However, before we in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, could fully integrate Copilot into OneNote, we first needed to make it more secure. We recently accomplished this internally at Microsoft by deploying labeling that makes our OneNote notebooks and files more secure. This allowed us to start using Copilot in OneNote without compromising our sensitive or classified data.

“We realized that notebook oversharing was happening significantly and that we were keeping a lot of sensitive data in our notebooks,” says David Johnson, a principal product manager with Microsoft Digital. “OneNote was the only Microsoft 365 program that didn’t support labeling, a gap that we needed to address.”

“OneNote is designed to be the ultimate collaboration tool. So, you can have OneNote as your own personal notebook, or you can share it out with other people and collaborate. People use OneNote for a lot of different things, but at Microsoft especially, it is used for things like troubleshooting guides, post-incident reviews and other very sensitive things that require a high degree of seamless collaboration.”

Faye Harold, principal product manager, Information Protection team, Microsoft Security

Our diverse and heavy use of OneNote throughout Microsoft made closing that gap a critical need.

“OneNote is designed to be the ultimate collaboration tool,” says Faye Harold a principal product manager within the Information Protection Team in Microsoft Security. “So, you can have OneNote as your own personal notebook, or you can share it out with other people and collaborate. People use OneNote for a lot of different things, but at Microsoft especially, it is used for things like troubleshooting guides, post-incident reviews and other very sensitive things that require a high degree of seamless collaboration.”

And the idea that “it’s fine” because no one will ever find your notes in OneNote?

That’s no longer a thing, if it ever was.

In the age of AI, security through obscurity is effectively gone.

“Now the construct is, ‘AI can show you everything you have access to, no matter where it is, including in your colleague’s OneNote notebooks,’” Johnson says. “Without labeling, Copilot can and will show you information that you’re not supposed to see.”

“Bringing sensitivity labels to OneNote marks a major step forward in helping tenant admins safeguard organizational data. It enables consistent enforcement of security policies across the Microsoft 365 suite, giving admins greater confidence that sensitive information in OneNote is protected and governed just like in other Office apps.”

Daniel Beade, senior product manager, OneNote product group

Permissions versus labeling

The current security measures in OneNote are permission-based, determining who can access content at a specific point in time. Labeling adds encryption and policy enforcement to ensure content is protected regardless of where it is stored or shared. And when it comes to AI, labeling establishes confidentiality and security requirements that Copilot must respect. Labeling also helps users understand the sensitivity of content used by Copilot, ensuring they handle the generated responses with appropriate care.

“Bringing sensitivity labels to OneNote marks a major step forward in helping tenant admins safeguard organizational data,” says Daniel Beade, a senior product manager with the OneNote product group. “It enables consistent enforcement of security policies across the Microsoft 365 suite, giving admins greater confidence that sensitive information in OneNote is protected and governed just like in other Office apps.”

Johnson used the analogy of a poisoned apple pie to explain further.

“Imagine if Copilot was baking you a nice apple pie and you weren’t told that the apples it used to make the pie were poison,” he says. “You probably should know that before you take a bite of that pie. Same basic idea here. You’ve got highly confidential content in use that Copilot is using to generate a response. You should be aware of it.”

A triangle deployment model

Security labeling for OneNote was deployed internally to our 300,000 Microsoft employees and vendors in April 2025, and we have updated the Microsoft 365 product roadmap to reflect our plan to make this capability generally available by January 2026 with more information to be shared in the coming months.

“The user awareness aspect of labeling is absolutely critical. When you think about labeling, it’s about user awareness of how sensitive a piece of content should be and the applicability of policies to make sure that the content doesn’t go beyond whatever limits are imposed.”

David Johnson, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Our internal deployment happened in two stages. The first stage enabled labeling in the user interface. The second stage rolled out a default policy that labeled all content with a protected label, with options for users to adjust based on the sensitivity of the content.

“The user awareness aspect of labeling is absolutely critical,” Johnson says. “When you think about labeling, it’s about user awareness of how sensitive a piece of content should be and the applicability of policies to make sure that the content doesn’t go beyond whatever limits are imposed.”

“It’s super important to have a labeling capability in OneNote, because down the road labeling is going to help enable more capabilities of Copilot that will allow users to increase their productivity.”

Humberto Arias, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

The internal deployment strategy involved a triangle model where one organization focused on security requirements, another on tenant management, and his team focused on employee experience.

The model ensured that security measures did not hinder productivity.

“Because Copilot extracts and surfaces content from various sources, it is essential for it to know the sensitivity of the content it uses to generate responses,” says Humberto Arias, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital. “So that’s why it’s super important to have a labeling capability in OneNote, because down the road labeling is going to help enable more capabilities of Copilot that will allow users to increase their productivity.”

As for those future capabilities, Beade from the product group listed three that will further enhance security within OneNote.

The first, user-defined permissions labels, or UDP, will allow tenants to define permissions at the user level. This means one of our employees could set up a UDP label and then use it to grant edit permissions to one person and read-only access to another. This is similar to what currently exists in Word, PowerPoint and Excel.

The second feature Beade mentioned is auto-labeling. This will allow OneNote to automatically label information based on criteria defined by the tenant admin. Flagging certain content automatically will help prevent Copilot from surfacing sensitive information.

Another security feature coming soon to OneNote is dynamic watermarking.

