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Exerting Control Over Individual Copilot for Microsoft 365 Components
No doubt inspired by the article explaining how to remove individual features (service plans) from Microsoft 365 licenses, a reader asked if it is possible to control where Copilot for Microsoft 365 functionality surfaces in different apps. There’s no GUI in the Microsoft 365 admin center to disable bits of Copilot for a tenant. You can disable apps belonging to the Copilot license for a user account (Figure 1), but the question is what apps are bundled with Copilot for Microsoft 365 and what happens if administrators disable the apps for users.
The Copilot for Microsoft 365 Service Plans
Looking into the details of the Copilot for Microsoft 365 license with the Microsoft Graph PowerShell SDK, we discover that the product (SKU) identifier is 639dec6b-bb19-468b-871c-c5c441c4b0cb and that the license covers eight service plans. As you’ll recall, a service plan governs functionality within a license that can be enabled or disabled. The Microsoft 365 admin center refers to service plans as apps when displaying the license information for a user.
Here’s how to find the license detail with PowerShell:
Connect-MgGraph -Scopes Directory.Read.All -NoWelcome $CopilotSKU = Get-MgSubscribedSku | Where-Object SkuPartNumber -match "Microsoft_365_Copilot" $CopilotSku.ServicePlans | Format-Table ServicePlanName, ServicePlanId ServicePlanName ServicePlanId --------------- ------------- COPILOT_STUDIO_IN_COPILOT_FOR_M365 fe6c28b3-d468-44ea-bbd0-a10a5167435c M365_COPILOT_SHAREPOINT 0aedf20c-091d-420b-aadf-30c042609612 GRAPH_CONNECTORS_COPILOT 82d30987-df9b-4486-b146-198b21d164c7 M365_COPILOT_CONNECTORS 89f1c4c8-0878-40f7-804d-869c9128ab5d M365_COPILOT_APPS a62f8878-de10-42f3-b68f-6149a25ceb97 M365_COPILOT_TEAMS b95945de-b3bd-46db-8437-f2beb6ea2347 M365_COPILOT_BUSINESS_CHAT 3f30311c-6b1e-48a4-ab79-725b469da960 M365_COPILOT_INTELLIGENT_SEARCH 931e4a88-a67f-48b5-814f-16a5f1e6028d
Table 1 summarizes the service plans included in the Copilot for Microsoft 365 license.
| Service Plan Name | User Friendly Feature Name | Service Plan Id |
| GRAPH_CONNECTORS_COPILOT | Graph Connectors in Microsoft 365 Copilot | 82d30987-df9b-4486-b146-198b21d164c7 |
| M365_COPILOT_INTELLIGENT_SEARCH | Intelligent Search (Semantic Index) | 931e4a88-a67f-48b5-814f-16a5f1e6028d |
| M365_COPILOT_BUSINESS_CHAT | Microsoft Copilot with Graph-grounded chat | 3f30311c-6b1e-48a4-ab79-725b469da960 |
| M365_COPILOT_TEAMS | Microsoft 365 Copilot in Microsoft Teams | b95945de-b3bd-46db-8437-f2beb6ea2347 |
| M365_COPILOT_APPS | Microsoft 365 Copilot in Productivity Apps (Office) | a62f8878-de10-42f3-b68f-6149a25ceb97 |
| M365_COPILOT_CONNECTORS | Power Platform Connectors in Microsoft 365 Copilot | 89f1c4c8-0878-40f7-804d-869c9128ab5d |
| M365_COPILOT_SHAREPOINT | Microsoft 365 Copilot in SharePoint | 0aedf20c-091d-420b-aadf-30c042609612 |
| COPILOT_STUDIO_IN_COPILOT_FOR_M365 | Copilot Studio | fe6c28b3-d468-44ea-bbd0-a10a5167435c |
| COPILOT_STUDIO_IN_COPILOT_FOR_M365 | Copilot Studio | fe6c28b3-d468-44ea-bbd0-a10a5167435c |
What the Copilot for Microsoft 365 Service Plans Do
The Copilot service plans split into those governing user-facing features and background or administrative functionality.
User functionality:
- Microsoft Copilot with Graph-grounded chat
- Microsoft 365 Copilot in Microsoft Teams (app, summarization of chats and meeting discussions, ability to rewrite/adjust messages before posting to chats or channel conversations)
- Microsoft 365 Copilot in Productivity Apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook (Win32 and Monarch), Loop, OneNote)
Teams and the productivity apps support Copilot in the desktop, browser, and mobile platforms.
Background and administrative functionality:
- Graph connectors bring static information from external sources into the Graph to make the data available to Copilot.
- Semantic index. Although the semantic index isn’t necessary to allow Copilot for Microsoft 365, it helps to ground prompts sent to the LLMs with additional context and therefore contributes to more accurate answers.
- Power Platform Connectors. Controls access to Copilot plugins and Power Platform connectors.
- Microsoft 365 Copilot in SharePoint (use Copilot to help create sites). Microsoft announced this functionality in May 2023, but it doesn’t seem to be available yet. Perhaps all will be revealed at the M365 Conference next week.
- Copilot Studio. A low-code tool for creating and maintaining custom Copilots (Figure 2).
Turning Off Bits of Copilot
Getting back to the original question, control is available over the chat app, Copilot in Teams, and the generalized bucket of productivity apps. For example, you cannot turn off Copilot for Word and Excel and have it available in PowerPoint and Outlook. The productivity apps are either enabled or disabled for Copilot. Granular control isn’t available.
Copilot for Office depends on the Microsoft 365 enterprise apps (subscription version of Office). Using another version, like Office 2024 (preview available now) isn’t possible because these apps don’t include the necessary UI and code to communicate with Copilot.
The answer to the question is that you can turn bits of Copilot for Microsoft 365 off. For instance, not everyone needs access to Copilot Studio. I’m not sure that I would disable any of the other service plans for background and administrative activity because you don’t know if the action might affect how the user-facing apps work. