The following below was generated by an AI bot there will be typos. Source – https://levelupm365.com/2025/01/20/podcast11-new-teams-chat-ui-and-calendar-plus-fun-with-chat-bots/↗
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Episode 8, new teams chat and new Teams calendar.
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Hi all.
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Welcome to the Level Up in 365 podcast here where we talk about the broader M365 collaboration apps for admins, pros and CEOs.
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Topics that we are going to cover today are going to be a little bit of some preamble and we’re going to the message center.
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And this is not comprehensive, just news that stuck out to me.
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We’re going to go over our topic of the day and in this instance, we’re going to talk.
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It’s been a few minutes to talk about the new teams calendar coming out and the new teams check UI, which is scheduled to be released this month.
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And then we’re going to end on the tip of the day.
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With that, let’s get right into the sponsor.
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Today’s sponsor is me similar to the last episode, I have been kind of on the ropes about whether I want to put an ad in here or not.
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So as of right now, I’m financing this out of pocket, but you know, with a with an iPhone and all the other stuff, it’s not terribly expensive, just as time time consuming.
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I’m on all the socials level up in 365.com is is where all my content lives.
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So with that out of the way, let’s get right into the preamble.
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Preamble section is just me kind of giving you a little personal update.
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And I actually haven’t done a podcast episode in a minute.
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And like everyone, just took some time off for the new year, got a few things organized and now I’m back at it again.
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And I’m going to be using LinkedIn a little bit, a little bit more for the majority of my posts still still going to post on my my main site, but the value of LinkedIn is the storage of content is free, at least for my my personal account.
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So if you haven’t followed me on LinkedIn, feel free to do so as I’ll probably probably be posting stuff there.
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First links, links to everything is going to be in the show notes.
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So yeah, let’s go ahead and get right into the message Center radar.
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So the news that stuck out to me here in the message center radar and some of these have actually been released for a while.
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Again, I kind of randomly pick things that I know are either going to cause consternation or excitement.
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So let’s get into the first one.
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And this is about the new teams calendar.
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We’ll go into a little bit more in depth later in the show, but this is ID 415415.
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Yeah, four and five, four and five.
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Simple enough.
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This is coming out mid January, late January, probably first week of of October of February for general availability, and I’m going to read quick a blurb of the description here.
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The new Calendar app aims to provide a single, modern, intelligent and coherent calendar for both Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook users.
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That latter part’s important the new opt in experience will be available in Teams, allowing users to toggle the Teams calendar interface.
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This message applies to Teams on Windows, Mac and desktops, which is an interesting point because I don’t see it available for the browser just yet.
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The new chat experience we talk about, I also don’t see that experience in the web browser.
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So with the new calendar and the new chat experiences coming up, you can expect, this is me talking now.
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You can expect kind of a bifurcation temporarily where the desktop app has kind of a different UI than the web browser.
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Attached to the show notes is actual, you know, screenshots.
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I have a blog post that kind of shows you what the what this new experience looks like.
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So with the new team’s calendar, I do like where they’re headed.
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The writing is on the wall that the classic teams calendar is going away and you can expect, you can expect the new teams calendar to to be take advantage of.
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I guess I, how can I say it?
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You have the web-based based Outlook, then you have the new Windows Outlook app.
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Those are the same like core technologies and there are different technologies in the classic Outlook.
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So the new Teams calendar that’s coming out is just that same same web browser calendar just baked inside of Teams.
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And this is actually a really nice experience because it you, I just mentioned like 3 different technologies, Outlook in the web, the new Outlook app, and then and then the calendar in the new teams.
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And you would think that those are three different things, but they’re all kind of the same thing.
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And what you’re seeing is a cohesion between all the different Outlook apps.
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So my advice is if you can ditch the classic Outlook now, if you if you can do that, the sooner you can do that, the the the better.
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Because it’s definitely I believe the new outlook coming out is going to be done released sometime next year for general availability.
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But that’s going to be the same back end technology as this new teams calendar.
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So definitely be sure to check that out.
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Look at the blog post, look at the message notes.
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You’ll see screenshots.
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Let’s go into the next message center.
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So this one should already be out.
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This is the message.
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Was it Message Center 395, 931?
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Ability to rename the general channel?
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So a lot of people didn’t know this is already out.
