Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat

Microsoft announce that there are enhancements to the Microsoft Copilot experience for users with a Microsoft Entra account and, because of that, there’s a name change… Welcome Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat! It’s the use of Agents in the chat experience that’s the big news – oh, and the fact that these can be paid for on a consumption basis.

You can find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3Cj84bp, and information on how the consumption works here: https://bit.ly/4auaUXB.

Alternatively, if you’re a Licensing School subscriber join our Did You See..? training session on Wednesday 22nd January, 2025 and let us teach you all about it: https://bit.ly/3Wy2CbZ.

Microsoft 365 plan comparison documents

There are updated (August 2024) Microsoft 365 plan comparison documents which now include the Microsoft Entra Suite and a couple of the new components such as Entra Internet Access and Entra Private Access.

Get the Enterprise version of this document here: https://bit.ly/3yxc2LE, and the SMB flavour here: https://bit.ly/4deVHu2.

Microsoft Entra update

At the end of May 2022 Microsoft introduced us to Microsoft Entra – a new product family encompassing all of Microsoft’s identity and access capabilities (https://bit.ly/3SEMXDA). There are three members of the family with Azure AD remaining the hero identity and access management product, alongside two new product categories: Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM) and decentralized identity.

With the acquisition of CloudKnox Security in 2021, Microsoft now offers a CIEM solution as part of Entra called Microsoft Entra Permissions Management. This was made generally available in July 2022 (https://bit.ly/3PdAF2f) and is licensed as a standalone solution costing $125 per resource per year, where supported resources are compute resources, container clusters, serverless functions, and databases across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

The decentralized identity solution, Microsoft Entra Verified ID, was made generally available in August 2022 (https://bit.ly/3SQSyae) and is included with any Azure AD subscription, including Azure AD Free. If you’re new to this notion, then there’s a nice video explaining decentralized identity here: https://bit.ly/3paTuso.

In terms of learning more, if you’re a partner, then this Inspire session (https://bit.ly/3BfNea3) is a good introduction to Entra, and of course there’s the main product page here: https://bit.ly/3P7VGLK, with links to lots more product information.