- Welcome to episode 370 of the Microsoft Cloud IT Pro podcast recorded live on February 9th, 2024. This is a show about Microsoft 365 and Azure from the perspective of it pros and end users where we discuss a topic or recent news and how it relates to you. In this episode, Ben and Scott circle back to Microsoft 365 copilot where they discuss the recent changes to Microsoft 365 copilot licensing, which now allows tenants with less than 300 users to purchase licenses.
They shared their experiences with Microsoft 365 copilot and their own tenants and explore its capabilities beyond just a summarization tool. They also delve into how it can assist with Outlook, word, PowerPoint. Microsoft teams tune into this episode to hear their thoughts and insights on this powerful tool. Here we are, we shouldn't ramble, but I've been so scatterbrained this week. It's been busy the last, it hasn't slowed down like ever since December.
I started getting busy in December and I feel like I've just been slammed ever since December - . Yeah, it's weird out there, right? Like I don't know how you feel or how most folks feel in their job, but it's pretty easy some days to walk away and go like, I think I did too much today, . Like I was, I was talking to another person on our team the other day and they go, yeah, I feel like I'm like an FT plus one.
Sometimes it's like, hmm, I don't know that I could justify like feeling like I'm really like two Xing it. But yeah, there's times like definitely like 1.5, especially when I realize that I'm to the point now where I'm like on one meeting but I'm maybe chatting in a window on another meeting or I'm like, oh hold on, I'll be right back and be right back is I gotta go join another call for five minutes and then go take care of whatever fire is over there and then come back over the other way.
So, uh, I don't know where rear relief comes but take time off. That's, that's what time off is there for. - I should, but I am totally with you. I, I just looked I could, I am actually probably close to one point fiveing it 'cause I looked, it's the 9th of February and because I do the whole consulting contracting thing, like I kinda guide how much I'm doing. There's certain points I wanna hit in terms of number of hours by certain points of the month, all of that.
Considering that's the ninth, we're not quite a third of, well it's February, it's a short month so we are a third of the way through it. But in terms of hours I'm at about half of what I normally do. So current trend, I will work about one and a half more hours this month than is my goal or maybe 1.5 x - . Not, not just one and a half hours more. - Yes. 1.5 times. 1.5 times the amount , I mean it makes for a little nice February bonus when payday comes, but in terms of my sanity it's not good.
- Not so much. Yeah, no. So I'm curious. We should do a kind of wraparound on co-pilot as well. Okay. Kind of before we get into today's topic. So I think you've had an opportunity to play with co-pilot a little bit maybe in sandbox environments, but certainly like availability out there, like it's available in more places. Yes, you have the opportunity to unlock it for personal use.
There's like copilot pro for MSAs for like Microsoft accounts that you can go and get for like a personal Microsoft account for $20 a month and then there's the M 365 copilot variance, but those got unlocked for tenants with less than 300 users. I got access to copilot about a week ago, maybe a week or two ago. Okay. I had the flu one week so I was kind of out of it.
But I know there's been a lot of folks that are kind of coming back and maybe don't have it in their own tenants yet or certainly not actionable on top of their own data. And I just kind of wanted to maybe give a little bit of a review as somebody who recently got access to it and has admittedly only scratched the surface. But I think I get a sense for, or I'm starting to get a sense for where it's helpful for me and my job.
- We could talk about a whole bunch of things we could punt and go completely to copilot because there is some interesting things. So like you said, I had it in Sandbox for a little while and then shortly after we got it in Sandbox I, they lowered that limit under 300 and I was like, you know what? Sandbox is cool, but to your point it's not my data. So I went and I bought two licenses for my tenant the day they dropped that.
Well the day after they dropped that 300 license limit because the only way to get it at least, oh it did show up. I went and looked. The only way to get it like that first week or so it came out was through a CSP and my CSP is me, but my company I used for my CSP - Weird limitation by the way. - Yes. The company I use for my CSP, 'cause I'm like, I think it's technically an indirect CSP didn't have it available in their marketplace till the day after. So then I went and got it.
