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Welcome back to the teams insider podcast. This is an audio version of my monthly update. If you want to see the full video version, head over to empowering.cloud and you can see it there and you can also grab the PowerPoint deck as well. Hope you find it useful. Any comments, questions, or feedback? Do let me know.

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Microsoft Teams Monthly Update, June 2024. Many thanks to AudioCodes for their support of EmpoweringCloud. Really appreciate them. AudioCodes are going to be at Comsverse in the UK this month, and I'll also be doing a panel with them on their VOCA Contact Center solution. So if you are at Comsverse, do be sure to check out AudioCodes. Loads to talk about this month. We've got the new Dynamics 365 Contact Center, Microsoft Places Preview, some new Copilot capabilities, Teams devices, and loads of roadmap

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items. So let's get stuck in.

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First off, lots going on in Empowering Cloud. Always new content there. Be sure to check it out. Making the right choice, your Teams Premium versus Copilot SME session has been a really popular one. Lots of conversation going on about where Teams Premium stops and where Copilot starts and which you should choose which use cases. So be sure to check that out. We also had some great guests on the Teams Insider Podcast, in particular, Richard's session, which is all about Copilot and AI in legal and how to be more efficient while staying compliant was a really popular session. And we've had a hands on unboxing with a neat Gen 2 bar with Graham as well. As always, got any ideas of content or feedback, do let us know. So biggest news in our space for sure is Dynamics 365 Contact Center. This is Microsoft moving their contact center offering away from being tightly paired to Dynamics CRM and to more of an all round contact center experience. Let's check out a quick

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video overview from them.

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My

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new tent is broken. Is it still under warranty?

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Your Trailmaster X4 is covered for 90 days. Do you need to start a return?

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Maybe I just need help setting it up.

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Sure thing. Let me connect you to an agent.

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So you can see there, Microsoft positioning the new Dynamics 365 Contact Center very much as a copilot contact center, AI first. This is launching 1st of July. The critical thing there right at the end of the video is it no longer is dependent on customers running Dynamics CRM. So Dynamics 365 Contact Center can integrate into your preferred CRM, your preferred workflow solutions. So this pushes Dynamics Contact Center into being applicable in more scenarios than just those already existing Dynamics customers. As you'd expect from Microsoft, very heavy on AI. You saw AI Agent Assist there, you saw AI directly with the end customers as well. Obviously Intelligent Routing and Queuing, Agent Insights, Analytics, all the stuff you'd expect from Contact Center. This is the next evolution of what was the DCCP platform, which was tied tightly to Dynamics. So I'll be keeping a close eye on this and look out, we're going to be doing a special Teams Fireside Chat all around Dynamics 365 Contact Center. and diving into it in more detail. Onto a public preview. Places finally entered public preview. Here's another quick video.

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continues to improve the way we work, but where to work still isn't clear. With the introduction of Places across Microsoft 365, AI can now help solve hybrid work. From your calendar in Outlook. Places lets you check when your coworkers will be in the office, and Copilot even recommends when you should go into the office and why, making it simple to coordinate time with your coworkers, so you can adjust your schedule to maximize in person connections. Places makes it easy to find the right place to work, at the right times, with the right people. In Teams, Places lets you take advantage of being in the same building by creating meaningful moments to connect with coworkers nearby. And it's integrated into the Microsoft 365 apps that you use every day. On top of all that, Places helps companies optimize spaces and costs. To make your office more efficient and sustainable.

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So that's Microsoft's teaser video for Microsoft Places. It is now in public preview. It is still very early days for Places I'd say. There's still a lot to be done there. There's a setup guide, there's some website information and there is a public preview you can join as well. This is going to be part of Teams Premium. So another value add put into Teams Premium and you saw there some tight integration teams with things like being able to at mention people based on their location, being able to understand where people are working from. We also recently had Microsoft Build and we got lots of news there, including some new Copilot capabilities. This is a really big deal because Copilot is now moving into some kind of team and agent capabilities. So previously we would have had Copilot as just a personal assistant. Now you can see with these two new rings, we have Team Copilot and we have Proactive Agents. So let's talk about Team Copilot first.

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Here's another quick video.

