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M365 Perspective

Facilitator goes proactive, Cowork with Opus 4.7

Tom Arbuthnot's Microsoft 365 Perspective

Many thanks to AudioCodes, this month's community Benefactor, for all their support of the community. Check them out this week at M365 Conf, and you'll also see them at Comms vNext and Commsverse.

April Microsoft 365 and AI Workplace Briefing Video

You can check out my April update video briefing to get all the news in under 15 minutes on YouTube, LinkedIn and on the podcast.

Microsoft 365 and Copilot

On the M365 Copilot side, this month's update is dominated by Anthropic. More Claude in more surfaces, admin controls for who can run third-party models and Copilot Cowork with the new Claude Opus 4.7 model.

April 15 Copilot Licensing Changes — Now Live

The changes we covered last month are now in-product. If you have a full M365 Copilot licence, nothing changes for you. If users are unlicensed:

  • Orgs with 2,000+ seats → Copilot Chat (Basic), no Copilot in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or OneNote. Outlook integration stays. MC1253858
  • Orgs under 2,000 seats → M365 Copilot (Basic), you keep Copilot in the Office apps, but usage is governed by "standard access" (rate limited by service capacity and time of day). MC1253863

The in-product labels — Copilot Chat (Basic), M365 Copilot (Basic) and M365 Copilot (Premium) — are now visible to users, and the overview documentation has been updated to reflect them. See Microsoft 365 Copilot overview.

Copilot Cowork in Frontier gets Claude Opus 4.7

Copilot Cowork is now available to Frontier tenants, and only if you've enabled the Anthropic models. MC1265767.

Having spent real time in it, this is the Copilot I feel like we wanted when Copilot was first launched. It can send emails, book meetings, schedule tasks, build PowerPoint decks, and chain multi-step work together — all running in Microsoft Cloud containers, connected into Graph, and fully auditable. It does seem a bit fragile in preview; I've had it not work more than once, possibly due to load.

Look out for a Teams Insider podcast in the next couple of weeks with Bas Brekelmans, one of the engineers behind Cowork, on Microsoft's multi-model approach and where this is going.

Auto Critique and Model Council in Researcher

Microsoft's multi-model story is starting to show its real power: not just "pick a model", but having different models actively challenge each other. MC1265765.

  • Critique — a second model reviews a draft for structure, citation and completeness, before you get the output.
  • Council — runs the same prompt across multiple models, shows you the independent reports side-by-side, and summarises where they agree and where they don't.

Microsoft is claiming a 13.8% improvement in quality on the DRACO benchmark with Critique. We've seen this pattern of mixing models in coding for a while (OpenAI even wrote a plugin that lets you use Codex inside Claude Code), and it's genuinely interesting to see it land in knowledge work surfaces. Frontier program and Premium licence required.

Anthropic Models Default for Word, Excel, PowerPoint

A new Admin Center setting — "Copilot in M365 apps with Anthropic models" — will make Claude the default for Word, Excel and PowerPoint when enabled. MC1269241, rolling out in May, for those who have anthropic models enabled.

Third-Party AI Model Access per User/Group

Admins can now assign third-party model provider access to specific users or groups — up to 999 groups/users, including nested groups. MC1263276.

Rather than all-on or all-off for Anthropic across the tenant, you can allow it for users or countries where you're comfortable with data processing outside the EU Data Boundary, and keep it off everywhere else.

EU Flex Routing - allowing LLM inferencing outside the EU Data Boundary during peak demand

Microsoft is introducing flex routing to allow LLM inference to burst outside the EU Data Boundary during peak demand, maintaining the Copilot experience. Data stays encrypted in transit and at rest, and only limited pseudonymised data is stored outside the EU for security and operational reasons. MC1269223.

It's enabled by default from April 17th (this is why you have to keep on top of these changes). Some organisations will accept that trade-off for better availability; others — particularly those with strict data residency commitments or in regulated sectors — definitely won't.

This, combined with the Anthropic-outside-EUDB story above, makes it pretty clear that compute capacity inside Europe is a real constraint for all the frontier models.

New SharePoint Experience

A meaningful SharePoint redesign. MC1240699.

The new SharePoint app bar introduces Discover, Publish and Build surfaces, along with updated page, news, library and list experiences. The message centre post is the best single source — it calls out clearly which features are gated by the M365 Copilot licence and which are in the box. Jeff Teper and I went deep on the direction of SharePoint on a recent podcast, if you want the broader context.

Microsoft Teams and AI Powered Workplace

Teams Licensing Changes Now Live

As of April 1, advanced events (town halls, webinars up to 3K/10K) are in Teams Enterprise, Microsoft Places (Finder + Explorer) is included with E3/E5 and Business SKUs, and Teams Shared Devices is now Teams Shared Space. Attendee Capacity Packs (5K–100K) remain a separate purchase. Teams Premium keeps its higher-end features — advanced protection, Queues app, branding, intelligent recap, and translated captions.