“Not only will the labeling protection be added into the file, but also watermarking will be added that will ensure everyone knows that the information is confidential,” Beade says. “All three will compliment security labeling and add more protection to OneNote.”

Adding new features to OneNote will now be much easier.

“Labeling is going to make it very seamless for us to deploy new Copilot features in the future,” Arias says. “This was an important step for us to bring OneNote up to par with the rest of the Microsoft 365 apps.”

Key takeaways

When sensitivity labels become publicly available in OneNote in January 2026, here are some of things you will be able to do with them:

• Use OneNote features with confidence. OneNote is a powerful tool for collaboration, and security labeling makes sure Copilot does not surface sensitive information from your notebooks.
• Foster collaboration without the risk of exposing sensitive data. Permission-based security determines who can access content at a specific point in time. Security labeling adds encryption and policy enforcement, protecting your content regardless of where it is stored or shared.
• Be AI-aware when it comes to security. Security labeling ensures Copilot respects confidentiality and security requirements while also helping users understand the sensitivity of content used by Copilot so they handle the generated responses with appropriate care.
• Set location label defaults. We set an encrypted protection label, limiting data to tenant members only for all our employees’ OneDrive. That made it so simply rolling out OneNote with labeling resulted in a high percentage of active sections having that default label applied.

Try it out

Try out Microsoft OneNote.

Related links

• Learn about our migration from the Windows 10 version of OneNote to the Desktop app.
• Here are our top 10 tips for using Microsoft 365 Copilot every day.
• Check out these 10 things you may not know about OneNote.

The post Confidential by design: How we’re securing OneNote for the age of AI at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

The Copilot-powered feature figures out how you work and selects what emails are the most important for you. The feature’s designed to help you focus on high-impact communications by intelligently surfacing the most relevant messages in your inbox based on your past behavior, organizational context, and other filters that you can adjust manually.

“I think it will change the relationship people have with their inboxes,” says Matthew Marzynski, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, which deployed the new feature internally at Microsoft. “It will make inboxes less passive and make Outlook an intelligent tool used to focus on what’s important.”

Natural language prompts allow you to define your priorities. You can type in instructions such as “emails from my manager” or “emails related to project X” to customize your prioritization settings. To date, Prioritize My Inbox has been rolled out to more than 2,000 email tenants, representing 3.7 million individual email accounts. It is available to all our 220,000 employees here at Microsoft.

“Imagine if everybody could have their own assistant who screens and presents you with the most impactful actions. Prioritize My Inbox is sort of like having your own personal assistant.”

Matthew Marzynski, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Getting started with Prioritize My Inbox is simple. Just click the Copilot icon in the ribbon, select “Prioritize,” and add a few statements about what makes an email high priority for you. These natural language prompts and Copilot’s machine learning capabilities are all Prioritize My Inbox needs to begin sorting all new emails you receive.

An assist from your assistant

Imagine returning to work refreshed and relaxed after a long vacation, only to open your email to find hundreds of unread messages in your inbox.

“We built this feature primarily for people who feel like they get too much mail, and it takes them a long time to sort through their inboxes…. Not only does this surface what’s important at the top of your inbox, it explains why it’s important.”

Paul Tischhauser, product manager, Microsoft Outlook

We’ve all been there, and it’s overwhelming. Thanks to Prioritize My Inbox, this common experience can be a thing of the past.

“Imagine if everybody could have their own assistant who screens and presents you with the most impactful actions. Prioritize My Inbox is sort of like having your own personal assistant,” Marzynski says. “This can increase your responsiveness, generate time savings, focus your priorities, and help you to align to business-critical communications. It also offers relief by lowering the stress we feel when faced with a huge, unread inbox.”

The case of the overflowing inbox is one of the reasons Prioritize My Inbox was created.

“We built this feature primarily for people who feel like they get too much mail, and it takes them a long time to sort through their inboxes,” says Paul Tischhauser, a Microsoft Outlook product manager who worked on Prioritize My Inbox. “They have to context-switch a lot to get through all the mail and figure out what’s important and respond to it as fast as they can. Not only does this surface what’s important at the top of your inbox, it explains why it’s important.”

No rules, just prompts

Prioritize My Inbox is different than rules-based approaches like Focused Inbox because it is context-aware and adaptive: it learns from your behavior rather than following a static if-then model.

“It takes a ‘watch me and learn how I work’ model that adapts to changes in how, and with who, we communicate,” Marzynski says.

Another way the feature differentiates itself from rules-based filtering is through personalized prompts. When you set up Prioritize My Inbox you’ll be asked to provide an example of what to label a high-priority email. Multiple prompts can be added and updated, ensuring prioritization remains relevant and effective over time.

“You can make it your own by giving it a couple of statements that are particular to you. And I think people will be happy with the results that they get,” Tischhauser says. “Be aware the first couple days as it’s prioritizing mail and you open your mail and look at the explanation of why it was prioritized—those explanations really get people excited because of two things. One is, if they did any customizations, they can see the personalization going on. And then the second thing is explainability. This feature does a great job of explaining why it did what it did, so that if you want it to behave differently in the future, you can give it feedback.”

Marzynski adds that Prioritize My Inbox can empower you to control your email when it often seems like email is controlling you.

