{"id":17337,"date":"2024-10-31T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-31T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=17337"},"modified":"2025-11-11T08:15:35","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T16:15:35","slug":"boosting-business-chat-in-microsoft-365-copilot-with-smart-enterprise-content-management","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/insidetrack\/blog\/boosting-business-chat-in-microsoft-365-copilot-with-smart-enterprise-content-management\/","title":{"rendered":"Boosting Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat with smart enterprise content management"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"Microsoft<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When our employees look for content internally here at Microsoft, they go to Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat first. With Copilot Chat, they can easily get answers to questions, catch up on missed work, generate new ideas, and more by tapping into the work data that they have access to via Microsoft Graph.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An employee might ask, \u201cCan you tell me how I can learn more about AI in health care and who the experts are in the company?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whether they ask in Microsoft Teams or another Microsoft 365 app, or right in their browser, they likely will get a helpful, accurate response very specific to the health care sector. The answer could refer to an AI industry PowerPoint presentation, articles on responsible AI strategies, Microsoft Research publications, or a list of employees who are experts on the topic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But how does Copilot know how to reference the AI industry PowerPoint presentation for health care? How does it know which versions of the responsible AI strategies for health care articles to use? How does it identify experts in the company?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s because Copilot connects to all the content on the topic available through Microsoft Graph.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOur internal Microsoft content is the content Copilot uses to generate its results,\u201d says Dodd Willingham, a principal program manager and internal search administrator in Microsoft Digital, the IT organization at Microsoft. \u201cHow Copilot consumes and uses our content determines the success\u2014or failure\u2014of Copilot for our employees.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Enabling useful results<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Johnson,
David Johnson (left to right), Dodd Willingham, Rene Sanchez Almaguer, and Stan Liu, are part of the team that\u2019s responsible for ensuring Microsoft Digital\u2019s content management capabilities are ready to efficiently support Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When it comes to returning the right content with Copilot, context is key.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Copilot uses the capabilities of Microsoft Graph to power its AI-generated results. For Microsoft Digital\u2014like most organizations\u2014that includes the content our users store and work with in our Microsoft 365 tenant. Results from Copilot directly depend on the quality of the content it uses. There\u2019s an enormous opportunity to increase the capabilities of Copilot-based solutions because the underlying content is of such high quality. We\u2019re seizing that opportunity to get this right internally at Microsoft.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou hear a lot of people talking about Copilot, but few address the importance of improving content quality,\u201d says Stan Liu, a senior product manager and knowledge management lead with Microsoft Digital. \u201cThe quality of an organization\u2019s content management must be considered in every implementation of Copilot, and we\u2019re doing some great things at Microsoft Digital to ensure Copilot returns accurate, relevant, and up-to-date responses.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s an exciting time to be in content management, and we\u2019re excited to share how our team in Microsoft Digital has met and addressed the challenges of preparing our content for a bright future with Microsoft 365 Copilot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Curating enterprise content for Microsoft 365 Copilot<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s an urgency for organizations to bring advanced AI tools to their employees, but it must be done thoughtfully and with good intentions. One of the fundamental challenges in implementing generative AI technologies like Copilot is balancing the desire to move quickly with the need for caution with technology possessing potential risks that haven\u2019t been fully revealed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"An
The enterprise content management landscape at Microsoft.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA lot of what we do lies in managing our content in a way that aligns with company strategy, and Copilot isn\u2019t any different in that respect,\u201d says David Johnson, a tenant and compliance architect in Microsoft Digital who ensures that the company\u2019s content is well governed. \u201cIt\u2019s important that Microsoft employees understand why content management is important and how they can help do it well.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To be effective, we must lean into our ongoing culture shift to embrace knowledge sharing. We\u2019ve been fostering a knowledge-sharing culture at Microsoft for years, and our adoption of Copilot has magnified the importance of that culture and the need to continue driving awareness and education for Microsoft employees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Liu and his team are prioritizing this culture transformation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cYou need to build and encourage a culture that embraces user-driven content management,\u201d Liu says. \u201cTeams that document their knowledge, follow a content lifecycle in their workflows, and manage content consistently across the company are contributing hugely to what we\u2019re trying to accomplish.