quickly. That doesn't really exist in the same way in the Copilot app. You have an apps little navigation item that you can click on and you can also pin apps down there, But it's for sure a secondary, tertiary, like, function. They are for sure saying Copilot is your number one.

The apps are number three that you should worry about. I don't believe Copilot's to the point where it can abstract enough of what I do in the apps to deprioritize it that much quite yet. I imagine it might at some point. Maybe they're just working ahead and they know that's where it's gonna go and so they'll deal with my distaste in the meantime. But

Cam: I do like that call out. Like, I'm looking at it here as we're talking, and before the old page, basically, the entire purpose of the page was apps. And now apps is the very bottom menu option. So if you unless you're an admin, it's the very bottom. Yeah.

And now it's here's five features that AI does, different types of features, and the entire homepage, instead of being little icons or apps, It's a big Copilot prompt message.

Matt D.: That's why I I thought about this a little bit and I can understand where they're going. I agree with your I actually was one of the ones that told Microsoft that, hey, like, where is my waffle of of apps? Like, why can't I find it?

Mitch: Let's clarify quick. We are part of the the TAP program for the So we've

Matt D.: We've had it for a long time.

Mitch: And we've we've been in conversations. So we're we're gonna do our best to not share things we shouldn't.

Matt D.: Disclose things we shouldn't.

Mitch: But, yes, you have been giving that feedback.

Matt D.: Yeah. And it and it and it is it is definitely a problem. But when I think about exactly what you're talking about, Cam, like, previously, it was an app for no reason. It had no purpose beyond aggregating some stuff. And if I think about, like, having another Copilot, like a separate Copilot app, separate from this thing, I'm like, well, that's great, but I I still have this thing that doesn't really fit anywhere and it's just this thing.

Like, it was a app without a purpose in some ways, and I do feel like it gives a little bit of purpose.

Mitch: Mhmm.

Matt D.: But it is because it gives it that purpose, it is really hard to do everything the other one did. I don't know where they're gonna end up with it long term. I think the thing that I would encourage people, especially what you said about the copilot being shoved down your throat, etcetera, is I would was before I knew that they were gonna make it free and include the free version, I was like, this is dumb. Why are you renaming this? This is absolutely for this thing.

Like, you're just trying to get people to buy your stupid thing. Like, what the heck? I was not happy. The fact that it's free for everyone, it makes it a replacement for so many things that I think people do today, and I would be encouraging people to do that. Mhmm.

Because now you can basically treat it like you're Google. Like you're

Mitch: Sure.

Matt D.: Like all of the things that you used to open up a web browser and try to ask questions and try to research yourself, you can now use this free tool that's built in, and it's leaps and bounds better than what you could do previously. Like, not even comparable. Much better. And it's all protected. It's all included in your license.

It's all, you know, that for me was the breaking point in regards to some of these things that made me more okay with it is that, you know, literally when they first talked about it, I was I was not. Yeah. Was not feeling it.

Mitch: Yeah. I agree. Just and just because I know people will make sure we're paying attention to detail here, what do you mean by it is free?

Matt D.: Yeah. I don't yeah. Yeah. I corrected that later on in my statement there. So when you purchased a Microsoft three sixty five license at a certain level, I don't think f licenses, etcetera, have all the features, but, you know, traditional e three, e five, that kind of thing licenses, they have included in them the ability to use Copilot grounded in the web.

Right? What that means is it's not going to be grounded. You won't be able to use Ask It about your email. You won't be able to ask it about your SharePoint site and all the content around it. But you can ask it general questions about content that's publicly available on the Internet.

And those questions, as you prompt and have those things, they're not gonna be stored and added to the model. And that very, very, very, very, very limited information will be shared with Bing search services.

Mike: Mhmm.