A really good news story for a lot of organisations that couldn't previously justify the premium licence for events and places.

Chat and Collaboration — Quality of Life and Security

Several nice updates:

  • Multi-tenant, multi-account — unified activity feed across all your tenants, respond without switching. A huge one for anyone working across orgs. MC1184992
  • Enter key control — choose whether Enter sends or inserts a new line. A genuinely contested preference. MC1217643
  • Centralised Drafts view — every unsent draft in one place. MC1223827
  • External file sharing in external chats — files and Loop components with automatic permission handling. MC1181772
  • EXIF metadata auto-removal — GPS and device metadata stripped from shared images. MC1217997
  • Mark All as Read (Shift+ESC) (Roadmap 557974) and improved image lightbox / Mac Spotlight actions (Roadmap 554924)
  • Simplified external collaboration controls — Open / Controlled / Custom presets. MC1183006
  • Numeric-only meeting passcodes — GA April. MC1232096 / Roadmap 555858
  • Third-party AI bot detection in meeting lobbies — bots labelled distinctly in the lobby so you can keep them out with a bit more confidence. GA early June. MC1251206 / Roadmap 558107

Meetings

  • Annotations on a shared window — annotate a single shared app rather than the whole desktop. MC1234561
  • Audio Recap in 7 new languages — Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish. MC1239183
  • Meeting notes for instant meetings — Loop-powered notes for Meet Now. MC1218712
  • Video-based intelligent recap — narrated highlight videos of the meeting. An interesting concept; will be curious to see how useful this actually is vs. the text summary. MC1261588
  • Interpreter improvements — Traditional Chinese as the 10th language, custom dictionary, auto detection. MC1267977 / MC1266022
  • AI meeting recap without transcript — long-asked-for capability for orgs that don't want to transcribe. You get an AI summary, nothing else is stored. I'm slightly wary — if there's no transcript, what do you verify the summary against? But the demand is real. GA June. MC1275312
  • AI-generated meeting archive policy — long-term Copilot recall beyond transcript retention. An AI-built memory across many meetings, which will be very interesting from both a productivity and compliance perspective. Only just hit the roadmap. Roadmap 558933
  • Test mic and speakers before joining — record-and-play-back check at the pre-join screen. Such a small thing, and so overdue. Roadmap 560074

Teams Phone

  • Copilot in Teams Phone now powered by M365 Copilot Chat with Work IQ data during calls — bringing your organisational context into the call surface.
  • Multi-line support — up to 10 numbers per user, across Operator Connect / Direct Routing / Calling Plan, including from multiple regions or countries where regulation allows. Early June. MC1253752 / Roadmap 557716
  • Legacy phone retirement — specific Poly Trio, Yealink and Crestron models will be disconnected from the service on June 1. If you have these devices, plan replacements now. MC1229952
  • Report a Call — flag suspicious calls as scam/phishing from call history. GA late April. MC1223828

We'll hear more from the Teams Phone team when they join Teams Fireside Chat in May.

Facilitator — Proactively Answering Questions

One roadmap item I want to call out specifically: Facilitator detecting and answering questions proactively, targeted for June. This is Facilitator moving from passive note-taking to actively listening to the meeting content, spotting questions being asked, and offering up answers by going off and searching. Roadmap: 558341.

Teams Rooms and Devices

New Certifications

  • Cisco Room Kit Pro G2 — certified for Microsoft Teams for large rooms (4.5 m x 8.5 m). MDEP-based device with a lot of connectivity and extensibility.
  • Barco bundle with Huddly — a new certified bundle for Teams Rooms, giving Barco another route-to-market with cameras and capabilities built in.

Roadmap

  • Cross-platform SIP join from Android — the capability Windows Teams Rooms have had for a while via certified interop (Cisco, Pexip), now coming to Android Teams Rooms. Requires Teams Rooms Pro. June. Roadmap 558539. I'll be doing a session with the CTO of Pexip soon on how the interop works technically and commercially — look out for it.
  • Book future meetings from Teams panels — walk up, browse the calendar, reserve the room, add guests. May. Roadmap 557168
  • Digital signage on Teams panels — nice addition to the panel story. May. Roadmap 558852

New on Empowering.Cloud

Teams Insider Podcast

Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and YouTube

Events

Online events:

In-Person events:

More on our events page.

The Microsoft AI Powered Workplace team is bringing the AI-Powered Workplace Tour to 4 European cities this spring.

🇬🇧 London — May 8 → https://aka.ms/AIPWPTourUK

🇩🇰 Copenhagen — May 13 → https://aka.ms/AIPWPTourDK

🇫🇷 Paris — May 21 → https://aka.ms/AIPWPTourFR

🇳🇱 Amsterdam — June 16 → https://aka.ms/AIPWPTourNL

As always, if you have any questions, corrections, thoughts, or feedback, please reply.

I read all the replies. I really do want to hear your thoughts.

Thanks

Tom
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