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Microsoft Copilot is evolving from your personal AI assistant to your team AI assistant. Introducing Team Copilot, a new valuable team member, helping everyone achieve more together. You'll be able to add Copilot as a meeting facilitator, taking notes during the discussion that everyone can edit and add during the meeting, along with follow up tasks and actions for everyone to see. Sharing and managing the agenda with the team. Keeping the conversation on track and integration with Teams Rooms ensures Copilot can continue taking notes, even for ad hoc meetings. You'll be able to add Copilot as a collaborator in chats, keeping everyone aligned with up to date insights as the conversation happens, and interacting with the team, responding to questions based on messages and shared files. You'll be able to add Copilot as a project manager, creating project plans with tasks and goals, and assigning them to team members. Copilot can also take on completing tasks on behalf of the group, notifying team members when input is needed, and facilitating group collaboration to complete the task. With Team Copilot evolving to provide team assistance, your team will be more productive, collaborative, and creative together. Microsoft Copilot.

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So you see from the video there, Microsoft are moving Copilot away from just being personal assistant into being an assistant for the team. So they outlined some example roles of meeting facilitator, group collaborator, and project manager. And the idea is that Copilot will be able to help the whole team, so you can add it to the Microsoft Teams team, you can add it to the meeting, and it will proactively work for the entire group and work with the entire group. Moving from the personal assistant to the team assistant. Fun with the naming here, so this is Team Copilot Singular, as opposed to Copilot for Microsoft Teams, which is part of Copilot for Microsoft 365. This will be available in preview later in 2024, so we've got no firm dates yet, and it will be part of the Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 license as well. Also announced we have Agents, so these are proactive Copilot scenarios again, but these are proactive scenarios that you build yourself. Let's have a look at another video.

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Redefine business processes with Copilot Studio. Create co-pilots that act as agents working independently for you. Simply describe what you want your co-pilot to do. Easily configure your co-pilot with the details and needs like instructions, triggers, knowledge and actions Quickly test your copilot before you deploy. and seamlessly publish across multiple channels. Watch it use memory for context, reason over user input, and manage long running tasks. Copilot can learn from feedback to improve. And you're always in control. Put Copilot to work for you. With Copilot Studio.

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So in this scenario, you're making your own Copilot. So your organization are making Copilot and Copilot Studio to automate business processes. So running lots of steps proactively, again, moving Copilot from I go and drive this assistant to this process is driven for currently this is only in early access program and it'll be available again later in 2024. But in both cases here, Team Copilot and Copilot Agents in Copilot Studio, we're moving into Proactive AI, which is really interesting when Microsoft have traditionally positioned Copilot as your personal assistant. The brand now moves into Proactive Assistant, even positioning it as a Project Manager or Meeting Coordinator. Last thing on the Copilot train, I won't go on about this too much, you can find out more detail if you want to, but just ahead of build, Microsoft announced new Copilot Plus PCs. Now the key thing here is this is a new specification from Microsoft of certain types of PCs that can get this badge. At the moment they must have at least 16GB of RAM, 250GB of storage, and critically they must have a 40 TOPS or higher Neural Processing Unit, NPU. Microsoft Mechanics And what that NPU allows Microsoft to do is to run AI models on the machine, and it gives them clever new AI abilities directly on the machine. So three they announced as exclusive features to the Copilot Plus PCs are co creator, this is where you can create a really basic image in paint, and it will enhance that image, so you can say, I want sand here and sea here, and it'll make the pretty AI version, but based on your initial rough draft, live captions and live translation. And things like Eye Contact, I think they mentioned as well. And Recall, which is the ability for the PC to continuously snapshot your screen, save all that information, and you can go back and use AI to query that information. There's been lots of debate and drama around Recall and how secure it is. And Microsoft just a few days ago announced a blog post highlighting that they're going to make Recall optional to turn on. They're going to encrypt it on the disk, and they're taking various other security precautions to Make it safer. But there's definitely been a lot of controversy around. Is it a great idea to have your screen continuously snapshotted by an AI and how secure is it to keep all that data locally? Microsoft are using Windows Hello. They're using all sorts of encryption, but definitely one that's up for debate and certainly in enterprises, things like GDPR are going to make that really tricky. On to the Teams devices news. We've got some new news this month. So Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows got another update. This is mostly fixes of minor issues from the previous update. So nothing terribly new there. But there is some slight change that the ability to change language on the console is now enabled by default. Admins can turn that off if they prefer. The rest is all fixes you can see here. On the devices front, the Poly Studio G62 is now certified for Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android. This is a new Android First Compute Unit from Poly. Looks like it's got some reasonably good specs. Looking forward to checking that out and getting hands on. And also Logi announced the Meetup 2. This is a USB device. So A-B-Y-O-D type scenario device One of the things that's really interesting is this has network connectivity as well. So while it's A-B-Y-O-D device, you can do some management, some updating remotely. I did a podcast coming out with Randy Chapman soon at Lodgy and we get into kind of BYOD scenarios and what the options are and what the potential is. And now with Microsoft having various BYOD options in Teams as well, interesting timing. And onto the roadmap, roadmap this month. Microsoft announced they will not be retiring Teams Live Events as soon as they thought. So originally it was going to retire in September 2024, but that has been delayed. And this is mainly about getting Town Hall to have all the features that Teams Live Events has before you move over. Town Hall is still the main direction, but those using Live Events in certain ways will be able to continue to keep using it until they're ready to go to Town Hall. So good to see Microsoft listening to customers there on features and feature requirements. I won't go through every single bullet on this slide, but Microsoft are adding a whole lot of new capabilities to encourage the use of Teams and Channels. We all know that in Microsoft Teams, it's quite hard to get the adoption of people using Teams and Channels, as opposed to chat or meeting chat. Microsoft are changing a whole lot of things around the UI, including streamlining creator team, encouraging people to use a channel or to create a new channel rather than new team, a new discover feed that will service the most relevant information, hiding channels, renaming general, hiding inactive channels, and all these features are around trying to make it Easier for people to use teams and channels and be a bit less overwhelmed. I'm a big fan of using teams and channels much more than chat threading. That organization is really important. And as the AI comes together and keeps all your information about a project in one place, even more important than not using chat and having all the information over multiple chats. So nice to see Microsoft continue to invest to improve that experience. Custom emojis coming to Teams. This is a really popular feature for certain people on Slack. And if it's popular on Slack, inevitably, eventually we get the option in Teams. I'm sure a lot of enterprises won't be fans of this. This is the ability to upload a picture and create your own custom emojis. Admins can choose who can do it. They can turn it off as well if they want to. This is coming to public preview in June. I'm really excited for these features. These are improvements in Q& A for meetings and webinars. We do some pretty big meetings at Empowering Cloud and community meetings and having improved Q& A experience will really help us. So things like voting, filtering, sorting Q& As, letting the attendees choose which questions want to be voted on to be answered and also exporting the Q& A at the end. So you can see who said what and who asked the questions and do any task assignment and follow up. So looking forward to seeing those. Those are both coming in July. Custom backgrounds for Teams Rooms on Android. We've talked about this before, but this has now hit the message center and this will be rolling out early July and expected to finish rolling out by mid July. So looking forward to that. Also some phone devices capability, so a new people app on the Teams phone to choose who you ring and control the speed dials.