It does look like now you can go get it through just the normal M 365 marketplace. It just logged in as an admin and another tenant and it is showing up there as available to just go in and purchase right through the like admin do microsoft.com. But I have had the chance to use it some too. So do you wanna talk about uses for it? How much do you wanna talk about copilot today Scott? - I was gonna kind of scratch the surface of it, but we keep going down this rabbit hole. Okay.
- We can scratch the surface. - I will say as someone who also pays for chat GPT, like I wanted access to chat GPT plus and kind of the different models and things that come along with it. Like I was really down on chat GPT, like I, I was seeing a lot of the examples that were out there for what folks were doing with it and I was either physically constrained or artificially constrained due to like my employer and the nature of things that I work on, right?
Like so like lots of stuff is NDA so I can't take say like an internal roadmap or like an internal strategy in a given area and like copy pasta that thing and put it over in chat GPT. Like that's just not gonna fly. It's not gonna work and I'm not gonna do it.
So I think for like for me chat GPT and even co-Pilot Pro, like I'm missing out on a lot of the things that would make it valuable to me because back to that whole like were like 1.5 x-ing our jobs, like we're spending almost more time at work than we are on the personal stuff at this point.
So that's where like all the data and all the gravity and all the things live, I've also found that chat GPT is like a singular tool is very much just that like it is siloed and, and it and it's very off on its own versus co-pilot which has kind of been a little bit muddy in the M 365 space for me.
Like what's the distinction like say with like a team's premium feature like meeting recaps versus co-pilot, like the whole nuance is lost on me at this point because there's things like generative AI that runs across the transcript and gives you, you know, an overview of the meeting and what was said in it, what are next steps, action items, all those kinds of things.
So what I like about it off the cuff is having access to a rich set of like features for generative AI across workloads is kind of awesome 'cause it's, it's very consistent in that. So things like teams like hey I'm gonna record a teams meeting. That meeting is going to be transcribed and because it's transcribed, the large language model that copilot uses can run across it for summarization. So things for like meeting recap that stuff is awesome.
I think the way I framed it like in in the Discord is like it's really clutch, it's hit or miss with names like and that's to be expected to a certain degree. I think like I work for a multicultural multinational organization like I don't expect it to nail every single name that it puts into things either for people or products but like gets close enough that I can figure it all out.
I think the best things there for like the generative meeting recaps is auto capture of next steps surprisingly accurate and doesn't hallucinate a lot. Seems to hallucinate a little bit more in the notes maybe and I think it's just giving like extra alliteration sometimes than it does in things like next steps.
And then I think like, and this is again muddy for me, there's some kind of cool features in like meeting recap in teams itself and the team's client and the new client that they kind of like go together with the generative AI and the summarization and they make it all really cool. So like on the meeting recap pane, now when you hit play on the recording you can actually jump to like where the person is talking.
So I know a stream could always jump to where it was in the transcript, but this gives you a bunch of visual indicators. So like I can see that like, oh Ben and Scott are in this meeting and I'll actually see a row for Scott and a row for Ben and then I can click just where Ben talked like I know like, hey about 30 minutes into this meeting Ben talked about this thing here. You can just go ahead and click that and pull it up and it's all good.
It also does an excellent job of extracting the meeting chat and any of the artifacts included in the meeting chat. So I don't know about, you hop on a lot of, I hop on a lot of meetings and things like links to docs or links to external sites. All those things are shared in the meeting chat and the recap just pulls all that stuff together. So that's super cool. Another team slash copilot crossover is co-pilot in a teams meeting that's already in progress and being recorded.
So you can have access to copilot chat as like chat just for me between me and copilot while a meeting is going on. So that's great if you're in passive meetings, like you can actually ask copilot like hey what just happened in the last three minutes? And it'll go back in the transcript and pull it out for you.
