Goodbyes, big changes in free Copilot and Agents

I prepared for You the summary of the most important news, announcements and articles about Microsoft 365 from the last week. Enjoy!

Building intelligent agents with Copilot Studio agent builder

Imagine a workspace where productivity flows smoothly and improves continuously. In the era of generative AI, organizations and employees are experiencing unprecedented enhancements in efficiency and creativity. Generative AI systems can automate routine tasks, freeing up valuable time for employees to focus on more strategic initiatives. These intelligent assistants analyze vast amounts of data to provide actionable insights, helping teams make informed decisions swiftly. Furthermore, they assist in content creation, data analysis, and even customer interactions, ensuring that businesses can operate more effectively and adapt to the ever-evolving market demands. This technological advancement not only optimizes workflows but also empowers employees to innovate and achieve their full potential, ultimately driving success and growth within the organization.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant, and Copilot Studio is where you easily create and manage agents – think of these as the new apps for an AI-powered world. Agents connect to your organization’s knowledge and data sources, to automate and execute business processes, working alongside or on behalf of a person, team, or organization. Agents range from simple, prompt-and-response agents to more advanced, fully autonomous agents. We envision a workplace where every organization will have agents, working on behalf of individuals, teams, or functions.

The Copilot app naming is changing again, and Free Copilot is evolving into a much more complex app.

Microsoft announced that in mid-January 2025 will roll out the first changes around Free Copilot. Since January Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat will become a flag product of Microsoft 365 that will support AI-first experience.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat (formerly Microsoft Copilot) will continue to offer web-grounded chat with the latest large language models including GPT-4o, features like Pages and file upload, and enterprise data protection at no additional cost for Entra account users.

Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat users will be able to discover, create, and use agents, including custom agents that can access shared work data in your tenant. Access to agents can be controlled and configured within the Microsoft 365 admin center. Specific agents, such as those that access shared work data, will be billed based on metered consumption for users without a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Agents grounded only on web data will be available to use at no additional cost.

End of life of Delve in Microsoft 365

In December 2024, Delve will be retired. This change was first announced in an MC Post available in the Microsoft 365 Message Center. There's also an article you can refer to, Alternatives to Delve in Microsoft 365, that focuses on helping end users find alternatives for their tasks within Microsoft 365. The purpose of this article is to assist administrators with the Delve offboarding process. Delve offers many features that are built on top of multiple Microsoft 365 services. When we say we're retiring Delve, it's important to note that we're not changing or retiring anything on the services side. Both documents and people data that are surfaced in Delve will continue to be stored and managed as today.

There are a couple of exceptions regarding data storage. Delve stores a limited set of Delve-specific data, such as list of users recently viewed in Delve, Delve favorite documents, Delve favorite tags, and some Delve-specific settings. These will be retired together with Delve. You can export this data before December 16, 2024, in Delve by going to Select settings > Feature settings > Export data.

End of life of Viva Goals

Viva Goals will be retired on December 31, 2025. Microsoft will continue to maintain Viva Goals’ availability, accessibility, and security through retirement. However, as of December 5, 2024, Microsoft will no longer invest in new feature development.

While Viva Goals is being retired, Microsoft remains fully committed to the Viva suite, continuing to innovate and deliver tools to help our customers drive meaningful business impact.

Power App experience in Viva Connections Dashboard

We are excited to announce general availability for using Power Apps cards as an extensibility option for the Viva Connections. This means that you can surface Power Platform powered experiences directly within the Viva Connections dashboard, making it easy for the employees to access their relevant applications from one centralized location.

Viva Connections is the company branded front door to employee experiences that allows them to access important apps, tools, resources in one place, surfaces the most important news/updates and enables them to take quick action on work related tasks.

Users can develop light weight apps on using Power Apps cards which can be rendered directly in the Viva Connections quick view without user being redirected away from the other relevant applications and functionalities in the dashboard.

8 Components of SharePoint Information Architecture

In today's digital age, the volume of information within enterprises is constantly growing. Without effective policies and principles for governing this information, users may find themselves overwhelmed and unable to efficiently manage their content. This is where Information Architecture (IA) comes into play. This article will guide you through the key components and best practices for architecting IA on SharePoint in Microsoft 365. IA is the practice of organizing, structuring, and labelling content in an effective and sustainable way. It ensures that information is easy to find, manage, and use. In the context of SharePoint, IA involves defining site structures, navigation, content types, metadata, and governance policies. As a business decision maker, investing in robust information architecture can be transformative. The greatest benefit is the enhanced efficiency and productivity it brings to our organization. The goal is to reduce time spent searching while minimizing duplication.

SharePoint Agents available in Teams and without M365 Copilot

Have a great weekend ??

Szymon