Start preparing for the changes that will come in January 2025

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

As an IT administrator, you might encounter situations where some of your users have unmanaged and unlicensed OneDrive accounts within your organization. Unlicensed OneDrive accounts can pose security and compliance risks, as well as create confusion and duplication of files.

Beginning January 27, 2025, any OneDrive user account that has been unlicensed for more than 93 days will undergo the following actions:

• Unlicensed OneDrive accounts subject to a retention policy, retention period, or legal hold will be automatically archived after 93 days of license removal. While these accounts will remain visible to admins through administrative tools, neither admins nor end users will have access to their content. Access will stay restricted until administrators take specific actions. (Note that these changes do not apply to EDU, GCC, or DoD customers.)
• Unlicensed accounts not covered by any retention policy or legal hold will be moved to recycle bin after 93 days of license removal.

Once billing for unlicensed OneDrive accounts has been enabled, archived unlicensed OneDrive accounts which are not deleted will begin to incur charges for both monthly storage and ad-hoc account reactivation. If the billing is put down to reactivate one particular unlicensed account, the reactivation fee is applied for $0.60/GB for that account, and from that month onward, the storage fee of $0.05/GB/Month is applicable for all unlicensed accounts within the organization for longer than 93 days.

For example, if an organization has 100 unlicensed OneDrive accounts, each consuming 1 TB for a total of 100 TB, and enforcement occurs between January and March 2025, the 100 unlicensed accounts are automatically archived. If the organization needs to reactivate a specific account in October 2025 and set up billing, they incur the following costs:

• A one-time reactivation fee of $0.60/GB for 1TB, totaling $614.40.
• A monthly storage fee of $0.05/GB for 100TB, amounting to $5,120/month starting from October 2025.

Microsoft 365 Business licenses will move to New Outlook in January by default

Starting January 2025 and over the following months, if you are a classic Outlook user on the Current Channel with a Business plan, you will automatically be switched to the new Outlook after receiving a series of in-app notifications. You can choose to switch back to classic Outlook at any time, using the toggle in new Outlook. Both users and IT Admins can also turn off the automatic switch if not ready to try the new Outlook.

We will start to roll out to users with a Business Plan in the Beta Channel in November 2024 for validation and feedback.

If you are an IT admin, you can find the instructions to opt out of this experience in Opt out of new Outlook migration.

Prepare your organization for Trial access to SharePoint Agents

During a promotional trial period starting from January 6, 2025, through June 30, 2025, organizations with 50 or more Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses automatically receive 10,000 queries per month for SharePoint agents. This trial gives users without Copilot licenses access to create and use agents. As a SharePoint admin, you can disable this trial access using the SharePoint Online Management Shell. View the Trial Agreement details.

The promotion trial goes into effect January 6, 2025, and remains active until June 30, 2025. As SharePoint agents roll out, tenants will be eligible for this promotion. You as a SharePoint Administrator or more can disable trial access at any point during the promotional period. Tenants that are eligible for the promotion see a message bar on the Copilot Admin page in the Admin Center.

2025 will be the end of the life of Office, Exchange and Skype 2016/2019

After a product's support period ends, Microsoft no longer provides:

• Security fixes for vulnerabilities that are discovered and that may make devices, apps, or servers more directly exposed to security breaches.
• Bug fixes for issues that are discovered and that may impact the stability and usability of the product.
• Technical support for problems that may occur.

Continuing to use products after their end of support can negatively impact organizational security, compliance, and productivity. Because migrations can take time, we recommend starting your upgrade to supported versions of these products as soon as possible.

Microsoft is committed to helping you make the transition to a supported configuration. Across the Tech Community today, experts on each of the products going out of support next October have published specific guidance to help you plan your move:

• Office 2016 and 2019 suites and applications
• Exchange Server 2016 and 2019
• Skype for Business 2016 and 2019
• Project 2016 and 2019
• Visio 2016 and 2019

Explore 30+ AI Agents pre-built for you in Microsoft Copilot Studio

With Microsoft Copilot Studio, you have a comprehensive tool to easily create, manage, and deploy a variety of agents. Agents use AI to execute business processes, enabling you to achieve more. These agents can range from simple, prompt-and-response agents to more advanced, fully autonomous agents and they can be published across various channels, including Microsoft 365 Copilot, Microsoft Teams, or even on your own website and mobile applications. Just as documents and spreadsheets revolutionized productivity, agents will be the next evolution in the AI era.

No matter where you choose to begin, explore the list below to understand the scope of available agents. Again, while many of these agents are ready for immediate deployment, you can always create your own in the full Copilot Studio experience, Copilot Studio agent builder, or SharePoint to better suit your specific business needs.

New Microsoft Copilot Analytics Features Now Available

In conjunction with the announcement that Viva Insights will now be included in Microsoft 365 Copilot at no additional charge as part of the new Copilot Analytics, we’re excited to announce several new features for Copilot measurement included in the Copilot Dashboard and advanced Copilot reporting in Viva Insights.

These features bring more Copilot metrics and capabilities into your analysis.

New releases and updates under Microsoft Copilot Dashboard:

• New Copilot action metrics including Business Chat (web)
• Business Chat (work) prompt action metric underneath Teams and Outlook sections
• Viva Glint & Viva Pulse integration
• Viva Pulse Copilot templates now included

New releases and updates under advanced Copilot reporting in Viva Insights:

• Copilot Business Impact Report
• Copilot for Sales (metrics and adoption report)

SharePoint Agents available in Teams and without M365 Copilot

Have a great weekend ??

Szymon