Microsoft 365 Copilot Without the Hype: Adoption, Governance & Getting Your Tenant Ready with Paul Keijzers [MVP]

Yeah, welcome back to another episode of the MC65 as a podcast. Today we are talking about one of the biggest questions facing Microsoft 365 organizations right now. Are you actually ready for co-pilot because buying license is easy, but what happens when co-pilot suddenly has access to years of SharePoint sites, TeamsCon version conversations, documents, permissions, language, the content and information that perhaps should never have been shared in the first place. My guest today is Paul Kiosz. A time Microsoft MVP and founder of KB Works, Paul has spent more than 20 years in the Microsoft ecosystem helping global organizations improve the way they use Microsoft 365 from SharePoint and Teams architecture to security, Microsoft, PUE, View, governance and co-pilot adoption. His focus isn't simply on the deploying technology, it's about turning Microsoft 365 and co-pilot into something organizations can actually measure. His waste time, better productivity and lower risk. Paul also runs an intensive focused weeks in Portugal where customers work directly with him on some of their thoughtless Microsoft 365 and co-pilot challenges. So today we are going beyond co-pilot demos. We are talking about what happens before co-pilot arrives by co-pilot fails, where oversharing becomes dangerous, how PUE View fits into the picture and how organization can prove whatever it's actually the lower value. Paul, welcome to the LCC-65FM podcast. Thank you, thank you. It was a big introduction. I'm not used to such a big introduction, yes. Thank you for inviting me. Yeah, Paul, it's amazing. You are working around 20 years in the Microsoft ecosystem. Where did your journey organically start? Well, my first start was actually not in IT. I was 21 when I started and it was in Card Audio. So you know, those big boom boxes around the road in the early 2000s or even earlier. Where people had big boxes, that's where I started and I started my own company in that. But after like three, four years it was hard because the innovation became better for the cars. So then I had to move along and then I started at an insurance company where I was just doing manual work and they saw, hey, you have some, how do you say that, feeling with IT. So don't you want to work for our department? Okay, I want to. And that's where the journey started. After a while they had to reorganize, so I had to go and then I went to another IT company and that was in 2001 when I first touched the SharePoint ecosystem. So I was doing VBA and lots of people with branding and then SharePoint came along and the first steps were only like versioning. So just check in, check out, that was it and it was still buggy but it was a good first step. And after that I went to several other companies and in 2007 I really picked up again my own company but different name of course, but really into SharePoint and then I did some migrations of 2003 to 2007 and that's where I really started to feeling with SharePoint and do some more coding on that and the web parts and I did some things for big education schools there and then in 2010 and I 2009 I went to the first or no it was a second. And then I got to the SharePoint conference in Las Vegas and that's where I met a lot of people and I even got more hooked to SharePoint and also the community because it's, SharePoint has a really great community and then later on I went to a big bank also for my own but I did do a lot of internet parts and at the time SharePoint 2010 and then we got BayPos around 2011 to 2012 I think which is originally the name of Office 365 so they renamed it, rebranded well as we know every year there's a rename of products and after that I went more and more into the clouds and then in 2016 I got the first time MVP awards and at that time I was working with Wurthel, Microsoft Partner, a very nice company as well but that was a time that I was working for them not for my own and I fully focused on Microsoft Teams at the time which was brand new in 2017 so lots of work in there and especially what we see now and still see is the way they set up for example their storage which is still in the background SharePoint so that's what I did a long time, a focus on Microsoft Teams especially because they improved a lot during the years and you see more usage and then actually late when it was it, well when co-part it came out I directly, I was at the at the different bank working and they were Early Access Partner so then I had the chance to jump on the wagon and go along with the co-pilot Early Access so that was really a very good start for me and yeah and at that time I took all the knowledge I could of co-pilot with me but a lot has changed since then of course because it was also the first versions and everybody was searching okay how do we implement what do we need to take care of and yeah basically a lot of companies use it for outlook still because it's easy to use in outlook but lately we see how do you say that something coming back is SharePoint and people are using more and more SharePoint although some don't even know that but they are and lots of Office 365 components are really built on SharePoint and that's something not a lot of people know. Most people think it's just a server-like environment but a lot is hosted within the SharePoint environment so it's really important to have your governance up to date there and especially you already mentioned it in the intro when you take a look at your file storage and there's not a lot changed to be honest since 2016 when Delph came out because I don't know do you know Delph? It's not I never