“An inbox can start to feel like it drives your life, and it really shouldn’t,” he says. “Prioritize My Inbox is about email ruling less of your work life and getting the best outcomes from your communication stream.”

An exciting change to email

Mark Stratford is a senior product manager with Microsoft Digital and an early adopter of Prioritize My Inbox.

“People have a deeply personal connection to the way they manage and experience email. They have their own set of rules, categories, filters, and folder structure,” he says. “This is a big shift, and an exciting one, because it opens up new opportunities to improve how we stay productive in email.”

“I absolutely think that this revolutionizes email and where we will get to in the future…. It transforms what used to be a manual process into an end-to-end assistant. The potential for efficiency could be through the roof.”

Mark Stratford, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

Stratford says the feature has helped him concentrate on what’s important while spending less time dealing with his inbox.

“Not only does it help me spend less time on email, but it also tells me what’s important and why. The time savings are great, but the real value is in helping me focus on what matters most. Prioritize My Inbox does exactly that.”

He added that the personalization makes it extra useful.

“You choose what is important. You train it based on what you believe is high priority, not its assumptions,” Stratford says. “It’s designed to learn what matters to you.”

Stratford thinks Prioritize My Inbox, along with Copilot features such as email summarizing, coaching, and drafting, have the potential to change the game when it comes to managing email overload.

“I absolutely think that this revolutionizes email and where we will get to in the future,” he says. “You can have a system that identifies what’s landed in your inbox, highlights what’s important, suggests responses, and even coaches you on how to reply. It transforms what used to be a manual process into an end-to-end assistant. The potential for efficiency could be through the roof.”

Key takeaways

Here are some tips for getting started with Prioritize My Inbox at your company:

• Make email work for you. Prioritize My Inbox will save you time by summarizing and flagging important emails.
• A personalized assistant for your inbox. Over time, Copilot will be able to prioritize and deprioritize emails based on your own preferences and workflows. 
• Getting started is easy. Click the Copilot icon in the ribbon and select “Prioritize.” Then add a few statements about what makes an email high priority for you.

Try it out

Give Outlook for Windows a try.

Related links

• Control your time with Microsoft Outlook Calendar Analytics.
• Learn how we’re using AI to redefine how we work in Microsoft Outlook.
• Five ways we’re getting more out of Microsoft Teams in the era of AI and Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• How we’re recapping our meetings at Microsoft with AI and Teams Premium.

The post Wrangling our email with the Prioritize My Inbox feature in Microsoft Outlook appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft Teams Rooms is a conference room tech solution for today’s AI-powered workplace. It features modernized Microsoft Teams technologies optimized for hybrid work environments, and it has had a positive impact on productivity since being installed in thousands of conference rooms across Microsoft’s campuses.

When Teams Rooms was initially deployed in 2019, the focus was on modernizing meeting rooms with Teams-integrated features to meet today’s virtual and hybrid workplace needs.

Building on the success of that endeavor, the next iteration of Teams Rooms is Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms, which allows you to deploy the Teams Rooms experience at scale in smaller meeting rooms at a lower price point and lower maintenance costs.

Internally here at Microsoft, our work to get Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms off the ground was done in partnership with The Hive, which is a workshop on our headquarters campus in Redmond, Washington, where our engineers, architects, and designers work together to create new products and experiences that we roll into the Teams Rooms suite of products. Through research at The Hive, our team in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, partnered with the Teams Rooms product group to create Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms.

“Faster deployment combined with a simpler tech solution for our smaller meeting rooms makes Teams Rooms Express 40% to 50% less expensive than a standard Teams Room deployment,” says Roy Sherry, a principal technical program manager for Microsoft Digital who works in The Hive. “We want to look for ways to reduce costs and make our deployment process more efficient. And if we can get the cost of operating our small rooms down, then we can upgrade more of our small rooms.”

Currently the more robust version of the Teams Rooms technology solution is deployed in hundreds of conference rooms on our campuses around the globe, and our ultimate goal is to transform all our conference rooms—many of them smaller, focus rooms—using the new more affordable Teams Rooms Express solution.

When it came to creating Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms, our focus was on three main pillars: User experience, security, and cost.

• User experience: All conference rooms must meet a minimum bar for user experience that delivers an AI-powered workplace experience. The goal is to make it easy and intuitive for all of our employees to use all of our conference rooms.
• Security standards: Each conference room must meet minimum security standards to ensure the safety and integrity of the technology and data used within a room.
• Cost efficiency: By reducing the cost of deploying and upgrading rooms, the number of rooms that can be upgraded within an available budget can be maximized. This involves making the deployment process more efficient and finding ways to reduce the overall cost of room upgrades by decreasing the deployment friction and infrastructure complexity.

“The more we can put modern technology such as AI in our rooms, the better the user experience,” says Sam Albert, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital. “Additionally, modern technology in the rooms makes it a more secure environment, and if we can do that more cost effectively, then we can increase the number of rooms we can deploy.”

Creating a room-in-a-box solution

After the success of transforming larger rooms into Teams Rooms through a pilot program of 70 rooms across Microsoft campuses in Singapore, Taiwan, Munich, Vancouver, and Redmond, the goal became to create a “room-in-a-box” solution for smaller rooms. For these solutions all the components were pre-engineered and ready for quick deployment, says Sarika Kesavan, a senior program manager on the Teams Rooms product group.