Matt D.: So you're protecting that data, you're protecting those, the information that you're sharing, but you're getting so much more than you could from a traditional Google search, a traditional Bing search, a traditional, you know, web query. As you know, I use it all the time. It's really, it's a valuable part of my daily activity. And I think the app itself has a lot to do with enabling that at the level that people can use it today.

Mitch: Okay. Before we move on, I want a quick plug. If you have thoughts on this, we would love to know. We have a feedback link set up at bulb. Digitalfeedback that you can use to send your notes.

We're interested to know what what everybody thinks about these changes. Yeah. Where are we going next?

Cam: So part of the new Microsoft three sixty five Copilot app, They have a tab called agents, and there are two agents that just went GA very recently, researcher and analyst. Those are part of the new Copilot app experience. There's also visual creator. What is an agent? What do these do?

And why

Matt D.: are they useful? Agents in the context of Copilot and AI in general is, you know, when you think about Copilot and the Copilot chat experience, it's a very generic experience. So you come into the chat and it's very open, generic. I can anything I want to ask it, I need to include in the prompt. And I need to as I have that conversation in the prompt, that adds more context to the chat that gives it more information to give me more detail.

That's a lot of work, number one, you know, to have to set that up every time. Number two, it has access to the whole corpus of information either through the web or, you know, if you're paying for the license for in your your private network or your intranet, it's gonna pull information from anywhere it thinks is reasonable. That's not always really what you want. Right? And so an agent is a way to add another layer to that and say, this isn't a generic chat.

This is a chat in the context of HR. Right? Or in the case of, Image Creator, this is a chat in the context of I wanna create images. Right? And so it allows you to put some parameters and some some structure around what these chat and this conversation is going to be about that elevate its accuracy, simplifies what people have to do to get results that they want, and protects people from things like hallucination, providing, you know, incorrect information, outdated information, etcetera.

So you can think of it as a way to customize that generic chat and make it something a little bit more useful to people.

Cam: So it's like bumpers for AIs. We're gonna stay in this specific lane, and I wanna know about image creation, or I want to know about researcher or Yeah. In the

Matt D.: case in the case of researcher so there's a couple different layers of agents, would say. And researcher and and analyst are they're specialized. So a lot of agents are traditionally would be target the scope. Right? There's a bunch of third party ones, Ramp, for example.

Well, if you're chatting with a Ramp agent, it's only gonna be talking about Ramp related stuff, which Ramp is a tool used for expense tracking and and credit card usage. Right? Expense usage. If you have a chat with that, it's it's the topic is what's gonna be focused primarily. Right?

In the case of researcher and analyst, there's a bunch of extra features. In researcher, you get advanced research analysis. When you ask a question and prompt it, it's not just doing one level. It's like it's gonna keep asking more questions and create a very, very detailed analysis for you after the fact. So agents can be a couple different things.

Those two in particular, there's even more than just topic and that kind of thing. There's a bunch of other guardrails or bumpers as you and features that are enabled to for you. In other cases, it's pretty simple. It's like, hey. Target this agent to a SharePoint site, one particular SharePoint site, or one piece of content.

Cam: You can feed it files, and the agent is specifically interacting with the file that you give it. Yep. And nothing else. Nothing else, which is really nice where I don't think without agents it would be as focused of a response.

Matt D.: Or you'd have to ask it to. You'd have be like, hey, every time you want to prompt it, it's like, hey, only look here for this content.

Cam: Here's a really specific paragraph of please stay within this file.

Matt D.: Yep. Yeah. Thing that's interesting about agents that people don't realize is it's also a licensing benefit to use an agent. Right? You don't have to have a Microsoft three sixty five Copilot license to use an agent.

I can be a regular user and just use an agent, and I'm only gonna pay for the questions and the prompts that I work with with that agent on. If I have a conversation about, you know, a payroll issue, for example, asking some questions about how to resolve an issue, and I have five different prompts, I'm gonna pay for those five prompts and the resources that those use. I'm not gonna pay for a monthly Microsoft $3.65 subscription. So it's also a from a Microsoft perspective, it's a it's a way to tease people and get them in to start using these tools and get them excited about using these tools so they can get more money. Because that's what a lot of it is all about.