Like if you misheard something like you don't have to stop the whole meeting and interrupt if you're a couple minutes late to a meeting you can say in copilot, just catch me up and it just goes back and kind of ingests the transcript and gets it to where it needs to be. Such cool features that I'm basically recording every single teams meeting I'm in.
Whether it's like a meeting that I set up personally, like I'm kind of like recording everything other than one-on-ones right now because I'm finding it so valuable to have access to the generative AI summaries, recaps and just the ongoing things in there and even the ability to go back later. Like you can go to copilot in teams like your actual copilot app in teams or your copilot chat and you can say like, Hey tell me what happened between Scott and Ben in that meeting last week on Friday.
And as long as this thing's recorded and it's out there, it'll just go back and scrape the transcript. It'll scrape the chat from the meeting and all the things and kind of like give you like a net new like mini recap right there. So it's all very good for that. I also like the generative AI for presentations.
So copilot in PowerPoint like hey go take this specification or this kind of like product requirement doc or this, you know, deck on a status update, whatever it was and turn it into this other thing. And that's good when it works. I don't think it works as often as it's supposed to. Mostly because of token limits in the language models.
So I think I'm really running into the problem where like a 20 page doc is just too much versus like a two page doc for it to ingest and put all of those things together. So like when it hits it's awesome. It's like ooh that's great. It just isn't a hit maybe as much of some of these stuff in teams and it's very nebulous to me as an end user. Like what am I actually encountering? What's, what's the limitation? Is it token limits?
Should I only be working with docs that are of a certain size, be it number of pages? I imagine it's gotta be like number of words, right? For the tokens that are driven into the LLM or something like that but it's kind of opaque and not great there. And then I think my last point about all of this stuff is, and I was kind of getting here with chat GBT as well is you do have to become a prompt engineer.
So kind of taking a step back and saying like, hey, this thing that I'm using is a tool, what's the best way for me to use this tool? Which I imagine lots of us do in other places, right? Like most of the people I know don't just type random strings into a Google search. They know how to like constrain strings with quotes. They know how to put binary operators in there like show me this but not this thing.
They know how to dial it into like a certain file type like hey search for you know, just PDFs in in my search results and and things like that. And just the way you learn to be a power user for things like maybe like Google search or you learned all the keyboard shortcuts and a bunch of like power functions and Excel or anything else like that.
Like you do have to go back and spend time on prompt engineering what makes a good prompt and how you can get things to kind of where they need to be in prompt plans. So one of my suggestions there is Microsoft has a site that they stood up as part of copilot. So if you go to copilot.microsoft dot coms, copilot.cloud, do microsoft.copilot.cloud.microsoft man, these dude new like.cloud things are killing me. Copilot cloud microsoft slash prompts.
It brings you into a like structured prompt experience and it helps you just kind of figure out like hey, what are some getting started prompts maybe what are some more advanced prompts that I can do with this tool to make it all kind of come together and really shine for me? - It's been interesting. So it's, you've primarily just been using Athe in teams and maybe a little bit in the office or like meetings focused on meetings. - I've been using it in teams, I've been using it in office.
The other place I'm using it a bunch is Outlook. So I do a lot of email from my phone and having access to co-pilot on my phone is kind of cool at, at least inside of Outlook. So I get, I typically like get a lot of escalations so I'm added into an email thread after it's already been going for like a week and it could already have a chain of you know, 20, 30, 40, whatever, how many, however many like responses have already gone through it.
And in the past I've kind of declared bankruptcy, somebody sends me an email and sometimes I'll look at it and I'll go like no I'm just not gonna read this. Like you really need to summarize it for me, right? Like gimme a recap of where things are at, don't just plus one me in and then expect me to solve it for you.
