Microsoft Update February

Packed with the latest information from Microsoft, this update focuses on changes to Teams including chat and channels, notification locations, file preview, and the new calendar experience. We also touch on Microsoft's new exciting Copilot Chat pay-as-you-go Agents pricing model, and the new Copilot Narrative Builder in PowerPoint. 

Teams Changes

Over the past two months, Microsoft has introduced several exciting updates to enhance customisability and improve user experience in Teams.

Chat and Channels: The December Update mentioned the new chat and channels experience, which combines the Chat and Teams areas into a single place. In order to give organisations additional time to prepare for this change, Microsoft have postponed the rollout from January to late March.

If you are currently on the new experience, and wish to switch back, you can do so by navigating to the Teams settings in the ellipsis next to search, then clicking ‘Separate’ under ‘Chats and channels’.

Notification Locations: The location of the notification pop ups that come up when you receive a call or message are now able to be customised. In the Teams settings, navigate to ‘Notifications and activity’, and scroll to ‘Display’. From here you’ll now be able to change the corner where notifications are shown.

File Preview: Now when you send a file through Teams, a preview option is available. When you send or receive a file in a chat or channel, you’ll be able to see a play button in the bottom right corner. Clicking this will expand the file view, and you’ll be able to read the document without having to open it.

For PowerPoint files, you’ll be able to play though the slideshow as it would appear being presented, with all of the animations.

At the moment the preview feature only works for certain file types such as PDF and PowerPoint, with Microsoft planning to gradually extend the support to other formats such as Word and Excel.

New Calendar Experience: Microsoft have redesigned the Teams calendar experience, to better align it with the Outlook calendar, while also introducing a number of helpful improvements.

Organising your meetings has become easier, by right-clicking a meeting,  you can create and name new categories to keep similar meetings the same colour. Charms have also been introduced, where you can give meetings icons.

The Teams Calendar now has new view options. You can apply filters to only show appointments, meetings, or certain categories. The time scale can be changed to display more or less details about meetings. When you create a view that you find yourself using often, you are also able to save a view.

When viewing a second calendar, the two calendars will be displayed on top of one another, or you are able to switch to a split view through the second dropdown in view dropdown under the ellipsis.

If you decide you prefer the old calendar, you are able to switch it back using the toggle in the top right.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat adds Pay-as-You-Go Agents

Microsoft is introducing pricing models for Copilot that deliver accessability and scaleability without locking organisations into hefty licensing commitments.

The Pay-Per-Use AI billing model allows payment through an Azure subscription, based on actual usage, rather than the number of licenses.

This pricing change will allow teams to take advantage of Microsoft’s free web-based version of Copilot to launch Copilot agents to automate tasks with Pay-as-You-Go pricing.

Copilot agents are advanced AI assistants that integrate with your organization’s knowledge and data sources to enhance the functionality of Copilot.

This pricing model will allow organisations to experiment with Copilot tools more freely, without commiting to licenses.

More on this pricing change can be found here.

Do you need help to develop your Copilot strategy or complete a readiness assessment? Reach out to our team, we’re experts in information management, security and protection in an increasingly AI enabled world.

Copilot in PowerPoint

To help with the often-giant task that is creating a PowerPoint presentation, Microsoft have introduced the Narrative Builder.

When you create a new presentation, you will be able to navigate the Copilot logo above the first slide and select ‘Create a presentation’. Here using the Narrative Builder, you are able to give Copilot a prompt to build a presentation off, as well as select a reference word document.

The Narrative Builder will then create a list of topics to generate slides on. You are able to change the order of these topics, delete them, and add more with additional prompts. For each new topic you add, you are also able to add another reference word document for it.

At the bottom of the pop up you will be able to see the estimated about of slides that will be generated, with forty being the maximum.

Additionally, PowerPoint can now summarise even longer presentations – up to 40,000 words or 150 slides.