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And it’s yeah, it was spin out since before the end of last year, actually, probably fall of last year.
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But I did want to note the value of this feature, this release, because it could cause some problems.
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If you’re linking out to things, I can tell you I did some troubleshooting on this.
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You know a SharePoint link, a Teams is a SharePoint site on the back end for the files.
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And when you store something in a folder, the the link will have that folder path in it.
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So if you have a general folder which every team has or had until this point you’ve got in your you’re linking out to an item stored in your general channel.
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You then you have that general URL name.
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Now when I got this in my tenant, I created a link on my intranet for everybody to consume and then I went and intentionally changed my channel name.
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I changed my general channel name which broke the link.
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It broke the link that I had embedded on my intranet visible for everyone.
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Now, I did this in a controlled environment, but I can anticipate this being the case for others.
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So if you link out to intranets or you’re creating documentation based off of stuff in the general channel, you might want to be cognizant that you can now change the general channel name.
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Yeah, this is out.
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This is live to my knowledge.
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It wasn’t delayed for any region or any type of platform like government cloud or anything.
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So yeah, tread, tread carefully with that one.
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Going to the next Message Center release, which is MC9O8.
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This is the new chat feature.
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I’m going to skip most of the content of this because that’s the point of today’s chat.
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But just know this new chat is a big UI overhaul and it’s going to be released end of this month.
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So I’m a little late getting this out, but this is MC9O8116.
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Definitely, this is a very important topic to talk about.
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That being done, that being said, let’s go into it.
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OK, so let’s get into the focal point or content of this podcast and that is the new Teams chat.
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So mentioned earlier.
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I have a blog post in the message notes that gives you screenshots.
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And I’m not going to go into the marketing spiel of why this is great.
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I’m going to go into my personal opinions.
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I’ve been using it for probably 3 weeks now.
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You can enable this to opt in before it’s released to the general public, but this is the new Teams chat and I actually I do like this.
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I’m referencing my blog post here.
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Basically what’s happening is there’s a new chat interface and it’s removing.
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If you remember, if you use Teams every day, you have this, you have this on the far left panel that’s kind of your navigation nodes, like your Teams icons there, your chat icons there, your activity bells on the top.
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So what’s jarring?
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And then again, using word for word in my blog, my blog post here, what’s jarring is that Teams icon that I’ve been using probably for what, about seven years now that’s actually going away.
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It’s just going to be chat.
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Yes, your Teams channels and your chats are going to only be visible in the chat icon on the far left.
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And so many times, so many times I have forgotten this with the new UI and I’ve gotten an emergency call and I have to find some information and I don’t know how to get back to my my teams to, to find the information.
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So definitely if you’re in the position of supporting end users, you, you want to be cognizant and you want to pump this information out yesterday or last month that this UI change is coming.
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Where it’s tricky is this is only happening to my knowledge.
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I haven’t done that much research on it, but I don’t see this in the web browser.
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I’ve enabled the opt in experience which right now to try this out in preview you have to toggle a flag to be able to opt in in the admin panel, but I don’t see this available in the web.
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I only see it available in the thick client.
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So you have that bifurcation I mentioned earlier.
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But your key distinction, if you’re supporting end users, your key distinction is on the far left hand navigation, you won’t see the teams icon, you’ll just see the chat icon.
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So that’s kind of the cons or the nuance, nuance to manage.
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Now, under the pros of this is you have these cool things called custom sections and it’s a little bit, it’s got a little bit of a learning curve, but again, I have a screenshot and, and I’m using this custom sections feature to kind of organize projects that I’m working on.
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So I have AI have two custom sections called frequent, which are like my manager, my Co workers.
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Then I have another section called projects.
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And in that section, I throw in the group chats related to projects that I’m working on.
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And I, I just name those chats by the ID of the project.
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And then I also have some reoccurring meetings that are that that we use that my projects use as kind of a status update and I organize those under the project section.
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And that’s figure 3 of my, my accompanied blog post here.
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So that has been awesome.
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Like having those that, that has really helped me really stay focused on what I’m working on for that day.
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Just those sections.
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I also have the, you have the UN unread tag right on top of this new UI.
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So I keep the unread tag.
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And this is my personal flow.
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It’s not a recommendation, but I have a basically I open up my projects and I keep my unread tag toggled.
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So I’m just seeing what’s unread related to the projects and I’m working on and it’s super clean.
