Kurt Shintaku's Blog

If Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses are purchased for a sub-segment of your Microsoft 365 GCC users, it can provide SharePoint Advanced Management licensing for ALL USERS as announced on our blog. For instance, if a customer buys 250 seats for M365 Copilot, all 20,000+ users in the M365 cloud instance will access to SharePoint Advanced Management.

Note however: GCC customers will not automatically receive these SharePoint Advanced Management licenses until April 2025.

• From an administrative standpoint, for any of my customers purchasing pilot Microsoft 365 Copilot GCC licenses (~10% of your Microsoft 365 footprint) right now until April 2025, contact your Account team and we can request an exception with Microsoft 365 engineering to roll out SharePoint Advanced Management trial licenses tenant-wide for you extended for 3 months until it’s fully integrated with the M365 Copilot GCC purchases in April 2025 & can obtain full licenses/non-trial licenses.
• After the exception is approved, we can work with you to ensure that your Unified CSAM &/or CSA are working together to then educate you on assigning licenses, configuring features, enabling them, and best practices on monitoring and usage.
• There is also an offering from Unified Support called “SharePoint Optimization” that can be leveraged, with modules of SharePoint Advanced Management being included in it.

NOT READY TO LICENSE MICROSOFT 365 COPILOT?
Organizations with Microsoft 365 GCC that don’t want to license Microsoft 365 Copilot immediately, wil be able to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat in April 2025. Copilot Chat is the “lite” version of M365 Copilot which provides Enterprise secure, IT-managed Copilot for end users as part of their Entra ID Premium P1 licensing. Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat exclusively provides responses based on Internet/web data & does NOT INDEX OR PROVIDE RESPONSES based on Microsoft 365 GCC protected data from Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Teams or OneDrive for Business. (Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat consequently does not include SharePoint Advanced Management since Copilot Chat does not automatically index SharePoint Online or OneDrive files.)

(Note: There are no “trial” licenses of Microsoft 365 Copilot. If you wish to “test” Microsoft 365 Copilot & it’s integration with your Microsoft 365 tenant data, you are required to purchase licenses. These licenses will again include SharePoint Advanced Management licensing as mentioned above & this will activate the “Semantic Index service” and the “Microsoft 365 Copilot System service” for use in your organization’s Microsoft 365 cloud instance.)

To read more about SharePoint Advanced Management, visit:

• Get ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot with SharePoint Advanced Management – SharePoint in Microsoft 365
• Microsoft 365 Copilot now includes SharePoint Advanced Management at no additional cost

For customers looking to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot but want to ensure it doesn’t accidentally discover data that wasn’t properly secured, Microsoft is providing a powerful solution that restricts discoverability & access of Microsoft 365 Copilot at no additional cost to M365 Copilot customers without requiring labelling, classification & security policies.

This solution is called “SharePoint Advanced Management” & customers with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses will also get complimentary SharePoint Advanced Management licenses which will start appearing in GCC tenants in the next couple months.

The process of using SharePoint Advanced Management licenses to prevent oversharing in anticipation of using Microsoft 365 Copilot are discussed here but in summary:

• Set Restricted Access Control (RAC) at the SP/ODFB site level. Even if individual files/folders have broken inheritance and over shared, only RAC allowed users can access through Search and M365 Copilot – (available to GCC & in SAM)
• Set site level Restricted content Discoverability (RCD) to restrict content discoverability via Copilot and Org wide search– (available to GCC & in SAM)
• Data access governance reports for SharePoint sites: These reports help you discover sites that contain potentially overshared or sensitive content. You can use these reports to assess oversharing and apply appropriate security and compliance policies. ((available to GCC & in SAM)
• Conditional access policy for SharePoint sites and OneDrive: With Microsoft Entra ID authentication context, you can enforce stringent access conditions for users who access SharePoint sites. Authentication contexts can be directly applied to SharePoint sites or used with Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels to connect Entra ID Conditional Access policies to labeled sites.  
• Setup user access reviews to clean up group and site membership in Entra ID Governance.  
• Data assessments in Data Security Posture Management for AI to identify, remediate, and monitor potential oversharing of data. (coming soon to GCC)

Not yet available for GCC however for customers with Non-Disclosure Agreements & Microsoft 365 Commercial test environments:

• PREVIEW: Use AI Powered Semantic matching to find similar sites (Requires signed agreement)
  You discovered a site containing crucial business data that lacks proper protection. Are there more sites like this one that might have similar vulnerabilities? Soon, AI Powered Semantic matching helps you locate these sites using the site you discovered as the example. The AI powered semantic matching tool reads through all the sites you have, including content, files, metadata, and give you a list of similar sites based on your example site.
  Sign up to participate in the preview by following instructions here.

Extended Security Updates for Windows 10 are now available for purchase today through the Microsoft Volume Licensing Program.

Pricing
ESUs for Windows 10 will be $61 USD per device for Year One & will double every consecutive year, for a maximum of three years.  ($122/device, $244/device) For more information, see When to use Windows 10 Extended Security Updates.

Available for free for Azure Virtual Desktops or Cloud PCs
ESUs for Windows 10 are available at no additional cost for Windows 10 virtual machines running in Windows 365 or Azure Virtual Desktop. Windows 10 endpoints connecting to Windows 365 Cloud PCs will be entitled to the ESU for up to 3 years, with an active Windows 365 subscription license. For more information about Windows 365, see What is Windows 365?.

Read more at:

• Extended Security Updates (ESU) program for Windows 10

GeekWire is doing a year-long special series about Microsoft’s 50th anniversary & looking at what’s next for a company that reshaped the technology landscape.

It features articles & podcasts about Microsoft’s history and the people that made the company possible.

• Coverage: “Microsoft@50”
  https://www.geekwire.com/special-coverage/microsoft-at-50/
• Podcasts: “Microsoft@50”
  • February 4, 2025: Interview: Bill Gates on his early years, key influences, and outlook on the world today
    https://www.geekwire.com/2025/interview-bill-gates-on-his-early-life-key-influences-and-outlook-on-the-world-today/
  • November 14, 2024 – Microsoft’s startup story: A new look, with insights for today
    https://www.geekwire.com/2024/podcast-revisiting-microsofts-startup-years-in-search-of-new-insights/