“There was an opportunity with smaller rooms to create something that could be set up and ready to go in hours instead of days like it takes for the more traditional rooms,” Kesavan says.

Working with smaller rooms and having simpler technology solutions meant there wasn’t a need for a general contractor, licenses, or permits. This made setup easier and removed some of the frustrations customers expressed with the deployment process for larger rooms.

Some of the main tradeoffs of working in smaller rooms included smaller screen sizes for the Express Install rooms and a single camera instead of multiple cameras like in the larger conference rooms. For the smaller conference rooms the equipment can sit on a table, whereas a furniture base can house all the components in the smaller multi-purpose rooms.

“In the smaller rooms it’s a stand, a base with the computer sitting behind it and becomes this nice kind of all-in-one concept where the technology sits on the furniture,” says David Brown, a senior field IT manager in Microsoft Digital. “So, when you think about fixings and mountings, it is easier to deploy because you don’t have to think about things like how you’re fixing it to the wall.”

Finding the right fit for the technology

The Hive team worked with various commercial partners that specialize in mounting and furniture solutions to create stands that would be the perfect fit. One of the manufacturers was Salamander Designs.

“At the time, there wasn’t a purpose-built tabletop for video conferencing. So, we started to ideate with them jointly and through multiple conversations we landed on something that worked,” says Scott Srolis, president of Salamander Designs. “They definitely had a vision of what they wanted and knew what would work for them. We worked together to bring that vision to life.”

Salamander is one of several furniture manufacturers that will create custom stands and housing for Teams Rooms Express Installation. And several other Microsoft technology partners will be creating bundles of Teams-certified equipment to provide customers with options to choose from when it comes to setting up Express Install rooms.

Multiple Teams-certified tech bundles and various display options aren’t the only future plans for Teams Rooms Express Install. Brown says he would like to see all rooms at Microsoft upgraded to Teams rooms.

“We are always looking to improve and iterate,” Brown says. “As we continue to move away from bring-your-own-device situations, we want to have every room be a Teams Room.”

Here are some tips for getting started with Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms at your company:

• Faster deployments with pre-bundled tech: Many of Microsoft’s partners are creating bundles made specifically for Express Install.
• Teams Rooms for everyone: The interactive, hybrid-meeting-friendly features of Teams Rooms can be deployed at scale with Express Install.
• State-of-the-art conference rooms at half the cost: Faster deployment combined with a simpler tech solution makes Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms 40-50% less expensive than a standard Teams Rooms deployment.

Find out more about Express Install for Microsoft Teams.

• Watch a video about Microsoft Teams Rooms.
• Find out how telecom expenses for Florida Crystals dropped by three-quarters thanks to Teams Rooms.
• Read the Microsoft Teams blog.
• Get the latest Microsoft Teams product updates.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post A ‘room in a box:’ Upgrading our small meeting rooms with Express Install for Microsoft Teams Rooms appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Microsoft OneNote is a tool used every day by millions of people, from school teachers to boardroom executives, to keep their professional lives orderly. In October 2025 some of those lives could become a little more chaotic when Microsoft ends support for the Windows 10 version of OneNote.

To prevent that kind of disruption, organizations will need to follow our example and migrate from the Windows 10 version of OneNote to the OneNote for Desktop app. Migration is necessary because when support ends on October 14, 2025, the Windows 10 version will no longer be updated and may become vulnerable to security risks. Along with strengthened security, when you migrate to the desktop app you’ll also get better syncing and access to new features and future Copilot integration.

Here at Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’ve migrated roughly 400,000 accounts internally to the preferred app version of OneNote. This was done as part of our role as Customer Zero, meaning we validate and improve products before they go to customers. As part of that process, we often take what we’ve learned and incorporate it into the final product.

“The great thing about stress testing and migrating with Microsoft is because we are such a large company, we’ve seen all the edge cases and we’ve accounted for them, so customers don’t have to,” Humberto Arias, senior product manager for Microsoft Digital.

Our learnings from being Customer Zero range from making tweaks to the migration guide to improving the script used for migration to meet the needs of our customers.

“One thing we learned is that 60-70 percent of our enterprise customers block the Microsoft Store,” says Bolanle Soneye, a senior product manager in the OneNote product group. “This meant that those users likely were not upgraded to the most recent version of OneNote for Windows 10. So, we created a sample script where IT admins can customize to automatically update you to the right version.”

While all migration situations are unique, Arias offered these steps as a high-level overview of what a migration might look like:

• Detection: The first step in the migration process is to detect the version of OneNote being used. This involves collecting telemetry data to understand all of the versions within the tenant.
• Synchronization: The next step is to synchronize all notebooks with the cloud to ensure no data is lost.
• Installation: The OneNote for Desktop app is then installed. This ensures that employees have access to the latest features and security updates.
• Uninstallation: After successful synchronization, the old version of OneNote is uninstalled. This step is necessary to remove outdated software and prepare for the new installation.
• Resynchronization: The final step is to resynchronize all the files to the devices and keep copies in the cloud.

Different approaches for different customers

When it comes to our customers, we have three primary segments of OneNote customers: enterprise, education, and consumers. Because each one has different needs, we use different strategies for migrating each segment.

