A partner recently mentioned to me that whenever Microsoft starts talking to their customers about a new area of innovation, it’s the partner who inevitably needs to turn the dream into reality for the customer. When considering their next move with Copilot, the decision they needed to make was ‘’Do I ignore it for now? Do I keep an eye on it? Do I jump right in and get involved?’’. They decided to go for the latter, here is why.
- Microsoft’s marketing message around Copilot is loud and spreads far and wide, it’s unavoidable. In fact, because Microsoft is sprinkling Copilot into many of their products, there is a high chance your customers have already experienced it in one way or another. So you might as well be part of the conversation.
- When you look at the Microsoft Appsource, there are over 200+ Copilot related apps and services available for customers to talk to MSPs about. If you’re not starting a conversation with your customer about Copilot, another MSP is.
Taking both points into account, I recommend you embrace the opportunity to talk to the customer about Copilot before someone else does. It’s better to set the course of the conversation with the customer rather than someone else leading it in a direction that doesn’t work for you, or even worse doesn’t include you.
The inherent risks of Copilot for Business
We know about services like ChatGPT and how they use information on the public internet to build their models. However for Copilot, we also need to remember that it is also grounding its answers on data available internally within an organisation.
You should ask the following questions
- As Copilot uses customers corporate data, am I ensuring that customers data is backed up in the event of accidental or malicious deletion?
- How secure is the customer’s Microsoft 365 tenant; are the basic security controls in place?
- Is there any specific compliance requirements for my customer I need to adhere to?
- How do I do all this at-scale (across all my customers) and in a repeatable manner?
Engaging customers and preparing them for Copilot for Microsoft 365
So you got to this point and you are ready to get going, but what exactly is it that you need to do?
As you would expect, Microsoft has created documentation, quite a lot actually, detailing the steps you need go to through including checking for all the requirements, data/privacy/security for Copilot and much more, all viewable at Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 documentation | Microsoft Learn
All good stuff, but it’s created with a single customer in mind and doesn’t help when you want to calculate which customers to work with first. It also contains an expansive yet somewhat daunting number of links to information, documentation, PowerShell scripts, and more. Delivering Copilot for Microsoft 365 using just this documentation, without making mistakes or missing something, just isn’t possible.
MSPs need a way to make this process repeatable and scalable across multiple customers!
SkyKick Workflow: Plan and Deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot
The team at SkyKick has taken all the information from Microsoft and created a workflow for you to run to simplify the task of getting going with Copilot.
The workflow condenses all the Microsoft documentation down into the following easy workflow or process to follow:
- Determine which of your customers are ready for CoPilot based on usage data
- Confirm which users within an organisation are ready to be a pilot group
- Detect what M365 licensing is in place
- Understand what basic security standards/compliance are in place
- Set a baseline across all the customers for security standards/compliance
- Configure specific services like Data Loss Prevention and Retention policies for more industry specific compliance
- Understand and configure OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams access settings to make the most of Copilot
- Share your masterful findings with customers
- Assign licenses for Copilot as the final step
In the next blog post, we will take all of this theory and put it into practice. We will work through the workflow to understand where our customers are, segment them into different stages in their journey and then take them through a journey toward deploying Copilot for Microsoft 365. More importantly, we will do this in a scalable and repeatable manner!
Already a Security Manager subscriber? Use the workflow now