5 posts tagged with "Microsoft 365"

Giving someone access to Microsoft Copilot Studio can look like a licensing or adoption decision. A license is assigned, the maker receives access to an environment, and experimentation starts.

But something else now happens as well.

Since July 2026, every new Copilot Studio agent automatically receives a Microsoft Entra Agent ID. Microsoft describes this identity as a service principal with the Agent subtype. Copilot Studio creates and manages the identity and its credentials.

That makes maker access more than a question of who may build a chatbot. The organization is allowing people to create agents that become visible identity and lifecycle objects in its access architecture.

John Smith uses john.smith@m365wizard.com for purchasing. It works while John is in the role, so nobody stops to create procurement@m365wizard.com. john.smith@m365wizard.com belongs to John, while the purchasing process belongs to the organization.

That distinction becomes visible when John leaves. The organization converts his mailbox to a shared mailbox and removes the license to save money. The email remains available, but the personal OneDrive does not become part of the shared mailbox. It remains a separate Microsoft 365 object.

This is usually a process problem before it is a mailbox problem. If a process belongs to the organization, give it a shared identity from the beginning.

The last school bell has rung. Students are wrapping up, teachers are closing their final assignments, and Microsoft 365 administrators inherit one more end-of-year job: putting last year's class Teams away properly.

I feed Somtoday data into School Data Sync with a tool I built, and SDS turns that data into the classes and Teams used during the year. In my end-of-year process, every class Team provisioned through SDS is archived. But archiving is only half the job: the current SDS cleanup does not remove students, and removing those memberships one by one quickly becomes a mountain of Graph requests. Tony Redmond's batching article arrived at exactly the right moment.

Microsoft 365 Copilot becomes much more interesting when it stops only suggesting what to do and starts carrying out connected edits in the apps where the work already lives. That is what stood out to me in this webinar: update the plan in Word, carry the changes into Excel and PowerPoint, and then communicate them in Outlook. I have selected four shorter demos so you can jump straight to the app you use instead of watching the entire webinar.

Microsoft has a lot coming for education this summer. In this update, Mike Tholfsen walks through new AI tools for students and teachers, plus what is coming next in Teams, OneNote, Windows, and learning-management systems. Definitely worth exploring after summer break.