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It’s super efficient.
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There’s a little bit of a learning curve to get all this set up, but it’s totally worth it.
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And I do think, all things being equal, this will be a net positive once we all get our heads wrapped around the nuance.
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So again, that’s coming out this month.
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You I I was trying to get this out earlier, but this is the best I could do.
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So you definitely want to, you know, take my my post, share it, read the the company Microsoft blog posts just to see all the the benefits.
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I kind of highlighted what my opinions on this topic.
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And that being said, I think we’re done with this section.
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Let’s go ahead and go into the tip of the week.
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OK, on to the tip of the week.
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I have two tip of the weeks.
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First one is the SharePoint agent.
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So the SharePoint agents bound for maybe a month now and I’ll probably do a longer post about this.
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Want to get some more experience?
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But I did throw it in one of my Internet tenants just to see like what you know, how how valuable is this information?
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How, how, how accurate is it?
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And it was pretty darn accurate.
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And what’s amazing is there’s that content, there’s that question of how do I find things or I can’t find things.
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That’s a common issue within intranets, whether it’s SharePoint or ServiceNow.
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Individuals finding things in the knowledge base is always a challenge.
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And then you, and then this is just me.
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I’ve spent the last two decades of my life using metadata and forcing people to put in metadata.
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And people complain that it’s too hard or it’s too time consuming.
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So if I don’t, if I don’t have them tag the data, then it’s harder to find.
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So there’s SharePoint agents, kind of a middle ground because it’s using Gen.
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AI to locate the content of what is on the intranet site.
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And I use an example of some, some blog posts that that I had and I asked it, you know, have I talked about this before or when was the last time I talked about XYZ topic?
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And it pulled up the article and it, you know, gave me a summary of how many times I talked about a particular article.
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And then it, it linked, it gave me the references so I could actually go click on those links.
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And conversely, I had like an article, I have some help articles that talk about how do I share a file in OneDrive, You know, using a scenario of, of creating the, using the SharePoint agent as kind of a little chat bot.
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And sure enough, it, it, I had to help.
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I had an an article on there talked about how to share a file in OneDrive, but I didn’t have to train the bot on how to respond.
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So I see tremendous potential here.
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There are some pay as you go plans.
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Again, I need to learn more about this functionality, but the SharePoint agent is exciting.
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Another nice part about that is the agent only has access to that site to the best of my knowledge.
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So if I ask about information outside of that site, I don’t think it can gather it, which is a security feature.
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Plus it should reduce your I can’t remember what that that lingo is called where you’re you’re Oh, hallucination.
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It should it should reduce hallucination because the smaller the data set, the more accurate the responses should be.
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Second chat, second chat, second tip of the week is the is to use these chat GTP or copilot.
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I personally use, I swap between chat GTP and Copilot just just for learning experiences.
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I’ve for most of my blog posts actually the picture I’ve been using Copilot and it’s been pretty accurate.
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It’s been pretty good for generic photo.
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But what I’ve really been using both of these 4 is stuff I used to do in Excel, which is you get us, you know, you get us a series of emails that you have to add to a SharePoint list, but the emails are all together in one giant string, not formatted properly to bulk to bulk add to SharePoint list.
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So I’ll, I’ll paste in the list of users and I’ll say, you know, add a, give me an organized list and, and add a; At the end of all of these e-mail addresses and it will give me that list and even offered to export to CSV and string manipulation, data manipulation, posting it right into those bots, having it do that.
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These are things that I’d have used to have to write a formula for, and I may be a little rusty on my string manipulation.
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So then I got to go to YouTube and learn how to do it, whereas now I can just paste that that raw data into the chat.
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GTP, have it format the data and spit out a perfectly beautifully formatted CSV file.
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Right now I’m using the free version, but I’m considering the paid version because I I do a lot of data formatting and I see some value there.
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I do know that that you can have a chat bot inside Excel.
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I haven’t got as much experience with that, but wanted to share that with you guys.
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OK, so that concludes our show for today everybody happy 2025.
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I’m 20 days late.
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You’ve been saying that, but if you’ve enjoyed the show, the content here, don’t forget to check out the meeting minutes are the meeting notes, the show notes, and again, if you like what you see here, rate the podcast.
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Give me a thumbs up on your socials and you’ll have a good day.
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