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a two-fold challenge that involves encouraging and supporting our employees in collaboration and sharing and ensuring that the tools they use\u2014including Copilot\u2014provide results they can trust and use confidently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve set goals within our organization to make Copilot a daily habit,\u201d Liu says. \u201cCommunity engagement and participation is a significant part of Copilot adoption, and we\u2019ve been identifying use cases and success stories across Microsoft to share as success stories to inspire our employees and encourage adoption and innovation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next generation content management with SharePoint<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Microsoft SharePoint is a critical part of our content management strategy to get the most out of Copilot. We\u2019re using the AI capabilities in SharePoint to give employees access to simple and capable content management tools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SharePoint helps our Microsoft Digital enterprise content team ensure the right capabilities are in place to help people manage content. Missing metadata is a common issue with content management, and SharePoint now makes it easier for users and administrators to add metadata and classify and organize content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SharePoint now brings AI, automation, and added security to our content experiences, processing, and governance. The product delivers new ways to engage with our most critical content and prepare it for Copilot, helping us manage and protect it throughout its lifecycle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Automating metadata extraction with document processing<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The document processing capabilities in SharePoint simplify and automate the process of extracting important information from existing content. Liu\u2019s team helped deploy the document processing capabilities across Microsoft to enable teams to automate processing of important content, such as contracts, invoices, and statements of work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Document processing uses machine learning models to recognize documents and the structured information within them. Using optical character recognition (OCR) combined with deep learning models, it identifies and extracts predefined text and data fields common to specific document types, including contracts, invoices, and receipts. It also supports the detection and extraction of sensitive data such as personal and financial identification. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Liu\u2019s team is using prebuilt and custom document processing models to automatically populate metadata columns in SharePoint for many different document types. The metadata this processing provides improves search and creates a more complete understanding of what the files contain, so Copilot can recognize and return relevant information that was previously incomplete or unavailable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re capturing information across a plethora of documents automatically and almost none of it was recorded previously,\u201d Liu says. \u201cSome of our business groups were entering the metadata manually, but it was a time-consuming and expensive process. For most documents, it just wasn\u2019t done. It\u2019s a massive difference-maker in finding information about a specific contract or invoice that would have been close to impossible. By combining SharePoint with the power of Copilot, it\u2019s a simple question away.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Standardizing content creation with content assembly<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Liu\u2019s team enabled the content assembly feature of SharePoint across the company to simplify document creation and ensure that new documents follow metadata and structure guidelines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Content assembly creates modern templates that can be easily maintained and used to generate repetitive documents quickly. This feature is particularly useful for departments like finance, where templates for partner letters or contracts are frequently needed. By using content assembly, teams can reduce the time spent on template management and document generation, as it allows for the creation of documents with just the key parts needing changes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the time-saving benefits of content assembly don\u2019t directly affect Copilot results, they do encourage users to create better documents, eliminating the need to rewrite entire documents or repeatedly upload the same document. These documents\u2014created using modern templates\u2014are significantly more discoverable and classifiable and lead to more authoritative answers in Copilot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taxonomy tagging<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Liu oversees a team that has been managing the company’s corporate taxonomy in the SharePoint term store for many years, maintaining a hierarchy of terms that can be reused throughout the SharePoint environment. The term store helps ensure that SharePoint metadata is consistent across the organization, and it provides employees with a standard set of choices when populating commonly used metadata such as products, job roles, or departments.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Taxonomy tagging in SharePoint automatically tags documents in SharePoint libraries with terms configured in the term store using AI. As at other companies, we face the ongoing challenge of getting employees to tag content. Most times, even when you have managed metadata set up in your document library, employees often don\u2019t use it. This means the content is never further enriched with that metadata.