really worked with it I only hear this. Okay maybe I explain a little bit about that because lots of people think it's only the governance got really important when co-pilot came out but it was already in 2006 actually when you start a project it's already important but most people didn't care about it but now with co-pilot it surfaces easier but when Delph came out Delph is made by the craft team and it was made to let people see what are other colleagues working on so when you would share something with the organization it would surface up into the to Delph so you would already see it but most people didn't care of it or they shut down Delph because Delph was if you turned off Delph you would also turn off graph so problem gone but that was like just an easy thing to do but later on during the years more and more services were accessible via graph so then you had to make a decision okay do we keep Delph off or are we going to do Delph and then even in the mid-time there was a switch for a graph so then you could change a lot of things but with co-pilot now it's really like it's surfacing so people try to query it and you don't want to turn off co-pilot because that's what the business wants so now it's not that easy as in within Delph where you just turn off the knob and then it was gone now you have to be careful and what I see in daily life so to say yeah that's cool they're directly dive into co-pilot so I think Microsoft co-pilot looks incredibly simple for from end user perspective you open an application type or prompt get an answer but behind the simple interface there's enormous amount of Microsoft 365 info structure what are companies underestimated when they start with their co-pilot journey well as I already a bit told in the in the earlier stages they forget about permissions they forget about retention they forget about a DLP they forget about the labeling aspect so when they start off and some take it seriously so it's not all bad but a lot of companies just take off they buy some licenses co-pilot they start and they they see that some data is there but they don't care till there's something like how do you say that salaries that's coming up and people may not know it or something else that comes up because it was shared with the whole company so basically the first setting I always look at is the how the sharing is configured so if it's new guests and guests or is it allow everyone which is mostly used in a new environment or small companies because they just don't know it so that's that's the start where where I always look and then I have to talk to them and see what what they really need and if they really want everyone to be part of this sharing experience so I think that's the the the first start that's going well where there's problems let's put it that way and they surface once they start with co-pilot and not when they just you share search it doesn't yeah you can still find it but it's hard let's put it that way awesome I think we have to talk or we have to look more into the Microsoft 365 tunnel not only at the co-pilot so what does the co-pilot run in ready tenants actually mean for you oh a co-pilot is ready 10 means that the at least your data structures and labels the DLP is in order and even further which is not my expertise area but like in June defender you all have to set it up because I think when you are going to work with a product like this you want to have everything correctly in place and of course you can skip the defender and the in-tune part but still it's I think is very very important especially the bigger the company the more problems that arise there and that it's not my expertise there so that's why I say this but I think that there are many people who know a lot about this as well yeah I think what's one of your topics is SharePoints so and I think many organizations have been running SharePoint for 10 15 or even 20 years what happened when co-pilot meets the all this historical content and how to avoid the the broad problem with co-pilot from your perspective yeah I see that as well that companies that are using like from 2013 onwards or even earlier but then migrated to SharePoint on line that files are old so files that are not archived or the still there are lots of and this is really important you know there are lots of files that are just migrated from a file several in 2010 I don't know it doesn't matter but it's all data but it's not archived and it's got like version number one version number two no made the data anything and what co-pilot does it just looks at the data so when you query something and it finds that file of 2010 version one but you also have a version 13 or 30 it will check both documents or files and then it will surface it if it's correct that's on to you but this problem is one of the big problems at the moment that companies start to use the co-pilot they think they only have the correct data but also the data the data may seem correct but if it's old versions you can still not use it and then it looks like co-pilot is hallucinating but it's not it's purely on your own data I think in Germany we have yeah we have when we start the project we all data we have yeah have stay for for the next 10 years so it's for the documentation it also means we have this to yeah if the the last from close projects for yeah well that's data from from the last 10 years so what's the best way to to to handle this year old projects or old data that that must say in in the company yeah it depends on how how many times this data still needs to be accessed because if it doesn't need to be accessed anymore it still needs to exist you can archive it within the Office 365 suite and then it doesn't