And that little button right there in in Outlook mobile is awesome 'cause now I get that thing, I can just see like in the scroll bar how big of a thread it is and how much it's going and I can just hit that little button and it kind of summarizes it for me, which is great. So you know, the theme of it like is very much summarization like generative AI around summarizing other things that are out there, like written word kind of things. And I think that's okay 'cause it does provide value.
- I've been doing some of that. The teams meeting one is really nice, I need to record more of my meetings. I wish there was a better way to just set like a global flag of record all my meetings unless I tell that to oh my gosh - So much. So I want that. Yes. - Like I don't want to have to go in and edit them. I mean you can do like templates and stuff, but I just want like a default setting record all my meetings, prompt the users, like whatever we need to do for the legal things.
I just want that to be the default setting. One interesting thing, I didn't realize this, so before co-pilot you could use Teams Premium for doing the same thing, right? If you're not using any of the other teams premium features, you can just do co-pilot. Like there's a feature overlap there between teams Premium and co-pilot where the meeting recap is a licensed feature of teams premium and of co-pilot.
So depending on your usage of other stuff outside of like meeting recap in teams, you can go one of two ways to license the whole AI meeting recap thing. - Very much so. And I think that's like, it's a weird, - It's odd - Nuance and that's where I was saying it gets very murky all of a sudden. 'cause it feels like a lot of those things we're like, it's in my brain I think, you know, I could be conflating it but it's all just co-pilot at the end of the day for me.
Like it is all generative AI summarization, blah blah blah on top of the thing, right? Yep. And getting it going. So like I really don't care what we call it if we call it Teams premium or blah blah blah. But it, it's the same fundamental experience. - It's the same functionality - As like an end user. Yeah. To figure that stuff out. So, - But I've been playing with copilot, I've done a few things.
So one, just to test it out, I actually did go into PowerPoint and said generate a presentation for me based on a session title and a session abstract. It's not perfect like there's definitely repetition in it but it like went in and created like a 12 or 13 slide PowerPoint presentation and it did a decent job of pulling in different bullets of putting graphics in my slides.
I'm not gonna use this for going and maybe creating a session, but there's definitely some useful features there in terms of quickly getting, I would say drafts, right? I think it's a little bit of that emphasis that this is still there to help you not to do everything for you. So that was interesting. But I have been playing more with just the copilot app in teams.
To your point about that switch where chat, GPT, copilot, pro Bing chat, whatever you want to call it, doesn't have the context of your Microsoft 365 environment. But having copilot that you can go in and have conversations with in teams. One thing it does do is it gives you the ability to start new chats. But also one of the things you mentioned Scott, where you couldn't always go back and see previous chats, you can go see all your previous chats that you've had with copilot chat.
I don't know how far back it goes. - You can, which is nice. It is. It seems to cut off at some point. Like I don't know the exact number off the top of my head where it cuts off, but I do remember like it starts to drop off the list. - Yeah, the oldest one I see in mine is the 16th. So it's at probably at least 30 days. January 16, sorry it's at least 30 days. But having that conversation history. But you can start doing some fascinating stuff with co-pilot chat in teams.
And this is, I'll send you this prompt. I saw this one the other day in a training. I was actually on co-pilot where it's, look at my calendar over this coming week, create five to seven categories that describe how I spend my time and give me a short description of each category, an estimated percentage on time I spend on each.
And I was talking to one person that actually dropped this in Teams chat and it spit back and they were like, I spent 50% of my meetings with internal people at our company. I should probably be focusing a little bit more on some customer conversations - To the murkiness thing. How is that different than the Veeva Digest that I get at the beginning of every week that says, Hey here's how you spend your time, - Here's how you spend it. I mean there are definitely some overlaps there.
I think here it's diving into it, although I would say it's not perfect 'cause I've played with some other ones like how many emails did I send this week? Or which domains did I email the most? How many meetings do I have this week? I asked at how many meetings I'm multitasked in. It was the same number that I had meetings this week. Probably not a good thing. But , the fact that you can go in and start sifting through your data and to your point, you still have to get good.