Right?

Mike: So right now it's effectively just a pay as you go?

Matt D.: I mean, it's not just if you have a Microsoft three sixty five license.

Mike: Right. But that's the default. That's how they're getting everybody connected to the tools.

Matt D.: Yeah. So if you if you you have to have consumption licenses. You have to purchase those those licenses and then they get consumed. And when they run out, you can buy more. But yeah, it's that consumption model for accessing to agents.

Yep.

Cam: I was gonna ask, do you need a license for Researcher and Analyst? And I think you do.

Matt D.: I believe the answer to that question is yes. Right now, have to be a Yes. You have to be a Microsoft three sixty five Copilot. Copilot. There is a question outstanding about whether or not they will add additional licensing, especially for something like Researcher, which uses a huge amount of resources.

Mitch: You know, I just saw they added a change in the Copilot interface where instead of having to go to Researcher as its own navigation element, it's like a toggle in Copilot. You can just say, use your extra processing here to get me a good answer. And that mirrors actually what it looks like on chat GPT. It's just a toggle rather than and I like that line of thinking of I would don't want to know what agent I should be asking all the time. I just want it to apply the agent that it thinks it should.

Matt D.: Or recommend an agent

Mike: Yes.

Mitch: That you Right.

Matt D.: You you want to use.

Mitch: So they're doing some work on that.

Cam: Yeah. I just saw today in the Microsoft updates I've been going through that they've added they're going to add in the future, I think July, a side pane, like a pop out pane that is all of your agents in SharePoint and in Teams. So it'll have a little list of all your agents and what they are, and you can interact with them through this new little side panel. So they're really elevating agents and

Mitch: They're infiltrating everything.

Matt D.: Yeah.

Mitch: Alright. We have a little bit more to cover on agents here in a couple minute, but

Matt D.: Let's get out of Copilot for the moment.

Mitch: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Too much, you guys. We're drinking the Kool Aid too much.

Let's go on to the next one.

Mike: Alright, Mitch. The question is chat style channels. So threaded chats and channels, what is this all about? Like, there's a change coming. It's gonna be a different experience for people that are used to

Matt D.: It's out now, I think.

Mitch: Yeah. Yeah. There's two different things that have gone on in teams in regards to changing the way people communicate that I think are notable. One is we talked about it in a previous, like, bonus episode, but we they keep changing things, and so we we have we have a hard time articulating a recommendation for how to use it quite yet, but the topic is combining chats and channels. So they combined the the concept of in your left kind of navigation, you see chat and you see Teams.

And in the context of chat, you have DMs and group chats, and in Teams, you have channels. And they said, well, why don't we give people one place to go to communicate with other people and move it all into chat and combine those things and we'll put it all into one feed and show them alongside each other. We have mixed opinions on it, if it's if it's helpful or not. I think some of the nuances, if you use primarily chats and limited use of Teams and channels, it's probably very helpful for you because you can pull those in context of each other now. If you are trying to move away from chats and lean more into channels, I think it makes things more confusing because you are not giving clear indicators of what people should use because they're all just kind of jumbled together and sometimes it can be hard to keep track of them all.

What I really like about it is it introduced the concept of sections and making different sections of channels or chats or what whatever it is, you can say, these are my top priority, internal. These are low priority. You can categorize them however you want, and you can use that extra layer of categorization to lower your mental load of, I only need to look at my top prior like, I just got back from a meeting. I'm gonna scan through my top priority channels and see if anything is going on there. I was happy that happened and then I realized I didn't really like chats being in that context.