surface in the co-pilot but you could also restrict it from co-pilot to get access to it so if you restrict it it will not show up in in the co-pilot results so there are several ways to do this and of course it's depending on how the site structure is because what I also see is you say okay we have data we have to keep it 10 years but we just go on in the same site we just build our our complete folder structure and then we call it the different year and that's that's a harder part because then you really have to check okay we can archive sites but on file level it's it's a bit different and you have to check okay how are we going to do that and what do we really want to surface in in co-pilot or search because for me co-pilot is still like search it's only you give it a normal speech but it's still like search for me yeah that's interesting so I think a lot of companies say oh storage it's it's cheap let let keep let keep everything here but what or how do you say or what's the best practice for for content lifecycle management for co-pilot readiness from your perspective I think it really depends per company because you cannot say okay this works for this company and this works for this company because for example you say storage is cheap but I'm not agreeing on that because I think the storage is still very expensive on SharePoint actually so you would need to check depending of course of the size of your of your company but I would even look into blob storage for example or use the office 365 backup or use a third party tool that you that backup your data on a on a blob storage and talking about backup it's really important that you have a backup partner that backup your data but also restores it that's one but the other one which all companies forget is what if I want to leave this third party to another third party what is going to happen to my backup and I was a bit surprised by some companies that have like really high fees to get your own data back so this is something you have to look out for I think it's really important to look at that I think a melatopic a lot of companies talking about it's it's oversharing how how how will you define oversharing and what did you think is the biggest source of yeah of oversharing is it's a SharePoint is a team is one drive by so that my across of 365 groups or what did you think it depends I think it's I think it starts by looking at your settings if if allow everyone is on for example which is the base one yeah then you you have a big chances of oversharing especially on the SharePoint side and I think when you look now when you have one copied license you also have this advanced dashboard in the SharePoint admin center where you can get your oversharing reports and they give you good insight on how your sites are used and where the oversharing is taking place it sometimes it may not be correct in in the way it's rational so it sees that it's overshared but sometimes this can be for example I know some companies that use it for marketing data they just share it with other companies and then it's shown as oversharing but it's actually not it's it's just the way it's set up but yes this these reports really give you a good insight on on the sharing and where it's taking place and this is done across because SharePoint is the base it's done across the the teams the one drive and SharePoint so there's no no reason not to look into that I think when you when you when you have a copied license check into that I even sometimes say to companies if you only have one copied license you already get this extra features so that could be worth it for a whole company especially if it's a big company yeah I think one of the yeah Microsoft tools that that helps it's a peer view absolutely yeah peer view it's it's I don't know what's the right thing peer view modules solutions there are so many there's the information protection the DLP the DSPM the data lifecycle management you discovery compliance manager and the data governance we fight catalog what are important for for for co-pilot when well what what did I have as minimum requirement to look then into QVU well I do some peer view but I don't do all the per view but I think for copilot it's important to look at the labels so what do the labels say and have you set up the labels that's the first question of course and if you have set it up if is it applied do you have auto labeling on or not I think that are the basics on SharePoint side but on DLP and then we are talking first per view is like personal information like and that's also depending on which company because if it's an international company you have a lot of DLP policies but if it's like a ditch company or a German company you know okay no credit cards no physical numbers that kind of stuff you don't want to share it out that's what DLP can do but there's one thing that a lot of people again miss and it's not on the per view side it's more in the power automate side and that's the DLP on the power automate side because when you use copilot and you want to use connectors for example to Gira or to whatever you have you have to configure them in in the power automate DLP so and that's a different story it's something I wasn't aware of like two years ago but and nowadays I see it a lot and I see a lot of things happening in a default environment but also with advanced connectors and rules that's a whole new world for me but it's a very nice world very big world with lots of things changing because they see oh we should have done this so there's a lot of things going on there and then that's because it's also called DLP you can get mixed up really fast so and from the per view I focus on the labels and