How to get ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot
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If you’re part of an organization that has a lot of content and a messy M365 environment, this blog is for you. When looking into how to get ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot, you have to keep in mind that Copilot isn’t one of those tools you have to just integrate and turn on, and instantly everything is sunshine and rainbows.
Copilot integration
To conduct a successful Copilot integration, you must first consider all of your content and prepare it for Microsoft 365 Copilot. Because, even at the end of a perfect prompt, the quality and usefulness of Copilot’s output depend on the content it can access. An old adage from the inception days of computer technology is a useful guiding star for you to keep in mind when integrating Copilot – Garbage in, garbage out.
We will show you a couple of key steps to help you ensure your content is Copilot-ready, but let’s first take a quick look at the Microsoft Copilot requirements.
Copilot is available as an add-on plan that requires the user to have a specific base license assigned to them. You can use Microsoft 365 Copilot with the following licenses:

Source: Microsoft
Microsoft Copilot requirements checklist
Now that we have the licenses out of the way lets quickly go over some other prerequisites and requirements for Microsoft Copilot:
- Microsoft 365 Apps deployment – mandatory.
- Microsoft Entra ID – mandatory.
- Microsoft OneDrive account – required for some features.
- Office Feature Updates – required for apps such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote.
If you need a more comprehensive and detailed list, you can find it here. The page deals with details for Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Microsoft Loop, Microsoft Whiteboard, and also offers a lot of details around the Copilot network requirements.
How to get ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot?
Now that we have briefly covered the requirements and prerequisites for your Copilot integration let’s examine how we can help you make it a sound investment that will yield positive results.
What kind of an organization are you?
This is an important question to ask yourself because it will give you insight into how you plan to use Copilot.
If you’re a part of a medium sized business and plan to use Copilot to help with coding, you don’t need to worry as much about oversharing documents (well, at least not as much as a large organization with vast amounts of scattered documents).
If your organization or company deals with a lot of content, such as documents, multiple file versions, and many employees, then yes, oversharing and old, stale data will create issues when you or your colleagues use Copilot to draft documents and texts.
If that explains your situation here are the 6 key steps you need to do to get ready for Microsoft 365 Copilot:
1. Organize and clean up your data
Since Microsoft Copilot interacts with your organization’s data to provide output to your prompts, it’s essential to ensure that your data is well-organized, accessible, and not stale, so you need to:
- Clean up unnecessary or outdated files.
- Structure data logically in SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams.
- Implement data governance practices to ensure the right information is available.
Coming back to the hype model, when you see all the [Copilot] demos, they're very beautiful. Beautiful people, beautiful screen/stages, happy people, beautiful technology, producing beautiful results. What you don't realize is that beautiful results comes from curated data. And the data that exists in people's SharePoint sites and OneDrive accounts and Exchange mailboxes in the real world, they’re seldom very beautiful.
-Tony Redmond, Microsoft MVP2. Prepare for security and compliance
Copilot will interact with your organization’s sensitive data. Review and tighten your security settings to protect data privacy. Ensure that your Microsoft 365 compliance policies are up to date, including data access controls, retention policies, and data loss prevention (DLP) settings.
3. Review and update permissions
Ensure you’ve set up data access permissions correctly. Copilot will need access to relevant documents, emails, and files to provide useful results. Make sure that users have appropriate access to the data Copilot will interact with without violating any data security policies.
This step is vital if you want to avoid Copilot giving sensitive output to unauthorized users. It is also a perfect opportunity to implement a more dependable and continuous process of reviewing permissions, so you stay ready for Copilot in the long run.
4. Familiarize with Copilot settings
You need to review and familiarize yourself with the configuration settings for Copilot. Understand how to manage Copilot features, control access, and monitor usage within the organization. Microsoft will provide tools to govern Copilot’s interaction with data, so get familiar with these controls to manage its deployment effectively.
5. Brush up on Microsoft 365 tools
Make sure users are familiar with core Microsoft 365 tools, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams. Copilot integrates into these apps, so training users to effectively use them will ensure a smoother Copilot integration when Copilot features are introduced and also elevate your users’ work.
You might want to skip this step, and it’s understandable because not everyone likes workshops and education. However, as you probably know, and we’re preaching to the choir right now, most users only use a few apps, such as Word or Excel, and are unaware of many of their functionalities and “hidden” features.
Who knows what they might be missing out on, and more importantly, what they could be getting with Copilot if they had the right skills and insights.
6. Train Users on AI Capabilities
Offer training sessions to introduce users to AI features in Microsoft 365 and help them understand how Copilot works. Emphasize:
- The use of AI for drafting documents, generating summaries, and automating workflows.
- Best practices for giving effective prompts to Copilot.
- The ethical use of AI and respecting data privacy.
Would you like to know more?
Here’s a list of useful blogs we’ve created to help power users and admins get ahead of the game:
- Microsoft Copilot real life scenarios – How to prevent oversharing?
- 3 things you can only do with Microsoft Edge Copilot
- 3 ways how to use Copilot in Outlook to be more productive
- Using AI to write PowerShell scripts
- 8 ways Microsoft Teams Copilot increases productivity
- 3 Copilot productivity hacks for SharePoint admins – at no extra cost
- Microsoft Copilot – How to apply best practices with SharePoint
- 12 easy ways to enhance your Copilot readiness with Syskit Point
Hope you enjoy the read.