Here are the 10 steps to navigate your organization technical readiness for Copilot in Microsoft 365:
Before integrating Copilot, it's important to conduct a thorough assessment of your Microsoft 365 environment. This assessment will identify any opportunities for optimization, ensuring that Copilot aligns seamlessly with your existing infrastructure.
Microsoft has pre-built assessments that partners like 2toLead use along with other techniques to assess this rapidly working through license gaps, dependencies or service risks that might need to be addressed before you proceed with an enhanced experience like Copilot for Microsoft 365.
Data security and governance are critical considerations in any AI integration initiative. Addressing these questions upfront ensures that Copilot operates within the confines of your organization's data policies and safeguards sensitive information effectively. With Copilot accessing and processing organizational data, it's crucial to have robust data security controls in place and an evolving strategy as needs and the nature of our data changes over time. At a minimum this includes encryption protocols, access controls, and data loss prevention mechanisms to mitigate potential risks effectively, but optimally also considers lifecycle, retention and more.
Using the assessment work results, built in Microsoft reports, and some proven best practices can accelerate work here so we recommend doing this with Microsoft or subject matter expert support.
Keep in mind that while initially we can scope and limit the SharePoint sites used to power Copilot search this is meant as a temporary measure to help with it’s rollout and broader access will rapidly become needed to get the full value out of your investment.
Collaboration is key to successful Copilot implementation. Work closely with the team leading business readiness and/or user enablement to develop a comprehensive implementation plan that considers user training, support mechanisms, and change management strategies alongside the responsible technical enablement plan.
Implementing Copilot necessitates a robust service management plan to handle incidents, requests, and ongoing maintenance effectively. Define roles and responsibilities, establish communication channels, and outline escalation procedures to ensure smooth operations post-implementation.
Determine how you will tackle technical support, confirm understanding on how to manage tickets and the processes around escalation with Microsoft and train key IT team members on how the service can be managed, monitored, and optimized. This should include understanding the audit processes around Copilot and how they work with Purview, eDiscovery and other key processes.
Follow the setup guide provided by Microsoft to prepare your organization for Copilot integration. This includes deploying Microsoft 365 apps, assigning licenses to users, and configuring settings to optimize Copilot's performance.
There is an out of the box setup assistant you can use to support many of these activities within the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Granting access to Copilot usage reports allows administrators to monitor its adoption and effectiveness. Assign permissions based on user roles to ensure appropriate access while maintaining data confidentiality.
Here's an overview of the various ways you can monitor usage adoption of Copilot for Microsoft 356:
While access is important there is additional work to be done to ensure monitoring and reporting is effective during your rollout and continued adoption of Copilot for Microsoft 365.
Leverage usage reports and the Copilot dashboard to gain insights into user adoption, retention rates, and engagement metrics. This data-driven approach enables continuous optimization of Copilot's functionalities to meet evolving organizational needs.
By exploring these reports early technical teams can understand the data sources and ways we can enhance these reports by importing or integrating signals with Viva Insights, Glint or other qualitative data such as survey insights. This Copilot Dashboard experience and shared ownership between technical and business teams will be very important as the business readiness activities occur alongside the technical readiness activities and this becomes a central tool to optimize and adapt your strategy and tactics over time.
While it is easy to work through the steps to prepare for technical readiness it is important to still perform simple tests to validate access, dependencies and rollout tactics for responsibly enabling the Copilot experience for your initial pilot users.
It can be tempting to defer the creation of an initial plugin or two, but we highly recommend creating simple plugins that use targeted SharePoint locations (like a Policy Plugin) to provide better experiences, these don’t need to connect to other data sources (of the 1100+ supported by Copilot) but optimally if you can create two POC plugins that would be best where one is focused on tailoring an experience and using targeted prescriptive data sources and the other connects to a high probability system to bring data across and into a set of responses.
Doing this ensures the technical teams are ready and understand what goes in to calibrating and aligning Copilot with organizational, departmental or team specific requirements. These plugins enhance Copilot's capabilities, offering tailored experiences that drive productivity and efficiency and should always be incorporated into your initial pilots.
While optional this last start step is also worth exploring early with technical teams. You can empower your organization's innovation by exploring the possibilities of building custom Copilots, which can be more robust than just plugin-based models. Whether addressing niche use cases or streamlining unique workflows, building your own Copilots expands the horizons of AI integration within your organization.
Navigating your organization's technical readiness for Copilot for Microsoft 365 requires a structured approach encompassing assessment, planning, implementation, and optimization. By following the outlined technical readiness starter steps, you'll be well-equipped to harness the transformative power of Copilot, driving innovation and efficiency across your organization's workflows.
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