the DLP within per view but of course there's much more in there like the retention etc. Yes. Did you think copilot change how we should design SharePoint architecture or can we use the classics like I think for years we talk about information architecture or metadata, content types, subsides, taxidermy and search. Do these concepts become more important or less important when I can understand I think your natural language? Well I think they are becoming more important again instead of less important and there's a little bit of history because when teams came out you had this general folder in your SharePoint library and I must be honest I did not like it in there because it fully trolled the structure of how you set up SharePoint it's a total different way and a lot of people were a bit disappointed to say the least but then with teams we were working more again to a folder structure because teams was like that but I think when we look now I would say metadata is really important to have the correct data coming out and that not alone but if you in my opinion when I look at SharePoint libraries or team libraries doesn't matter I always say maximum three folders deep and the rest metadata but also like three or four fields maximum because if you do too much of metadata the people will not fill it in and now with co-pilot it can even look at your data and make the columns itself and then we also come to a point where we have to say okay this is a repeating order so then we have to set up content types which are also really important in the in the co-pilot space but also in the search space because a lot of people forget that as well. Yeah yeah I think one one thing it's oh we have the IT they have their work to do to make co-pilot ready but there it's also the employees I think the normal users I say marketing sales and so on. So I think we have the governance questions I think it's most IT and the other side I say it's the adoption part. What separates organization that gets strong co-pilot adoption from those that don't? Well especially the companies I've seen and a few have really good adoption because what they do they inform their clients how to get work done easier and with tips every day but also like not only co-pilot but also agents how to use them what are the best prompts to use and they organize like days in the company where you can check out what what agents they use or how they prompt it so they are really good and they you see like an adoption grade of or above 90% but there are also companies that just do like a day and then you get all information at once like they throw a full bucket of of trash over you and you have to figure out how it works the day after so they are doing not as well but you have to be careful with it because if you keep in contact with the business you will have much more of attraction not only from a IT perspective but also from the business side because once people see that there is a team constantly involved and helping them to get better it goes around in the company and people get better instead of one time this is it and a lot of things that in adoption land happens and I did it as well I haven't turned on to blame anybody but it's like this is this knob is for this this knob is for that but I think the better adoption practices are why would I use this and what is the outcome what can I expect and I think it's when you go to a company and you want to improve the adoption ask them how they work on the daily base what are the first stations that they have on a daily base and then check if you can create that something with copilot to improve like one hour to our day or a week because you can really improve your your work with copilot but you need to know exactly how to use it and that's that's the hardest part and especially because we have like weekly we have like 25 updates or something like that so it's not only like okay I know now copilot and I'm done no and next week it looks different and a good example is for example the the work editor or PowerPoint where you first had like you had the in PowerPoint you could prompt a copilot chat and it would do only in the side it would generate something now you can edit it and during the first times prompts for people just before summer you had to choose in the prompts which brand kit you were going to use if you use it brand kit of course but now you can already pre-select it from with the plus sign which makes it way much easier and just to prompt what you want in your PowerPoint and that's all those little skills they are they they make your work so much easier okay I think what did you think about the yeah I say the copilot champion program what did you think about it and and what did you think are here the best practice I think the copilot champion program is already good is a good start let's put it that way but you always have to check on how your company is working and if it's going as you planned and if it's the same as the the AI adoption plan for Microsoft because a lot of adoption plans that are made are not are for really big big companies which some companies with 25 people they won't use it it's it's too much and I think it's really important to look at that what does my company need does it need the AI adoption plan for Microsoft which is free by the way so you can just use it but I would rather make a combination of that like look at the adoption plan and take a little bit of that and create full plan for your organization and challenge users challenge if they they like it or not and what they think about this adoption program I think what also interesting is I think at the start the copilot it was really simple if the CFO came in and asked me