Our enterprise customers make up the majority of users who need to migrate. Our strategy for migrating our roughly 2.7 million enterprise accounts includes providing them with a sample script that is customizable for their needs. We also have a detailed migration guide for enterprise customers to follow. The experiences of 12 pilot tenants who stress tested the guide and provided feedback on their experiences were essential in formulating the migration guide.  

“Think of it as a modular toolkit,” Arias says. “It covers every step required to ensure data consistency and a frictionless experience—detect, sync, install, uninstall, and re‑sync—and customers can mix and match the pieces they need. If they’re comfortable moving quickly, they can execute the whole sequence in one shot; if not, they can start with detection, add synchronization later, and roll it out gradually.”

Because it is most convenient for IT managers of educational institutions to conduct mass migrations during breaks in the academic year, we’ve shifted our communications strategy to emphasize the importance of migration during those times. The challenge we’ve found with education tenants is they tend to keep multiple versions of the app instead of uninstalling the old version of OneNote after migration, which can create confusion for users and increase the risk of issues once the older version reaches end of support.

Looking ahead, there’s one final major opportunity for education users in the Northern Hemisphere to complete their migrations: the upcoming June to August 2025 break. We’re encouraging IT managers to take advantage of this window to ensure a smooth, timely migration and to uninstall the older version of OneNote afterward to help provide a clearer, more secure experience for everyone.

The consumer segment, which represents approximately 1.7 million people, has been the slowest to migrate. Our strategy for reaching them and encouraging migration involves in-app messaging around the sunsetting of the Windows 10 version of OneNote and the importance of migrating. Our call to action for organizations affected by this challenge is for them to use the in-app migration dialog to migrate before the app reaches end of support.

The benefits of migration

Soneye stresses the importance of migrating not just because of what you’ll lose if you don’t but also what you will gain when you do.

“We’ve heard lots of positive feedback on the improved syncing that comes with the desktop app, and you will have access to the new Copilot capabilities that we will be rolling out, alongside security labeling,” she says. “And IT admins have had a reduction in incidents and support requests related to OneNote, thanks to the migration. The benefits of migrating far outweigh the risks.”

Here is what you need to know about migrating to the OneNote for Desktop app:

• Support and security are ending: On October 14, 2025, Microsoft will end support for the Windows 10 version of OneNote.
• Keeping data safe and secure will be crucial: If you do not migrate you will be vulnerable to security risks.
• Take advantage of the new features of an improved OneNote app: When you migrate, you will have faster synchronizations and access to upcoming Copilot features within OneNote for Desktop.

Download the latest version of OneNote.

• Upgrade your notes with OneNote.
• Get your OneNote questions answered.
• Learn more about OneNote.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Mapping our migration from the Windows 10 version of OneNote to the Desktop app appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Places is a workplace scheduling tool that uses AI to make scheduling in-person meetings and working in hybrid work environments easier for you and your colleagues. It helps hybrid and non-hybrid teams align and manage schedules so they can know when the best times might be to collaborate in person or hold on-site meetings. It does that through location tracking, which can be turned on and off.

We are Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, and before we deployed Places globally here at Microsoft, we consulted with our works councils, groups of our employees who work in various geographies that advocate for the interests of employees in their region or country. One of the hot topics for works councils in today’s workplace is the introduction of AI into many areas of work.

More and more, we’re being exposed to new ways of working with AI, and we’re still learning how to use it in responsible ways. Many still have questions about its use, especially around issues of privacy. Initially, the way Places uses AI has brought up some questions from our works council countries.

“Places is actually a very simple product, but it touches on something that has huge interest in a number of works council countries, which is the aspect of tracking people’s location,” says Allan Hvass, regional experience lead for Microsoft Digital. “So even if the technology is simple, it’s a high, high-interest topic.”

{Read our guide for deploying Places at your company.}

Works councils provide a ‘golden opportunity’

While we at Microsoft Digital serve as Customer Zero—meaning our internal usage and feedback is used to shape the product before it’s launched to the public—we partner with works councils to help inform our product groups of potential concerns.

One of the keys to our strong partnership with our works councils has been being transparent with the purpose and benefits of the features we plan to roll out and being proactive with our communications. We work closely with them to ensure that everyone feels heard and protected when it comes to employee privacy.

Being proactive and starting conversations with works councils early has its benefits, according to Daniel Yaun, a senior product manager for Microsoft Digital.

“It’s a golden opportunity for us to have an open and transparent dialogue with works councils and for us to understand what the concerns are,” Yuan says.

Part of the conversations around Places with works councils involved detailing the benefits of enabling location sharing. Being clear about the benefits, such as knowing when coworkers are in the office, seeing the availability of meeting spaces, and enabling in-person collaboration, helped relieve some of the concerns raised by employees.

“In a hybrid work environment, we needed to be clear about what the value is for employees,” Hvass says. “We had to be very strong on the message of why it is a great benefit for me as an employee to be part of this and share my data. What I can gain from it and how can I help my colleagues, versus just being used for tracking whether I show up at a physical place or how many people are in a building. Otherwise, people would find ways of opting out rather than opting in.”

In the end, having a strong relationship, communicating clearly, and proactively and incorporating feedback into the final product has served us and our customers well.

“It’s really beneficial that Microsoft has a very mature process on the work of council engagements,” Yuan says.

Making a better product through works councils reviews

Aside from acting as the voice of employees in various geographies, one of the more valuable roles our works councils play is as an extension of Customer Zero. We listen to their concerns and work with product groups to incorporate their feedback to make sure the product meets their requirements.