I need to improve at some of these prompt engineering and coming up with various prompts for how do I ask copilot things in certain ways to get the responses and the information out I want. I also was playing, I'm still trying to get this figured out, the concept of add-ins in copilot and Jira already came out with an add-in for copilot. So in theory you could go into teams and ask about overdue tasks and upcoming tasks and spit out my tasks that are the most overdue.
I haven't gotten that working yet. There's some hoops to jump through with add-ins from what I've found. And I am apparently still missing something. But it'll also be really interesting to see if companies start building in add-ins.
Companies like Jira where maybe you're tracking your tasks or I don't think that DevOps is necessarily integrated by default or any of those other third party applications that maybe already have add-ins for Microsoft 365 that copilot will then be able to pull data from when it responds to those different conversations. So from my perspective, that's what I've been using.
I've been playing with, I don't know that I've necessarily figured out all the business use cases for it and ones that I like, but that conversation in the co-pilot in teams, because it has access to all my data is kind of nice. Even I would say the other thing like presentations that I've given the ability it has to go look at all my files and I'm like, okay, where do I have this? It's search ish. Like some people could say, well you already had that in SharePoint search.
And to a certain extent I think it's just the experience is a little bit different. - It very much is. So, uh, I'll give you a concrete example there of where that's been super helpful for me. So the other day I was working on some requirements documentation for an area. Okay. I needed some data about another part of our platform to like pull in for context on like, hey, why we'd wanna change this part of the service because this is where another part of the service is going.
Yep. I had that conversation with somebody else about like, hey the, this other part of the service is going in a different direction like over a year ago. But I remember having the conversation and I remember who it was, who it was with. So I was able to go and ask copilot, what can you tell me about Project X, Y, Z? From a meeting with let's say Ben about a year ago and he presented a PowerPoint to me, it pulled back the stupid PowerPoint like it gave me a link to it.
It said, Hey is this the right PowerPoint that you were looking for? I was like, oh my gosh, yes. And could I have gotten that another way? Well yeah, I could have gone into this maybe like my calendar and outlook and I could have searched for the meeting and but then I would've had to have like the right subject or you know, the, the right incantation of things to, to get to where, where it needs to be. So it was super helpful for that. It's been helpful in I think writing as well.
So I tend to do a lot of things where, you know, you write kind of like a big document. Like I could take like show notes for this as an example, right? We kind of write a document, we put a bunch of bullet points in it, things like that. And then there's just links sprinkled throughout it. So lately I've been telling, like in some of the documents I read, I'm like, Hey can you like in the appendix, like I'll be in the appendix section.
I'll say like Co-pilot, build me a table here that lists all the links in this document and make one of the columns the title of the uh page that it links to and it just automatically goes out and scrapes that stuff and pulls it down and just like boom, boom, boom. Like it builds you a table super slick when it works. . Yeah. - Do you feel overwhelmed by trying to manage your Office 365 environment? Are you facing unexpected issues that disrupt your company's productivity?
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I think that's where copilot, even from my experience tends to excel is not not creating stuff. It doesn't always do a great job creating stuff from scratch. But if you can feed it that specific information or tell it, give it good specifics about what you're looking for from a PowerPoint presentation, help me go find this conversation or this presentation or take this document and pull all the links out of it. I feel like it does a better job.
Some of that with some of that I've also used, have you played or tried the, the email coach yet in Outlook? This one's also been interesting to me. - , I have not been brave enough to . I was talking to a couple folks about this the other day 'cause we, we were going back and forth, right? I, I kind of, you know, somebody asked in our discord like what are the use cases for this beyond summarization? So, you know, I kind of gave that list of things I talked about earlier.
I also took that list of things back internally to uh, you know, other members of of the team that I'm on. I'm like, Hey, how are other folks using this? Like what am I missing? And I was going back and forth with somebody and he casually dropped. He is like, oh I've got this thing writing my emails for me right now. I'm like, you're truly a brave soul. Like I, I don't know that that might be a bridge too far for me. It's one thing to have Outlook collect, correct my grammar, which is horrible.
