June 13, 2024 – Bo – Microsoft 365 Business Consultant
Your organization has been swept up in the hype surrounding Copilot, and you are eager to take advantage of the benefits and time savings it offers. But where to start?
Purchasing and activating a license is a snap, but what if employees suddenly gain access to sensitive information, such as the CEO’s salary or the annual figures that would not be announced until next month? And what if Copilot uses outdated documents from your environment as a source of information, giving you back wrong information? Copilot, in fact, works slightly differently than a regular search bar.
If you use the search bar in SharePoint, it is a passive search. You type in a search term and based on that you get a result. This too may contain information that you really shouldn’t see. Fortunately, due to the volume of documents, you often don’t see this right away and have to open the document before you see the sensitive information.
For many, a familiar situation: Delve has a feature that lets you see documents based on relevance. Users panicked because of this, surely colleagues should not be able to see this at all? Well, so it does! Delve uses an active search, showing documents related to you as a person and documents to which you have permissions.
Copilot further complicates this whole story. When it comes to search, it is similar to Delve and uses active search. However, the results are not documents that the user has yet to open themselves. On the contrary, Copilot generates the content itself and selects the most relevant information. It searches through hundreds of documents at lightning speed and extracts the best information from them, regardless of whether it is intended for your eyes or not!
Successfully implementing new technologies, such as Copilot, within an organization requires careful preparation. Here are some important steps you can take to prepare your organization to use Copilot effectively.
Your organization undoubtedly contains a large number of workspaces spread across SharePoint, Teams and OneDrive. It is important that only relevant individuals have access to these workspaces.
Adoption is crucial, not only for using Copilot, but also for safe data handling.
Access rights are important, but data security should certainly not be forgotten either. Documents are shared, emailed and printed. This should be reduced and in some cases prevented.
Data contamination is a common problem. After all, among 15 versions, how do you still know how to find the right one? Copilot is not reliable then either, it does not see the distinction between version 1.1 and 12.1 or copies stored in different locations.
You now know what the risks are and what you here against can do. But where do you start and how do you know what applies to you? No worries, we are here to help je help!
Step 1: We begin with a thorough analysis of your organizational needs and risks. What retention periods should your organization use? What confidential information is handled within the organization? How are teams and SharePoint sites created and who is responsible for them? Who gets access? How is (external) sharing handled? All questions we are going to answer together.
Step 2: Next, we help clean up your work environment. To be sure you can trust Copilot results, a clean working environment without data contamination is required. We perform scans that provide insight into duplicate versions and obsolete documents.
Step 3: Then we set up your work environment step by step. We start on a small scale, for example by applying retention periods and confidentiality at the site level. It is important that working documents remain relevant and current while other documents are placed in the archive or deleted.
For setup, we use Microsoft Purview, the security and compliance platform of Microsoft 365. The goal is to automate as much as possible, relieving your staff and reducing the chance of errors.
Want to prepare your organization for the effective use of Copilot and address the hidden risks? Then contact us now for a Copilot Starterpack and let us help you optimize your work environment and realize the full potential of Copilot to its full potential!
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