The factors that made the rollout of Places with our works councils successful were:

• Having an established framework for working with works councils that has been successful and repeatable
• Having the ability to manage the release of certain functionality to specific markets
• Moving the product to an opt-in model
• Providing a full explanation of what the technology was doing

Jason McWreath, a director of business programs in Microsoft Digital, says there was an initial issue where collaborators could see each other’s locations across country boundaries, which had not been approved by all works councils. This raised privacy concerns and required a product update.

By acting as Customer Zero and partnering with global works councils, we heard the feedback and took that back to the product group to address the issue.  We updated Places to allow for specific targeting. This change enabled granular management at the country level, where the feature could be turned on or off for individual countries based on works council approvals. Getting approvals from works councils also allowed for Places to be updated after it was deployed.

“Instead of looking at it like these are more requirements that we need to consider, it’s more about what we can learn to enhance the product and make it more globally applicable for more customers, through the introduction of enhancements that the works councils have suggested,” McWreath says.

Due to continued privacy concerns for everyone globally, location sharing became our most debated feature and we had to address the varying privacy regulations of works council countries. By giving employees the default opt-out feature, it enables employees to choose whether they want to share their location. This has helped the product meet the requirements for global works council approvals.

The feedback we receive from works councils around AI and other technologies not only helps us effectively deploy products internally, it also helps improve products for external customers. And now that several Places features have been approved by most work councils, we can bring new features—such as the ability to locate someone where they’re sitting in a room or know whether a colleague is in a building based on Wi-Fi access—to works councils for review.

Here are some tips for collaborating with your works councils as you get started with Places:

• When working with global works councils, be transparent and trustworthy.
• Listen, learn, and implement feedback from works councils.
• After you’ve established a successful framework for working with works councils, ensure that it’s repeatable and use it to partner with them.

Get a free trial of Microsoft Places. 

• Check out a demo of Microsoft Places.
• Read our guide for deploying Places at your company.
• Learn more about our internal deployment of Microsoft Places.
• Find out how we partnered with our works councils to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Deploying Microsoft Places at Microsoft with our works councils appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Currently available to some of our employees as part of a ringed-deployment, Facilitator does the stuff none of us want to do in meetings, including taking and sharing notes in real-time, managing the meeting clock and reminding colleagues to wrap up, tracking your goals for the meeting, including highlighting when key points and decisions are made, and answering questions without interrupting the flow of the meeting.

Facilitator keeps up with your conversation and creates AI-generated notes for everyone within a single workspace. The notes are shown in the full meeting in the meeting notes windowpane, which frees meeting attendees from having to take their own notes and allows attendees to make updates and correct meeting notes in the same meeting notes windowpane. This allows them to stay present, focused, and more productive in meetings.

“It’s one of those rare features that comes along and immediately increases our productivity. Facilitator takes notes for everyone, which allows me to sit back, listen, and be more engaged.”

Chanda Jensen, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

It’s important to note that Facilitator updates your meeting notes as your conversations unfold, and your group’s collective viewpoints change. It uses the AI Notes feature to keep track of the topics, action items, and tasks shared in the conversation (please note that there is a delay in adding new and updated information as the meeting progresses).

The effective result is you no longer need to comb through your notes to see what the outcome was, Facilitator captures it for you.

“It’s one of those rare features that comes along and immediately increases our productivity,” says Chanda Jensen, a senior product manager on the deployment team in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “Facilitator takes notes for everyone, which allows me to sit back, listen, and be more engaged.”

We have deployed Facilitator to some employees internally here at Microsoft and will soon deploy it to the full company. You can learn more about Teams public previews here.

Delivering immediate value

Running late to a meeting? You can ask Copilot what you missed, or you can review Facilitator’s live AI Notes for a quick review and update.

“So many times when we come into a meeting, we’re a little bit late because we’re jumping from meeting to meeting,” says Sara Bush, a principal PM manager and leader of the Microsoft Teams deployment team here in Microsoft Digital. “Now we can use Facilitator to catch up without disrupting anyone.”

Need to catch up on the group chat? You can @Facilitator to get a summary.

Trying to remember a point without writing it down and taking your focus off the meeting? Facilitator has got you covered.

“Facilitator is there to be your champion, to be your collaborator. It’s the part of AI that has the tools and humans working together.”

Lesley Montgomery, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

You can ask a question in your meeting’s group chat, and Facilitator’s answer will be shared with all the meeting participants, or you can open your private Copilot view, and ask a question where you are the only one who sees the response in your private windowpane.

After the meeting is over, Facilitator notes are shared in the post meeting group chat in a Loop Component and via the meet’s Teams Activity icon. If people were assigned work in the meeting, you can go to either location to see what each person was asked to do.

Facilitator has become our employees’ advocate in the room that always keeps track of things for them.

“Facilitator is there to be your champion, to be your collaborator,” says Lesley Montgomery, a principal product manager on the deployment team in Microsoft Digital. “It’s the part of AI that has the tools and humans working together.”

Internal feedback leads to a better product

While they love the new capabilities, our employees wanted to make sure they can still talk securely in meetings.

“We had to show that we were using their meeting data appropriately and that Copilot and Facilitator are secure on our tenant,” Jensen says. “They wanted to know that private chats with Copilot could stay private when needed, and they can.”