yeah make sense to pay for copilot and then I are simply asked okay how many hours your employee saved and he say six okay then I say okay you pay 30 dollars it's it's five dollars per hour did you pay your employees more than more than five dollars than yes if less no so but now we get the the price thing with different tokens and so on yes yeah what what I heard in a different podcast with different people who do a lot of it AI really focus on only AI and they do it with different brands so it's a cloud and chat GBT but they they say that about it should be like two to three percent of the payment of the salary should be considered to be used on AI so like two to three present if somebody has a salary then it would be reserved for cost of AI for example co-work for a clot or any other AI system because people can learn more and more if they have like a budget on on their hand which they can spend on and this is something that's completely new of course because we are not used to spend so much on software for employees at least not in this way let's put it that way so I think that's a good thing if people would do that because you will see that they will adopt also more and more if they are aware so you have to get them aware of the situation and I think especially for example the copilot license is about 30 euros and 30 dollars 30 euros but with co-work you are talking tokens and with Microsoft Scout you are also talking tokens and the token thing is a whole different story whole different thing to talk about because if we look at co-work the first time I tried it out the amount of tokens I burned was immense so I thought okay what's going on here especially because we were in front there which means you can pre-use it then it was free and then first of July 26 they started to price you and when I did it then it was like really expensive and I thought okay I leave it for a while and then I went back like three weeks later and then it was like really cheap cheap and that's not only because co-work we came cheap but also because you have to be aware if you use co-work and it's on auto it will choose the model that's most suitable for your prompt but if you use co-work and you for example use clot opus 4.8 which is less than 5 a faible your cost will drop their mast dramatically so have a look at that if you want to do it but also there does this learning curve because if people start and they don't know this they will use faible 5 or astra from chatchipity to get the results and if they are not aware they will use co-work as co-pilot because there's also a chat in there so why not use it there and they are not aware of the cost so then you are getting into trouble let's put it that way I think what or we have started with co-pilot with prompt engineering doing prompts but now we yeah we have the the next era and I say it's the agent world and there are agents that say other agents to do this and that what's your view view on agents well I think agents can be very powerful and I heard a talk from missiel barman a few weeks back also in a podcast and he was talking about the Microsoft organization where they have enabled Microsoft's card for everyone and of course they have a earlier version so they eat their own dog food so to say but what he was telling me and or telling in the podcast he was telling that they have several everybody has a Microsoft scout session and those Microsoft scout sessions they are starting to talk to each other so they are agents talking to each other and they even show up in their organization profile so when you go into teams you can look at who's where in the organization and now even Microsoft scout agents show up there and you can talk to them directly so you can have like a question on one side from for me for example and I want to ask it to missiel and then missiel's agents pick it up and they say okay we can do that without disturbing missiel and putting it back to me so I think the future will be more like that but it can also be a danger because yeah we we are going to do a more AI way of working and once they start talking you still have to input them but once you stop inputting them and they can do everything you can do it can be a danger that's pretty that way. I think that's yeah I could be really critical but what did you think about yeah I think something like an agent center of excellence or AI center I don't know how we got there there is already one the the agent 365 is already a it is another license which at the moment I'm getting crazy about all those licenses that they come up with but within your admin center you also already have a agent 365 where you can view all your agents that are deployed in your environment even once you don't know because sometimes you don't know them and you can administrative them from there but also monitor them and even give permission from there so that's a really nice admin center I must say there are also third parties again that have similar functionality but cheaper and even sometimes more functionality so I would look I won't look will tell you not only to look at agent 365 but also look at third parties because although Microsoft works on it but third parties are most most of the time they are more innovative so they are more ahead of time and because they do it on the third party they can deliver it for a cheaper price yeah yeah and they have something that's yeah if you have these these what I read you from interesting you're you're originally from from from the Netherlands and then you go to Portugal and you have something you call it the focus week concept can you tell us a little bit about what is this as something to do with scope pilot or yes well what I we