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That's coming July.

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Explicit recording consent on physical phones, so having an option on the phone to approve being recorded on compliant recorded meetings. That's coming July. And the Copilot one, we're getting a Copilot catch up option. This is really nice, I think. So this will be in Copilot Web and Copilot in Teams. It's a little catch up tab that's going to pick out some of your key documents or meetings and meeting notes and suggest that you might want to engage with them and give you some Copilot prompts to help you nudge along. These are your actions or these are things you might want to query. Great to see Microsoft nudging along, helping people understand what the different Copilot scenarios are and helping them with proactive prompts, because adoption is one of the biggest challenges in Copilot, and with just a blank prompt page, it's pretty hard. But if you go to catch up and, oh yes, I need to review that deck or review these meeting notes, I think that'll be really useful. Onto our events, still lots going on in event season, looking forward to doing a webinar with Pure IP all around those contact center options, and now we'll be able to talk about the Dynamics 365 Contact Center, so that should be a good one. One Riviera, who's the CVP for Teams Phone Calling Meetings, looking forward to having him on Teams Fireside Chat. We have our regular Microsoft Teams Devices Ask Us Anything sessions. This month we have London User Group as well, so if you're in or around London in the UK. Looking forward to that. We're having that at WPP's office. So thanks to them for hosting. We of course have Comsverse coming up on the 26th and 27th. Really big event in the UK. And looking a bit further out to July. We have Tracy Herr, who I'm sure everybody in this community knows really well. She'll be doing the Teams fireside chat in July. And there's lots to talk about around Microsoft Teams Rooms and the changes in Android. So we'll be getting deep into those

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and looking forward to that. So again, lots

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happening in June, that new Dynamics 365 Contact Center, the Places Preview, Team Copilot, and lots more. Hope it's been useful for you. Many thanks again to AudioCode for their support. Be sure to check them out at Commsverse. And if you're at Commsverse as well, I hope to see you there. Please do say hello.

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Thanks a lot.