Recognizing that there are times when sensitive matters need to be discussed, our team worked with the product engineering team to ensure that controls are available to allow meeting organizers and attendees to turn off Copilot and features like Facilitator when they want privacy in a meeting.

The team continues to receive and adjust to feedback it receives from employees.

“We’re continuously innovating and improving,” Jensen says. “Our users are always asking for more innovative ways to use Teams.”

“It’s amazing the response we’re getting from employees. They feel great about having more real, genuine time to focus on brainstorming, on being creative, on having time to come up with higher-value solutions that can move the company forward.”

Eileen Zhou, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

Endless possibilities

The effects of deploying Facilitator are being felt throughout the company as the benefits of employees having higher-caliber meetings are passed upward through the organization in a compounding way.

“It’s amazing the response we’re getting from employees,” says Eileen Zhou, a principal product manager on the deployment team in Microsoft Digital. “They feel great about having more real, genuine time to focus on brainstorming, on being creative, on having time to come up with higher-value solutions that can move the company forward.”

“The possibilities are endless. It’s already changing how we work, and we’ve barely scratched the surface as to what our employees are going to be able to do with this.”

Sara Bush, principal PM manager, Microsoft Digital

A great way Facilitator helps groups stay on task is by monitoring the meeting time with or without an agenda.

You can tell Facilitator to keep track of time for certain agenda items to keep meetings running efficiently. Facilitator can also send post-meeting tasks directly to the assigned owner(s) that include action items and requested deliverables. Those are just a few of the ways we’re using Facilitator to help employees save time and be more productive.

“The possibilities are endless,” Bush says. “It’s already changing how we work, and we’ve barely scratched the surface as to what our employees are going to be able to do with this.”

Facilitator is one of many new AI-infused capabilities that we’ve gradually been folding into Teams, including Copilot analyze content shared onscreen during meetings. It can answer questions based on the shared content, such as slides, documents, spreadsheets, and websites. It also suggests follow-up questions to keep the conversation going and combines screenshare with transcript and chat data to provide comprehensive answers.

Copilot works well with Facilitator as it focuses on content analysis and follow-up questions, while Facilitator manages real-time meeting dynamics, including notetaking, time management, and goal tracking.

“Copilot works like a personal assistant for users, while Facilitator helps out the whole group,” Jensen says.  

These new features build on the personal AI assistant capabilities we added to Copilot in Teams last year, including the Intelligent Recap feature. These features capture what was said and decided at the end of a meeting, create lists of action items for attendees, answer questions in real time, and provide a transcript and notes. Learn more about what it was like for us to deploy the Intelligent Recap feature here.

We’ve expanded Copilot’s personal AI assistant capabilities a step further—instead of helping one employee at a time, Facilitator serves all the people who attend a meeting together, collaboratively.

“It really can help you stay on task as a group,” Montgomery says. “Traditionally, when people take notes, they take them from their perspective; with Facilitator that’s no longer an issue, as Facilitator doesn’t bring any partialities.”

Deployment journey

We deployed early versions of Facilitator to some of our engineering teams in the summer of 2024, and as they provided feedback, the product group made improvements to the feature. In the fall, we deployed the improved version to 18,000 employees in our Microsoft Elite program.

The Elite program is made up of employees who volunteer to test new products and experiences at Microsoft. They help us in Microsoft Digital serve as the company’s Customer Zero, which refers to how we gather and send employee feedback to the product group. That feedback is then used to make improvements to the experience before shipping it to customers.

We plan to fully roll out Facilitator to all employees and vendors, with a target date of April 30, 2025.

Key takeaways

Here are some tips for getting started with Facilitator in Teams at your company:

• Enable AI-generated notes: A transcript is required to ensure that AI-generated notes are captured for your meetings and chats. Select the AI notes icon in the chat header or during a meeting.
• Use voice recognition: For meetings that include Microsoft Teams Rooms, turn on voice recognition to ensure speakers are correctly identified in the notes and action items.
• Speak clearly and concisely: Facilitator works best when there is a clear and substantive volume of content. Make sure to speak or chat in supported languages and provide detailed information.
• Collaborate in real-time: Use Facilitator to co-author and collaborate on notes during the meeting. This helps keep everyone on the same page and ensures that important points are captured.
• Review and edit notes: After the meeting, review the AI-generated notes and make any necessary edits.

Try it out

Try out the public preview of Facilitator in Teams.

Related links

• Set up Facilitator in Teams for collaborative AI-generated notes.
• Review frequently asked questions about Facilitator in Teams.
• Get early access to new features in Teams.
• Learn how we’re recapping our meetings at Microsoft with AI and Teams.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Transforming meetings: How we’re using the new Microsoft 365 Copilot-powered Facilitator feature at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

When we deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot internally at Microsoft, we thought it would save time for our employees and vendors, and it has, especially with the help of Copilot Chat.

With a Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription, Copilot Chat becomes more powerful with its ability to bring together your web and work data as your front door to Copilot. It’s accessible within the flow of where you work, including in your Microsoft 365 Copilot app, Teams, Outlook, and Edge sidebar.