And so I said, I'm gonna go back, forget this, split them back out. And I flipped that switch and I noticed over time, they actually started to implement the same section functionality even when things are distinct and separate from between chats and channels. So now I get to have a home for just my channels that I can still categorize and move around that don't have to be in the context of, like, underneath the node of a team. So if I have 50 different teams I'm a member of and I only care about five of the channels, now I can group those up right up on top and it's really nice. So that mirrors what I have been using in the Slack world and I I like it a lot.

So I consider that a win. Whether or not you should stick with them combined or not is subjective question.

Mike: Everyone wants to know the answer to this question. Okay. Can we stop using Slack?

Cam: So We do wanna know.

Matt D.: Can can we?

Mitch: In the context let me

Cam: Matt Drossel

Mitch: These two changes that I'm talking about have been the first time in years that have gotten me to say, I think this might be to the spot now where that might be

Matt D.: Might be.

Mitch: Something to consider.

Mike: Might be to the spot that it might be.

Matt D.: Yeah.

Mitch: The well, what's unsaid

Mike: here is Too lights. It's pretty

Mitch: It would be quite an investment for us to move. We have

Mike: The history would be the We have we

Mitch: have history integrations, practices, like culture, and and Yeah. It's not quite like, oh, yeah. Cool. Let's switch over. So I'm thinking about that in more of those terms rather than I hate Teams.

It doesn't do the things that

Matt D.: So

Mitch: I want it to do.

Matt D.: It's somewhat related, but I'm gonna loop back to what we started with, which is like we wish Microsoft would keep making their tools better rather than at keep adding Copilot stuff. What they did with this Teams and Chat thing isn't enough. It doesn't deliver on that, the outcome that I would want, which is a unified experience that really works for everybody. I think there's more that they could do, But they're really not gonna spend the time to do it, I don't think. Right?

Partially because they have spent a lot. Like, this has been two years, I think, in the making, at least.

Mitch: Yeah. But They've been moving chess pieces for a

Matt D.: long They've tweaking and trying to, but they need to make some pretty significant changes to make that work in my mind. And then secondly, as also relates to the question that you asked, simple things like, I wanna be able to put as many emojis as I want on a message.

Mike: Mhmm. The fun stuff.

Matt D.: Like, why can't I do that? Yeah. Like, that's a pretty simple question. You can do it in Slack, and I love it. I can thumbs up and I can iLookie something.

I can't I don't have to choose. Mhmm. Teams, I gotta choose. And that can seem silly to some people, that can seem silly to Microsoft, I'm sure it does. But quite frankly, a lot of the things they have added that are making it a little bit better are those types of things.

Mike: Yeah.

Matt D.: They're like small Little volume of

Cam: life, like it improves your culture.

Matt D.: Yeah. Yeah. And it's the same thing with the chats and channel thing. Like focus on it and keep driving it home until it's actually done, until it actually accomplishes the goal. Because quite frankly, the net result is exactly what you described.

We got the thing that everybody likes is the fact that I can organize my own stuff.

Mitch: Yeah.

Matt D.: Why do they like that? Because the other way that you do it automatically kind of sucks.

Mike: Yeah.

Matt D.: Fix it.

Mitch: It's like a chicken and the egg thing sometimes when they build things the way they do and they have big customers that develop practices around how they use those things. It's different. And those customers are sitting there saying, we're not gonna buy our licenses if you change this. And so then we're in this world where we're promoting working in a different way, and, oh, this could be so much better. And maybe Microsoft agrees, but they say, we have this other crowd that's paying us money and what how do we do that?

And so let's let's make it super customizable and do this chats and channels thing.

Cam: We can the same or have the updated

Mitch: Yeah. So then it's like, let's make it super flexible. So then everybody's happy, but then you lose the the objectivity of this is how people should work. And Microsoft generally avoids having too strong of a stance there for good and bad reason. Yep.

The other update that I wanna talk about is in the context of of Teams is chat style channels. So if you're familiar with Slack, it's basically bringing that Slack experience into Teams. But I'll summarize it. And that's when you create a message in a Teams channel today, you are prompted with create a post. Right?

