Copilot chat and agents gets interchangeable in conversations. Here are the key differences between the two.

Copilot Chat

• Purpose: Provides a conversational interface for users to interact with Copilot in real time.
• Scope:
  • Handles ad-hoc queries like summarizing documents, drafting emails, generating ideas, or answering questions.
  • Works across multiple apps (e.g., Word, Excel, Teams) and integrates with enterprise data.
• Behavior:
  • Reactive and session-based—it responds to what you ask in the moment.
  • Doesn’t persist beyond the current conversation unless you explicitly save outputs.
• Example Use Case:
  • “Summarize the last meeting notes and draft an email to the team.”

Agents

• Purpose: Designed for automation and orchestration of tasks over time.
• Scope:
  • Acts as a persistent, proactive assistant that can monitor triggers, execute workflows, and manage processes.
  • Can integrate with business systems (CRM, ERP, etc.) and run multi-step operations.
• Behavior:
  • Always-on and context-aware—can take actions without waiting for a prompt.
  • Often customized for specific roles or business functions.
• Example Use Case:
  • Automatically updating a project dashboard when new data arrives or sending reminders for overdue tasks.

So main takeaways:

• Chat is interactive, on-demand answers to prompts
• Agents are automated task executions

The new advance management plan (coming March 2023) has a very important feature, Endpoint Privilege Management. If this works, it’s huge as something we have been asking since Windows XP. Currently many organizations utilize 3rd party like CyberArk and BeyondTrust to control local admin processes while taking local admin away from a user.  This will be an add-on SKU I believe to what you may own in E3 or E5 today.

Reduce your overall TCO with a new Microsoft Intune plan – Microsoft Community Hub

One of the annoying new features for me in Office 365/Outlook and outlook.com personal, is creation of an calendar event based on email content. Now this sounds great, if you need the additional automation. But for someone that wants to control what’s in the calendar little more, I need to disable or adjust. Unfortunately, this can’t be changed in the local Outlook app. You need to logon to Outlook web app.

Go into Settings (sprocket) -> Your app setting -> click Mail.

Once in the options, navigate to the Calendar section and click on Events from email. Here you can disable or configure.

Just as Microsoft has the Windows 10 Insider program to allow us to get the latest Windows 10 features that are in preview, the Office team has a similar program.

If you have a Personal Office subscription, you can go into any Office 2016/365 app and go to File -> Account and click the Insider option.

For commercial/corporate, this may not be available as it’s controlled by the installation done by the IT department.

For IT Admins who want to get the Office Insider for themselves, developers, testers, etc. the process is easy.

1. Uninstall previous Office versions and reboot on any system prior to installing the Insider.
2. Download the Office Deployment Toolkit
3. Extract the Setup.exe and Configuration.xml file into it’s own directory.

4. Edit the Configuration.xml with notepad or your favorite text editor to read as below

<Configuration>
 <Add OfficeClientEdition="32" Channel="InsiderFast">
   <Product ID="O365ProPlusRetail">
    <Language ID="en-us" />
   </Product>
  </Add> 
</Configuration>

5. from an elevated prompt, run Setup.exe /configure configuration.xml 

6.  After the installation is complete, open an Office app, such as Word, and go to File >          Account. Under the Product Information section, you should see text that includes              “Office Insider.”