Tom Arbuthnot's Microsoft 365 Perspective

Many thanks to Logitech, this month's Empowering.Cloud Benefactor.

I spoke with Grégory Franc de Ferrière at Logitech about their 3 certified native Bluetooth headsets for Microsoft Teams (they are the only vendor certified so far, find out why).

Microsoft Teams Monthly Update Video August

Check out my monthly Microsoft Teams update video for August, all the news you need to know in less than 14 minutes on LinkedIn or Empowering.Cloud.

You can also catch the audio version on the Teams Insider Podcast.

Microsoft Earnings FY2025 🔥

Microsoft crushed FY25, we just got FY25 Q4 results (April to June 2025). Big growth year driven by cloud and AI (but also huge investment in AI). Revenue hit $76.44 billion with Microsoft Cloud up 23% year over year and Azure up 34% year to date (largely AI-driven).

M365 average revenue per user climbed again this quarter, attributed to E5 and Copilot adoption. The M365 commercial seats grew 6% year over year, mainly from SMB and frontline workers.

We didn’t get exact Copilot numbers, but Microsoft shared that the Copilot family of apps has surpassed 100 million monthly active users (mixing commercial, consumer, and GitHub). I would like to see a breakdown of M365 Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat usage.

Microsoft Teams News

Mercedes Teams Integration in Cars 🚗
Mercedes is adding a Teams app in-car with audio and video support. When stationary, you get full two-way audio and video calls. When moving, inbound video cuts off, but your video feed continues (people can still see you driving). You can disable video while moving if you prefer.

Safety debates are already happening on LinkedIn. Interested in your thoughts - useful feature or safety concern?

Mercedes is going all-in with Microsoft, having also integrated Intune and with in-car Copilot coming soon.

Intelligent Meeting Recap Enhanced 📝
Intelligent meeting recap will soon include screen-shared content. Snapshots of content shared during meetings will be captured in both visual pictures and the content will be integrated into the summary text. MC1115314 September.

Copilot Analysis of Screen Shared Content Postponed ⏸️
Unfortunately, Copilot’s ability to analyse screen-shared content during meetings has been indefinitely postponed. The theory was that snapshots would feed into Copilot's reasoning for questions. As above, it's still coming to intelligent recap; it's not clear why Copilot analysis was delayed. MC998512.

Emoji Reactions to kick off Power Automate Workflows 😊
You can now trigger Power Automate workflows based on emoji reactions to messages in channels or chats. A popular feature in the Slack world - nice to see it coming to Teams. It's limited being set up for a particular chats/channels. Microsoft Docs.

Dropped Metered Teams Graph API Charges 💰
Microsoft is dropping incremental/consumption charges for what they called metered Graph APIs. These APIs export data from Teams chat, channels, meeting transcriptions, recordings, etc. The cost is being dropped starting end of August.

Great news for ISVs pulling data out for migrations between tenants and AI scenarios wanting meeting transcripts or channel content. More details on Empowering.Cloud (MC1122144). There was a big positive reaction to this on LinkedIn.

Teams Phone

Teams Desk Phones Getting AI 📞
The Copilot journey is coming to desk phones with several new features:

- Suggested prompts on the phone when Copilot is running in calls
- Call summary on transfer - send summaries from the desk phone screen to other Teams users on transfer.

More in MC1094046

We also now have Real Time Text (RTT) support to meet European regulation requirements.

Important Outbound "on behalf of" Call Routing Changes. ⚠️
Significant change to Teams Phone routing for “calling on behalf of” scenarios (auto attendant/call queue outbound calls).

This affects scenarios such as security teams with mobile devices or shared offices, where incoming calls need to be pushed out to mobile devices. Check message centre items and consult with your operator if you are using Operator Connect.

Microsoft is changing how this works:

🟣 Operator Connect: Check with your operator on charging models - some will charge incrementally, some require DDIs for auto attendants/call queues, some need user/service number costs. MC1123837

🟣 Calling Plan users: You’ll need pay-as-you-go calling plans on all resource accounts for outbound calls. MC1123835

Microsoft Places Updates

Places gets a web-based management portal in August - no more PowerShell scripts! This will be a big step forward for manageability. MC1122163

New desk status modes coming: unavailable, assigned, reserved, and drop-in. MC1122162

September brings map-based desk booking on desktop and mobile clients with a visual map interface. MC1124563

Places Directory APIs are now available in Microsoft Graph Beta for testing.

First Unify Certified Contact Centers

CentrePal and AudioCodes are the first certified unified contact center (the new name for what was “Power”). Research comparison and who else is pending for Unify here.

Unify solutions use Azure Communication Services to route calls and integrate with Teams. Unify and Extend have different capabilities. I recently did a webinar with Matt Landis talking about the differences and which is best; you can catch that here.

Microsoft 365 Copilot News

GPT-5 Microsoft Day One Launch 🚀
ChatGPT-5 launched and hit ALL Microsoft properties on day one. I had GPT-5 in M365 Copilot before my paid OpenAI Plus plan! Models available across AI Foundry, Copilot Studio, GitHub, M365 Copilot, and even coming in free Copilot chat.

Early hands-on shows this model is a step forward with fast response options and depth reasoning without choosing specific models.

Copilot Chat Outlook Email Summaries 📧
Interesting development: Copilot Chat (the free/included version) will soon summarise email threads in Outlook - both classic and new Outlook. This further blurs the line between what Copilot Chat can do and what requires the full M365 Copilot license. MC1124564. August to October.

Copilot in Word the way it should be - Continuous Re-editing ✍️
Coming September: Copilot in Word will continuously re-edit documents. Currently, it generates initial documents but can’t further update them from the chat pane.

Soon, it’ll work like GitHub Copilot - instructions in chat pane will be able to continually update the document. Significant improvement to the Word Copilot experience. MC1129126 September.

New on Empowering.Cloud

• Copilot Agent Business Use Cases: Custom Agents with Microsoft Copilot Studio with Alev Tamer and Chris Wheeler, Senior Copilot Solutions Engineers at Microsoft.
• Microsoft Teams Native Bluetooth Headsets Explained: Say Goodbye to Dongles with Grégory Franc de Ferrière, Director of Products at Logitech.
• Neat's Latest Meeting Room Innovations with Lee Edgerton, APAC Alliances at Neat
• Microsoft ends Charges for Select Teams Metered Graph APIs

Teams Insider Podcast

• Understanding AI Assisted Tech and the European Accessibility Act with Neil Milliken, Global Head of Accessibility at Atos
• Scaling Partner Management of Teams Phone in SMB and Midmarket with Mark Herbert, cofounder of Call2Teams
• AI, AV, and the Evolving Role of the Integrator with Dave Hatz, VP of Machine Intelligence at CTI
• Managing Microsoft Teams at Enterprise Scale with Callum Moore, Enterprise Product Manager for Microsoft Teams

On Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music and YouTube

Events

Online events:

• Teams Fireside Chat with Martin Boam, Architect - Center of Excellence at Microsoft - 14th August
• Microsoft Teams Devices Ask Me Anything - 20th August
• Teams Fireside Chat with Patrichi Dash, Product Manager, Dynamics 365 CS at Microsoft - 11th September
• Copilot Fireside Chat with special guest - 24th September

In-Person events:

• Microsoft UC User Group London September 2025 - 24th Sept
• UCX London - 1st - 2nd October - planning some great Microsoft talks and a user group takeover

More on our events page.

As always, if you have questions, corrections, thoughts, or feedback, please reply and let me know. I read all the replies.

Thanks

Tom

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