moved in 2023 to Portugal and at that time I did not know I was going to stay here but after three weeks we decided to stay here and now we have our own guesthouse as well on the land where we live and what I do in the focus week is actually you you start with how you want to do copilot or sharepoint and you you are going to go a week with me focusing only on copilot on sharepoint how to deploy it make you governance or make your development doesn't matter I'm here to help you then and what we do is in the morning we do the sessions in the afternoon you can go for a surf or you can go to the beach depending on what you like or go for a hiking we have great hiking trails so it's the thing is when you are in a company you are in a company so people come and disturb you all the time but when you go out of the company and you go somewhere else and you have the focus on it and you don't get disturbed by your colleagues you make search a lot of progress compared to in company and that's why I thought okay I have to make this and I like that people then come here as well and we can have a chat and we can check how we can improve everything of the company so yeah that's that's the thing what came up with me and I do a lot of surfing as well myself so yeah that's why I say it's a really good combination and you get back refreshed with the full program or a full list of things you can do or you are already ready to work on it with with the rest of your team or your company yeah awesome yeah that's that's that's I think yeah that that makes sense and you have the better better or more sunny weather than than we in middle Europe yes yes I'm I'm originally from Amsterdam or at least from the Netherlands I'm not an Amsterdam but from Aintova area but I lived a long time in Amsterdam so I know exactly the differences and just the weather is most of the time it's great we have 60 days of rain on a normal year so yeah I can I cannot complain but by the Netherlands the better you are parties yeah absolutely yeah cool I have yeah I say in every interview yeah I say rapid fire round I give you a short question and you give a short short answer so SharePoint or teams I would say teams at the moment okay co-pilot co-pilot studio or AI foundry co-pilot studio governance before adoption or adoption before governance all the way around and governance before adoption what what is the most underrated Microsoft 365 feature oh that's a good one early a days I would say one now but nowadays I would say much probably loop because I think loop is great it really works really well yeah it starts so simple and now it's such a powerful tool it's it's real it's really amazing how old is this evolved and so what's your five favorite co-pilot use case well I use it a lot for my own marketing as well so I think is is not early for in-company but also for your marketing it's a great tool but I also use it to keep me informed about things I still need to do things I forget that it just reminds me and what I also do is a lot of skills so we didn't talk about skills but a skill is like something like a standard operating procedure you every time repeat the same order a skill can do that so I love skills all my short videos that I post on youtube instagram and tiktok are actually done with AI so I speak normally but the editing is done by AI I'm not doing anything and it amazed me how much time I say for that so and then what do we have more yeah I use it also for myself for my CRM everything on that yeah it's hard to say okay this side of five use cases because there are many use cases to talk about and I think it also this is like each company has different use cases and some things that sound so logic they and you think okay yeah this isn't done in copage yet or there's no agent for that okay let's make a agent for that yeah when satanidalya calls you and say hey Paul you get all the money and resources to develop your dream feature and copilot what would it be to be honest I wouldn't know now I really don't know no no I couldn't answer your questions sorry okay okay who should I invite next and what questions should I ask I think it would be interesting to invite Vincent Clayis is a new MVP he's a Belgium guy living also in Portugal and he's on the adoption side so I think it would be really nice to hear his stories on adoption and where people yeah miss their tricks let's put it that way I also have a podcast with him but he's really nice and I think the main question is it would be like how do you do adoption in a multi multi country tenancy something like that because I think it's still lots of people can learn from him and finally if I tealed I listened to this episode we remember one thing about preparing Microsoft 365 for copilot what should it be I would start with the sharing settings I think that's a really important part to start with and to remember yeah then Paul thank you for for joining me today I think the biggest takeaway from the today session is that copilot readiness isn't really a copilot project it's Microsoft 365 project it's understand your share point environment it's understand who can access what it's yeah dealing with oversharing it's yeah building information protection strategy with technology such Microsoft PueView and yeah sensitivity labels and yeah then it's making sure people actually have real business problems where copilot can make a measurable difference so yeah for all the people you find all the links to Paul's podcast and to Paul's linked it profiles and other things in the show notes from the m65fmp podcast page and yeah which thank you podcast as Microsoft MEP found out kbworks for for joining us thank you it's all not to be here [ENGINE REVVING]