It's not send a message. When you think about coming from a direct chat world where you can just type to someone and send and it's it's like a back and forth chat message And you go over into Teams and suddenly you're prompted with create this post. It feels it's a it's a bigger threshold to overcome to say, oh, is this worth a conversation? Do I want to start a conversation on this topic and and have collaboration on it rather I can't just send a quick thing in a channel. Like, the the whole the way the whole interface is built is so that it's it's built around these conversations and not casual.

It

Mike: doesn't allow organic development of sub threads. Correct.

Mitch: Right. Correct. Everything is a thread. Right. And so what they're doing is taking a piece of what Slack does, which is there is no concept of start a post.

You're just sending messages in the context of a channel. And if you decide you want to have further conversation about something and kind of like go into your own little space to have that conversation, you can start a thread. You can click on a message and you can basically say, I wanna reply directly to this. There's gonna be some back and forth. It's not relevant necessarily to the whole channel, so let's go off into this thread and have this conversation.

That to me is another one of the reasons why I'm like, okay, that was one of my big gripes too, so maybe we could move, right? The thing that brings up is people have to configure this. Like, it has to be an intentional choice and some channels might show up one way and some channels might show up another, and it's going to create more disparity and more different ways of working and create more confusion. And so while I I I love the feature, I think people are gonna have to have a little bit of critical thinking when they create a channel, choose the style intentionally, and maybe try the style out and see if it works better and figure out what to do with existing channels.

Mike: Has that been introduced as the default style?

Mitch: No. No. No, they won't.

Matt D.: Yeah. So I'm gonna play the devil's advocate a little bit, which is I hate the way Slack works in that regard because people don't create threads when they should create threads. And oftentimes you don't know you need to create a thread until it's too late, till you're five messages deep. And then you're having a conversation about a particular thing. It is, for me, I am nervous, and I would I would be against making it the default because so many people don't understand how that works even in Slack.

You know, you we have conversations with customers who use Slack. We have conversations with customers who use these other tools, and they also have this problem where they just don't understand the concept of threading and topic based communication. And if one of the benefits

Cam: You have some users who reply in the thread and some people who reply outside of the thread Oh, yeah. That's meant for the thread. And so there's sometimes lost context or Well, and

Matt D.: in Slack's case, like, we I don't I don't wanna turn this into like a debate about the tools, but I would hate I would be really upset if I can if I can no longer mention the entire channel in a thread, which is what you can't do in Slack. In Slack, I can't say, at general, hey, just like, I want you to have a conversation about this. Like, there's a bunch of things. I can understand why they're doing it to help bridge the gap. And I do think there are some channels that the chances of you actually having a threat needing to have a threaded conversation is pretty low.

99% of the channels that I am involved in Is bold. You need we need threats. I would I would challenge someone to find a channel in our Slack that does not have

Mike: a thread. Now that I know the thing that really bothers him the most, I'm gonna

Mitch: Do not reply in the thread.

Mike: I'm gonna do it so Start a

Cam: thread and don't reply in it.

Mitch: Is this is compliance versus creative team. If if we haven't shared

Matt D.: don't even think that's

Cam: the case.

Mike: No. It it is. That's where it's lining up. I I see it too. It's I

Mitch: care if conversations color outside the lines a tiny bit. I would just want the conversation to happen.

Matt D.: Right. So notice he said notice he said a tiny bit. So what they just said is, oh, like, let's post it outside. If we don't have a thing that says, hey, you should post in it, people will

Mike: post outside the time. What you're saying, what he said is a tiny bit, what you said is absolute.

Cam: Yeah. Right. This decoration

Mike: Because for a staff.

Matt D.: Because because because a tiny bit, we've had it. We've we've

Mike: experienced Yeah. We've experienced But we've also those are been have been opportunities for our team in particular to learn the right mindset and approach. Because we correct. And and you would not have the opportunity to correct.

