NewsUC&C15 Nov 2023 · 3 min read

Copilot Added to Microsoft 365 for Frontline Workers

Microsoft 365 adds Copilot to F3 frontline workers, plus Teams, Shifts and Entra updates to cut admin overhead.

Copilot for Microsoft 365 frontline workers

Among several new updates being added to Microsoft 365 for frontline workers is Copilot's availability for subscribers to the F3 license.

Announced at Microsoft's Ignite event this week, Copilot will be added to the F3 license starting in December and will be available for no extra cost.

Microsoft described the update:

This new tool will bring AI-powered web searches, answers and content generation for frontline workers."

The product will also include commercial data protection, enabling frontline workers to make intelligent requests. Examples include looking up inventory or summarising large internal documents without being concerned about sharing sensitive business data.

Also coming in December is the Shifts plugin for Copilot, empowering frontline managers to easily find a list of critical items specific to their team and location to streamline tasks, including covering shifts and onboarding new employees.

Shifts plugin for Microsoft Copilot will utilise prompts to obtain insights for frontline managers. It will use data from the Shifts app and user and business data it's been granted access to, such as Teams chat history, SharePoint, and emails.

What Other New Updates Are Coming For Microsoft 365 Frontline Workers?

Other December updates include the functionality to deploy and manage frontline teams with dynamic membership features.

Admins will be able to deploy and oversee their frontline workers by provisioning frontline accounts and their teams through group memberships in the Teams admin centre. Admins can use dynamic groups through their Microsoft Entra IDs to automatically keep informed as people enter, transition within or leave the business. This dynamic membership ensures a consistent Teams channel structure to optimise effective frontline collaboration.

The Shifts app will introduce a new deployment tool to deploy and oversee shifts for frontline workforce across several locations. The tool will be accessible via the Teams admin centre and will be in preview in December. Users can standardise time-off reasons, plan schedules, and confirm shift settings across all frontline teams.

Simple authorisation without requiring domain sign-in will also be introduced, entering preview in early 2024. The feature enables frontline workers to sign in to Teams faster and more efficiently using only their employee ID without typing in long domain names. This will make it easier for frontline workers to leverage and more straightforward to manage and deploy, minimising distribution and management overhead and inefficiencies for IT admins.

What Else Has Been Announced at Ignite 2023?

Microsoft is combining to-dos, tasks, projects and plans into Planner for one unified collaborative experience.

The tech giant is merging Microsoft To Do, Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Project for the web into a single product. The Planner app in Microsoft Teams will be updated with these new features in the spring of 2024, with web functionality planned to be introduced later in 2024.

Microsoft is also adding new management tools to the Teams Admin Center, including shared calling for Teams Phone. Announced at this week's Microsoft Ignite event, shared calling simplifies Teams Phone deployment, allowing admins to empower groups of users to make and receive public switched telephone network (PSTN) calls through a shared phone number and calling plan.

Other significant new management features being introduced are low-friction Teams Rooms deployment options and advanced collaboration tools.

Microsoft is rebranding Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise as part of Copilot to simplify the user experience. The move intends to make Copilot more accessible for everyone to leverage the tech giant's premier AI-powered productivity tool via Microsoft's Bing search engine.

For subscribers of Microsoft Entra, Copilot in Bing, Edge, and Windows also introduces commercial data protection. Copilot (formerly Bing Chat Enterprise) will be out of preview and become generally available starting December 1.