I understand. I appreciate, you know, the, the red squiggly lines all over the place. Like hey you missed a the here or an and there you forgot to you, you spelled this thing wrong. But having it just wholesale write it, I don't know that I get there, especially when I see everybody in meetings.
Like I see a lot more people like participating in meetings now and and like acting as like a quasi scribe and like they're throwing things out during the meeting and all they're doing is getting the recaps and things from copilot as it's going on. So you can like clearly tell and you just know what they're doing. So like, and now one of our jokes is like did you write that or did you have copilot write it did you?
And you know right off the bat, like if you've been working with somebody for a couple years, like that's not your writing style. You had the robot write it for you - . I have not had co-pilot write my emails yet. But there's another option when you're drafting an email where it is coaching by co-pilot.
So if you go write and this is what I've done, I go write my email and then if you go click on this coaching by co-pilot, it will go in and it analyzes your email and it will give you pointers about tone, clarity, those types of things where it doesn't even rewrite your email. But I just threw, - Isn't that just Microsoft editor? Like how is that different than what editor was doing? - it's different than editor.
I feel like editor does more rearranging editor to me was a little bit more grammar focused. Or you could rearrange it this way to make it better. The coaching, it gives me something like the tone could be more friendly. The email sounds a bit dry and formal, which may not create a strong rapport with the reader. Suggestions. Consider adding some greetings and expressions of gratitude or appreciation.
I mean kinda cheesy but it has Hal where I'm like, okay, so I could rephrase this and reader sentiment. It'll tell you things like this email assumes certain things which may not be the case for everybody. So how is this going to maybe come across from the reader based on things that maybe you've asked for or questions you've asked. And then clarity. If it's like super vague, you need to get more detailed, more specific about something.
Point about the question. Discord business use case, maybe I'm still trying to dig through it. So far I have been unable to write any email that is friendly enough for copilot. So either I am an incredibly unfriendly person or a copilot is like over the top friendly. I, I don't really know yet. You - Gotta work on your your your Southern nice. Huh? - Apparently - It's your inner Northerner coming out.
- It could be that. It could be the fact that I'm like I don't have time to be nice in an email. I just need to get this out and get it over to somebody so I can get this taken care of. - I gotta admit I haven't tried this one yet. I'll have to go check it out. Is this only in the new I, it looks like it's only in the new Monarch article. Monarch client from the screenshots. - I'm on a Mac so probably 'cause I'm on the New Mac client, which I think is more on par with the new outlet client.
Yeah, that one's an interesting one. I'm still waiting for copilot in OneNote. I'm curious to see what I can do with it there because I have so many notes in it. I have not had it. I've seen screenshots of other people using an Outlook. I would think it's maybe Outlook for Windows. I haven't seen it in Outlook on the web or Outlook for the Mac. Or maybe I have something broken in my tenant, which is also a very real possibility at times. Could - Be.
I have not played around with it in OneNote yet. I don't know. Loop yes. OneNote? No, but I think I've been neglecting OneNote a little bit lately. - Oh for what? Scott? For Loop. Oh I thought you were gonna say notion. Okay. You're allowed to do it for - Loop. No, I'm still using Notion for personal stuff but Ooh, - I could get on a soapbox about Loop right now. I'm not gonna do it. . Yeah, I'm trying to think. Other business use cases for copilot that I've seen.
The meeting recaps, I mean summarization. Yeah it's a, it's still falls in that category but it's been really good. I've liked meeting summarizations with it. I don't know that there's any others - As folks. Like if you're starting to light this up, you mentioned add-ins or, or plugins for copilot. Yeah, you do have to go into the copilot app and then in the text box there's like a little shadow icon that you click down there where you have to turn that stuff on. It's a little hidden away.