Mitch: Shouldn't we just control instead?

Matt D.: No. I mean, I I have the opportunity to correct all the time. Well, I'm we deal with customers all the time that post long things that should be separate posts in a channel in Teams.

Mitch: This is to be

Matt D.: As

Mitch: one to you all. We're going long. Let's Yeah.

Mike: This will be the longest podcast in If you stick through it this long and you hear these words, send us send us a message.

Matt D.: Yeah. I'll ship

Mike: I'll ship you a jar of honey.

Mitch: If you subscribe. Yeah. Okay. Let's let's keep moving. Mike, you've been flying the wall for for a lot of this, but you have some responsibility here.

We need to talk about

Mike: You're not gonna talk about Copilot again,

Mitch: are you? Copilot. In the Power Platform Yay. What do people need to know about the state of this?

Mike: Well, so the first thing I think we'll talk about is using Copilot to enhance your work, I would say, in the Power Platform. And there's two sides of that that I would bring up. One is gonna be in the authoring side. So when it comes to building Power Apps or building flows, there are a variety of ways that Copilot is just there in your face again, like it is everywhere else, that are intended to help you as a citizen developer. So some of the common scenarios are gonna be, I need an expression that does x.

Right? And Copilot will help you with that expression. I think that's, in my experience, more useful on the Power App side Mhmm. Where you have some typically some fairly structured data sources that you're dealing with, and so then it can interrogate those things and give you something that's somewhat effective. The other area that seems to be somewhat useful, at least for me, is in troubleshooting flows.

So when you have a flow that errors out, it's like very quick to be like, hey, I think this is the problem and recommend a solution. Like, go change this expression or, you know, reset your connection. It, like, it does a pretty good job of sensing some of those things, which all of that is intended to make your low code development even faster and

Matt D.: more efficient.

Mitch: I feel like that's a really good illustration of the the word copilot, where you're on a mission to build something and you have

Mike: A helper.

Mitch: A helper next to you Right. Kinda helping you get unstuck. Yeah. I can say in the the software development world using AI and Pair

Mike: programming was was the thing. Right? Right. Like, is it up to stuff from a pair programming standpoint? Probably not, but it is it'll help you do things a lot faster.

I think for those of us who are pro devs, like, of the struggles that I have with it is I have mind mapped so many of the things that I've done over the years Mhmm. That it's actually faster for me to just, in many cases, in and write the code Yeah. And author it myself. So sometimes I have to slow down and and where I really use it the most is when I have something that's overly complex. Or if you get into an expression inside of Power Automate where the expression editor kinda frankly still sucks Mhmm.

And you get a lot of stuff in there and one jumbled big line of, like, it's like, oh my gosh, I cannot figure this out. Mhmm. So if you find yourself taking that and trying to put it in, like, Versus Code so that you can, like, parse it visually, like, that's probably time to start using Copilot.

Mitch: So maybe this is a point of saying if you have entertained using Power Automate or Power Apps, but kind of get stuck at the blank white screen not knowing what to do, especially when it comes to writing something that looks like code, this might be able to help you get over that hump so that you can at least how it might build things or, you know, take your inputs and translate it into doing what you want it to do. I know I've had tons of benefit from the coding side of, like, I don't have to bother him as much. Right. More of, hey, this thing doesn't work the way that I can just ask it and it's got a pretty good idea and I'll try it and and, you know, I I save only the the stumpers for for Matt so he can help me.

Mike: You put those in a in a thread, right, somewhere in No. The other thing I was gonna mention from an authoring experience is related to, like, data structure creation and just app creation. So there are a bunch of things in there you can like, front and center in Power Apps, it's Copilot's gonna say, what do you wanna build today? And you can tell it what you want and it'll give its best attempt. And so things like building tables in Dataverse, if you've if you've got the Premium Connector license and you wanna go that route, it will attempt to to create those things for you.