“It allows you to get ahead of all the noise that’s all around you,” says Swapna Malekar, co-lead for deployment of Copilot Chat and a principal product lead in Enterprise Search on our Microsoft Digital team, the company’s IT organization. “It’s about creating a coherent experience wherever you go—whether it’s your emails, your chats, your documents, your people, your calendars, your meetings, each and every entity type is covered under Copilot Chat.”

In short, Copilot Chat, a key path for accessing Copilot, simplifies your life at work, so you have time to think and get high-value tasks done.  

Today, our employees and vendors are using Copilot Chat to get summaries of their emails, meetings, and messages; to check Teams mentions; to manage their inboxes; and to make graphics and illustrations. They’re using it to create documents and set up meeting agendas. They’re using it to draft documents, augment content, and do simple searches.

But to get these benefits, we first had to ready our employees for the change.

Employees wanted ‘more and more’ Microsoft 365 Copilot

Malekar and Anishkumar Thoppil Ramakrishnan, director of product management on the Microsoft Search team in Microsoft Digital, co-led the initial deployment pilot in May 2023, when 2,000 of our employees in sales roles were trained to use the product. Microsoft Digital used different scenarios and use cases to show that group of employees the value of Copilot and Copilot Chat.

“People were loving it more than we thought,” Thoppil Ramakrishnan says. “They wanted more and more because they were seeing the benefits.” 

By October 2023, the number of internal users rose to 25,000 when our legal and marketing teams were onboarded, and in February 2024 our company-wide rollout was completed.

Driving adoption of a powerful, easy-to-use tool

The impact of Copilot Chat was almost immediate and transformational. And as Copilot Chat usage grew, so did the focus on accuracy and reliability. We in Microsoft Digital studied the rollout closely, evaluating overall user experience and the product’s accuracy, reliability, completeness, relevancy, personalization, coherency, consistency, and ability to evolve. Of equal importance, we also compared how well it surfaced and shared workplace information.

While usage was high, the deployment team remained cautious, especially as some employees wanted more accuracy for the information Copilot Chat was gathering.

“We have to help employees use Copilot Chat to find information, but at the same time, we have to be cautious,” Ramakrishnan says. But over time, the model continued to learn and improve. And with it, accuracy and user confidence went up. “They trust it more now.”

No longer having to focus on the mundane

Advancements haven’t just focused on accuracy, but product refinements and feature releases that empower our employees to do more.

“As an employee, as a user, you want to work on the most high-priority items,” Malekar says. “Copilot Chat can help you with the mundane tasks and free up your time to think more strategically and be more effective in your communication with your stakeholders.” 

 Our employees can automate their favorite prompts and share them with their colleagues using a feature that will become widely available in the coming months. If they create a useful Copilot prompt and want to keep using it, they can save and automate the prompt by asking Copilot to run it for them later. The prompt can be scheduled to run at set times and frequencies. 

This spring, the team is releasing a new feature called Rewrite, which allows users to edit typed text for tone, format, and length within an open page in Microsoft Edge. Last year we introduced Copilot Pages—a dynamic, persistent canvas designed for multiplayer AI collaboration that our employees are now using to turn Copilot responses into editable and sharable pages. This gives users a digital place for generating, organizing and refining content in real-time.

And the product is improving rapidly, so if it can’t do something thing one day, chances are it will be able to do it the next.

This is just the start

It takes time to build new habits.

“That’s the journey we’re on,” says Tom Heath, senior business program manager for Microsoft Digital. “It’s a natural migration, and our employees are getting there.” 

Malekar believes Copilot Chat needs to be extended to include more data, domain types, and knowledge sources. In the meantime, it’s becoming more personalized—and effective—through the actions of its users. 

Heath is one of our employees who uses Copilot Chat every day. 

“There’s always a file or a conversation or something that’s happened and I can’t find it in Teams or Outlook,” Heath says. “I just put a prompt into Copilot Chat, and there it is.” 

Copilot Chat will continue to evolve at the speed of AI and the product team is continuing to share the learnings it hears from employees back to the product group. That feedback is used to make rapid and iterative improvements to the product, turning Copilot Chat into an even more user-friendly, intuitive, and easy to use tool.

“Our employees are finding wonderful and clever ways to use Copilot Chat,” Malekar says. “They are doing things with it that we never expected—it really has fueled their creativity. It’s changing the way we use and think about technology.” 

Here are our suggestions for getting the most out of Microsoft 365 Copilot at your company:

• Use Copilot Chat to help your employees quickly find and use information buried in documents, presentations, emails, calendar invitations, notes, and contacts.
• Your employees can use it wherever they work, as it’s woven into m365copilot.com, Teams, Edge, Windows, Outlook, and the Microsoft 365 Copilot app.
• It will save your employees much-needed work time to focus on their core work. In a three-month period during its deployment, Copilot Chat saved our employees 900,000 hours collectively.
• Your use rates will go up when employees realize the best way to get to value is to change the way they work.
• Teaching your employees how to prompt Copilot Chat is key. Our employees reported the feature’s usefulness went up when they learned how to write effective prompts.

• Learn how to get started with Copilot Chat using our success kit.

• Learn how we’re measuring the effectiveness of our Microsoft 365 Copilot rollout at Microsoft.
• Explore this Microsoft Learn module for more ways to use Copilot Chat.
• Read our internal guide for deploying Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Check out these 10 tips for using Microsoft 365 Copilot every day.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Taking back time: Evolving how we use Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.