Like I had to go in and like I, I was confused. I'm like hey why can't you crawl the web for me? And it's like, oh you have to go turn that on for yourself to get it going. And that was kind of weird and, and not well documented to me. Yeah - And it doesn't stay on, I have not found a way to turn it on and say always crawl the web. Like you can turn it on for a chat but then if you go start a new chat it's off by default.
I haven't found a, oh no - On, I didn't notice that , I was just assumed it was on after that - I would go look unless it's again my tenant. So I did notice that. The other thing I have seen the documentation on this is not very clear is add-ins are technically still in preview and I was talking with somebody the other day about add-ins and we aren't able to tell from the documentation.
There is a section where it says if you wanna use add-ins in teams, like third party add-ins you in preview, you need to go open a support request and put this very specific phrase and I, I can go look it up and we can put it in the meeting notes in the service request so that it gets routed to the right person on the co-pilot service support side and they can enable add-ins for your tenant.
And I did that and I went through the whole process and they send you a request there, what tenant id do you want it enabled on all of that. What I don't know is do you need this to just use them or is this only for developing them? I was talking to a developer about this that was looking at writing add-ins for teams. I don't know if that step is for only if you're developing and you need something turned on or if it's just for general use.
Either way I have not gotten my Jira add in or plugin to show up in that dialogue box yet. Even though it says it's installed, I keep pouring through the documentation and it's go turn it on in the admin center but then you have to go over to teams but it doesn't really tell you what to do or where to do it in teams.
And I haven't, I have not come up with good guidance nor have I been able to discover the exact steps to get that plugin to show up in lieu of the fact that I don't see it yet in teams. - Again it doesn't seem to be well documented in some areas to go figure that stuff out. - But it is in preview, - Like you almost say you have to have like, like that person you can get the incantation from like, and I'm sure there's more than one edge case for that.
Like hey if you have this magic term, it'll effectively like ungate the next step for you. You almost want like your your dungeon master book. You know like, hey how do I , uh, I'm a DM and I'm, I'm trying to navigate a a crew through here. How do I get that going? - Yep. But again I will say it's in preview so I'm not necessarily expecting it to be super smooth and straightforward given the newness of copilot and that add-ins are still in preview.
One other thing, I'm gonna mention this 'cause I've seen questions about this. Did we talk about pricing of copilot and how you have to buy these licenses? Do you remember? - So we mentioned the pricing in the past like $30 per user per month and you briefly mentioned the initial restriction with CSPs but it'd be good to touch on it. Again this - Is for CSPs and for 'cause I pulled it up in the admin portal and for the admin portal, this is still one of those Yes, $30 per user per month.
But no matter how you buy it, whether you prepay or prepay seek hint, you're gonna prepay whether you do it through the CSP or through the admin center, it is prepaying for a subscription length of one year or three years. There's no month to month on this. So if you wanna turn it on, be prepared to pay $30 a month, which equates to $360 per year. So yes, $30 per month but your licensing is year to year for this one.
Don't complain to me, I had no input insight nor can I change it and nor can your CSP change it.
It is what it is. And we talked about this before, I'm sure it's due in part to certain capacity stuff needing people to, or Microsoft needs to have a lot of hardware to handle all of this and I'm assuming this prepay helps with some of that because I can imagine it would be really expensive for people paying for it for a month and then turning it off or paying for it for month, turning it off for a month, turning it back on for a month, whatever.
I don't know. The fact that you do have to prepay though and not pay month to month is still a little intriguing. - I imagine licensing will continue to be a moving target for a little while. Yeah, it it seems like it's been like rapidly changing in some of the requirements. The restrictions. I don't know if you ever get to a, a pure like month to month PayGo model but you are kind of there with things like copilot Pro I believe like wasn't the personal one month to month.