Some of the places where it falls down so for those of us who have been working in that world for a while, we know that there's a bunch of built in tables, like the contact table or the account table, and it doesn't seem to natively pick up that you want to connect something to one of those tables even though you tell it. Mhmm. And so there's some things like that that you have to come back after the fact and build those relationships or lookups and be a little bit more explicit with your table building. But as a generic, I don't know what I'm doing. I think I want a model driven app.

I need some tables that do x, y, and z that track this data. It'll do a pretty good job of standing that up for you.

Matt D.: So I have a question for you. I tried to use some of that stuff early Yeah. On especially with Power Automate. And I was not it was never right. It was not I was not I was not happy with it.

So I gave up, like, trying to give it the truth, like, really try. And I am now at a point where I use Copilot, but I use the Copilot app.

Mike: Mhmm.

Matt D.: And I ask it a question, and it gives me a copious explanation. Yep. And I read it, I'm like, okay, I pull out what I want, and I go do what I wanna do, and it works great. I love it. So I use Copilot, but I pretty much never use Copilot in the app in the in the studios.

Mhmm. Even for for troubleshooting flows, mostly because I'm like, you're talking a bunch of mumble jumbo that I don't

Mike: to get to the answer.

Matt D.: I'm not confident that you really know what it is. If I just look at what the stupid error is

Mike: But that's also because how they can figure it out. But that's because we're pro devs.

Matt D.: I mean, it could

Mike: be. Right.

Matt D.: My question I'm getting to my question, so hold it. Yeah. So Shut up. I want, like, a button that is, just fix it and I that I can trust. That's what I really want.

Yeah. It's not there. Nope. Right? Is it should I give it another try?

Mike: I think it's worth keeping tabs on. Some of the stuff that I've seen that's been most interesting is some of the stuff built in around your like, flow failures Mhmm. And recognizing that this has been failing a lot. Right? And there's

Matt D.: Not like, some other things to look on developing it, but I came in a week after something's been going on and now

Mike: there's been Diagnosing. Diagnosing. Right. Okay. Which

Matt D.: I haven't had a lot of that going on recently.

Mitch: Your stuff works the first time. Yeah.

Mike: I do think the the CoPilot ability to author expressions on the Power Apps side, like a Canvas app, is much more Super helpful. Powerful than on the Power Automate side.

Matt D.: Yeah. And it's Power Automate that I've been mostly doing and it's

Mike: Yeah.

Matt D.: I'm every time I do it, I'm like, what? Like, really? That's what you want me to do? That doesn't seem right.

Mike: Yeah. So Yeah. Which wastes your time a little bit. Yeah. Yeah.

On the other side of this that I think is I think pertinent to this discussion is on the end user side, which is if you have a model driven app and you're paying attention at all, you're you're using that, you're probably starting to see autofill with Copilot features Yeah. Just everywhere. It's on all the forms, or it'll be on a view and it'll have, like, filter suggestions for you and all kinds of stuff just built in. And it's like, oh, what is this thing? The thing to note there is that if you're just using, like, a standard, like, custom model driven app, so not a Dynamics app, All of those features are there, but they're still technically in preview.

So you'll try it. You're like because one of them, for example, is upload a document to fill this form out. Right? So you say you got a sales order or an invoice or something like that and you need to upload it to your whatever your system is. And that's the form and you can get all the fields you wanna fill it out, upload the document.

It'll sniff that document and fill in the fields that it can map. Right? And it like, I've played with it a little bit. It works like 10% of the fields, like maybe. But it's in preview and it hasn't been trained on that data, so it doesn't know what to do.

But that those same features are available, their general availability on the Dynamics app side. So CRM, sales, and customer service, all of that stuff, because those things have been trained on their data Yeah. And fill in those things rather well. I thought that's kind of an interesting thing. So I think the next thing that I wanna get into that I'm really interested in is what can I do to train that tool on the custom apps that I'm building for my clients?