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With taxonomy tagging, you set it and forget it. Uploaded content is automatically tagged, which does the job that a person would typically do, but often never does. This automated process ensures that documents get one or more metadata columns populated with standard terms from the term store based on the document content. This leads to more complete metadata for documents and more authoritative results for Copilot results when referencing data in those documents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using generative AI to help generative AI with autofill columns<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Autofill columns in SharePoint takes content management to the next level by harnessing AI LLMs to automatically extract, summarize, and generate content from files uploaded to your SharePoint document library. This feature allows users to set up a simple natural language prompt on a column in SharePoint that extracts specific information or generates content from files. The extracted information is then displayed in the columns of the library, making it easier to manage and analyze data.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Liu has a lot to say about how his team is transforming document processing with autofill columns in SharePoint. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Autofill columns are a game-changer for enhancing productivity in Copilot,” Liu says. “They also ensure that our documents have the necessary context for efficient retrieval and use. Autofill\u2019s impact on our metadata within SharePoint document libraries is huge.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Teams within Microsoft have started setting up new and existing columns with prompts to identify the types of information to extract from a file. These prompts can be customized and tested to ensure that they provide the desired results. After the autofill columns are set up, any new files uploaded to the library are automatically processed (and existing documents can be manually processed), and the result of the prompt is saved to the corresponding columns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This approach not only streamlines document processing workflows but also enhances the overall efficiency and accuracy of their data management practices, making Copilot even more powerful and effective.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Continuing to grow with SharePoint<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Liu\u2019s team continues to drive SharePoint as a crucial part of their content management toolkit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe\u2019re seeing immediate and significant benefits from using SharePoint and its AI features to manage our content,\u201d Liu says. \u201cIn the first half of 2024, we estimated that our employees saved more than 120,000 hours in processing documents, pages, and images across the company for over 1,000,000 content items in our environment. It\u2019s a great start, and we\u2019re targeting even greater improvements across more content soon.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Protecting content with Microsoft Purview Information Protection<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Microsoft Purview Information Protection provides a wide range of content governance capabilities that help us discover, classify, and protect sensitive information wherever it stays or moves in the Microsoft tenant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We use Purview Information Protection tools to identify sensitive content using expressions, functions, and trainable classifiers. With these tools, our enterprise data teams and employees can use corroborative evidence like keywords, confidence levels, and proximity to identify sensitive information types. They can also use examples of sensitive content to train recognition engines on expected patterns. All of this helps to better inform Copilot regarding the relevance of our Microsoft 365 content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We use sensitivity labels in Purview to apply flexible protection actions that include encryption, access restrictions, and visual markings. This capability ties in nicely with SharePoint, which also uses and applies sensitivity labels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Purview sensitivity labels provide a single labeling solution across apps, services, and devices to protect content as it travels inside and outside our organization. Purview sensitivity labels can be applied to Microsoft Office documents, third-party document types, meetings, chats, and the broader Microsoft 365 environment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The sensitivity labels that we use to protect our content are recognized and used by Copilot to provide an extra layer of protection. For example, in Copilot Chat conversations, which can reference content from different types of items, the sensitivity label with the highest priority (typically, the most restrictive label) is visible to users. If the labels apply encryption from Microsoft Purview Information Protection, Copilot checks the usage rights for the user and only returns content that the user has access rights to.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking forward<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Our enterprise content management transformation is ongoing. Our teams are looking at new content management capabilities across the company to ensure Copilot continues to provide current, accurate, and relevant results for our employees.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re continually evaluating our enterprise content management to identify new ways to create a Copilot-assisted workday for Microsoft employees. We\u2019re also evaluating new technology, organizational practices, and industry standards as we strive to set the standard for how an organization can capture maximum value from its content using Copilot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We\u2019re currently working with the SharePoint product team to grow the AI-based capabilities for content management and classification. We\u2019re experimenting with our own solutions and capabilities in SharePoint that will lead to the next generation of AI-supporting features that drive innovation and creativity here at Microsoft and for our customers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Key<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Are you looking to prepare your enterprise content for Copilot and AI? Here are a few suggestions:<\/p>\n\n\n\n