- Yes, that one's month to month and yeah, the only one I've seen it for even teams premium is month to month copilot for Microsoft. 365 is year to year. But I'm curious if it'll start changing overall because now that everything is annual commits anyways, you still pay month to month but you have an annual commit, it can just be a lot of money to pay, especially for larger companies if you get into the boat where you're starting to have to prepay for an entire year.
Messes with budgets, the whole CapEx opex thing, - Just a little bit. Right. - I think that covers copilot pretty well. Our experiences. I'm - Gonna continue to keep using it and playing with it and we should maybe come back in another couple months and revisit and see if there's any, any other tips and tricks or things there that kind of make the world potentially a better place.
- I agree. 'cause it is gonna be, there's gonna be a lot of stuff and see if I can get my plugins working and I can have updates on plugins, - . Yeah, maybe I can go try some of those too. I don't know what's lit up in our tenant or what restrictions exist. - Yeah, so from what I've seen, the plugins are like a Microsoft 365 admin center thing where you have to turn 'em on everywhere. I'm curious Yeah. To see if you have any or if you can figure anything out.
But with that I have Pinewood Derby cars to make a food truck outside my window the weekend ahead of me and an email migration . - So not, not a whole lot going on. Got it. - No, not really. It's just, yeah. And my wife's gone tonight and tomorrow will I do the Pinewood Derby car and the email migration. It'll be a busy weekend. Scott, you wanna come hang out ? - Sure, I'm, I'm, it's been a while since I've done a Pinewood car. My, my kids grew out of that stuff a couple years ago.
- My daughter wanted me to make one that looked like my Lego Lamborghini do it. Well the race is tomorrow so it's, I'll have to take a picture , I'll try to take a picture and post it and Discord or put it out on Twitter. It, I mean it's a Pinewood Derby car and we had like two weeks so it looks pretty. I was impressed for the time we had to put into it and the fact that we're dealing with wood and I don't have, I don't have a ton of fancy tools.
I thought it turned out fairly well. Well that's good. She was happy with it. The - Big frustration with Pinewood Derby cars is if you don't have a friend who doesn't have a band saw, I found having a band saw is 100% a requirement for those things. So I have like everything else, you know like table saws, jigsaws, MITRE saws. But I don't have a band saw. That was always tough. So get a friend with a band saw and you'll be all set. - I'm looking for one. I used a jigsaw to cut these out.
Jigsaws. It's rough. It is jigsaws lead to a lot of sanding. Yeah. I need a friend. If there's a friend in Jacksonville, Florida that has a band saw that listens to the podcast - That's gonna hear this before gets that's gonna, - It's listen to me. Well, but I'll have more Pinewood Derby cars coming up in the future that I can befriend and I don't know, I can pay you for your bandsaw. I can bring you food for your bandsaw or something. I would like a bandsaw in the next year
sometime again. Alright. - Okay. - Now that we've completely gone off topic, we'll wrap it up. - . Sounds good. Alright. Keep an eye out for bandsaws. I would love to have feedback from others out there that are using copilot. Like come and find us on Mastodon Threads, all that kind of stuff. Or if you participate in the Discord, come hop into the chat over there. Like it feels like a very net new area to me.
Like I said, I keep feeling like, oh my gosh, like I need to become like a prompt engineer. So I'm kind of like trying to soak all that stuff up right now. - I would love like other experiences but other prompts. I'm with you Scott. I'm not a great prompt engineer. That is an area where I need to learn. So I'm always intrigued with other prompts that people have developed and wanna share. We need to create like a prompt to library somewhere. That's - What Loop is for or OneNote.
- . Okay, perfect. Sounds good. Thanks Scott. All - Right, sounds good. Enjoy the weekend. Enjoy the derby. - You too. We'll talk to you later. - All right, thanks Ben. - If you enjoyed the podcast, go leave us a five star rating in iTunes. It helps to get the word out so more it pros can learn about Office 365 and Azure. If you have any questions you want us to address on the show or feedback about the show, feel free to reach out via our website, Twitter, or Facebook.
Thanks again for listening and have a great day.