Because then I think that would be just amazingly powerful.

Mitch: Okay. This is probably one of our bigger episodes. So we're gonna wrap up here with our last let's treat this like a rapid fire. Wanted to talk about agents one more time in the context of creating an agent. Okay.

What do you have to share?

Mike: Cool. So I haven't done a whole lot of it, but what little bit of it I have done is I found a few interesting things. So we talked about agents earlier. Agents, I think the thing three things to remember. There are gonna be as you're building an agent, there are gonna be things called topics, there's just thing things called knowledge, things called tools.

Topics are your chat flow, like how you have a conversation with somebody. Knowledge is gonna be other data that the thing has access to, so that could be documents, SharePoint lists, libraries, Dataverse tables. And then tools are gonna be things like Outlook, Teams for sending messages, those types of things, other systems that you might connect to. So as you're building your agents, just know that those those three concepts exist inside of an agent. Another thing that I would say is there are some template prompts out there that are like that you should go use and see what they do.

They're very interesting. They'll connect to like a Dataverse table and the baseline thing that they do is they create inside that agent, that Dataverse table becomes knowledge and they create the basic CRUD operations for that Dataverse table, which is create, read, write, delete, like update all

Mitch: of stuff CRUD.

Mike: Yeah. Whatever it is. Right? It's CRUD. Right?

But it does all of those things and it's very interesting to me because it if you actually go look at the action that it executes, it's building, like, the OData filter for the read, for the list Gotcha. Rows. Right? And I'm like, oh, that's really cool. So it gives you an idea of what you could do inside of an agent.

So think of like Create, read, update, delete. Delete. Yes. You got it. But so I like, that's that's something.

And then the last thing that I'll leave you with is all these agents that you create are created inside of a Power Platform environment. They're actually stored in Dataverse. So when you're creating them, pay attention to where you're doing that. You're either gonna be end up like doing it in the default environment, which maybe you don't want to do. You wanna pay attention to the environment where if you're using Dataverse data, for example, where that Dataverse data exists.

And so then it would be maybe deployed with that solution or as part of that solution. So just be aware of that thing. And you don't really even know it when you, like, create your first agent. It's kind of, like, hidden from you.

Matt D.: Magic just doesn't.

Mike: Yeah. It's like, oh, where did this get thing you created? But it actually got put in your, like, preferred Dataverse environment or Power Platform environment. And so then you gotta go hunt that sucker down and put it in a solution if you wanna ALM it, which you should also probably think about doing. So that's my last tip.

Mitch: We we that's probably a broader discussion for another day. I think as we get more into agents Microsoft's pushing agents. We're still kinda like figuring out, are people out there creating agents and like

Matt D.: Quite frankly, most of our customers, a lot of people that come to us don't aren't ready for agents because their data isn't organized. Yeah. That's another thing about agents is you can create an agent all day long, but like Mike was talking about the knowledge sources, if you don't have a good knowledge source to put on that, it ain't gonna get

Cam: an agent.

Mitch: So we'll maybe revisit this topic in the future, but again, if you have any questions, comments, concerns, we'd love to hear about it over in the feedback. That's bulb. Digitalfeedback. Okay. We covered a lot today.

This was our take on the current state of Microsoft and everything that we see going on. Lots of good things. Lots of things we wish were a little bit different, but, no. I appreciate everyone for taking the time today and talking through this and, yeah, talking tech. It's fun.

Mike: Yeah. Thanks, guys. It was good.

Mitch: We'll see you later. Hey. Thanks for tuning in to make others successful. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love to hear from you. There's a couple ways you can do that.

One, we'd love for you to rate our show on your favorite podcasting app and then if you have feedback or topic ideas or suggestions for future episodes, head over to bulb.digital/feedback and let us know. Your input is super valuable and we'd love to hear from you. Don't forget to subscribe and share this podcast with others who care about building a better workplace. Until next time, keep making others successful. We'll see you.

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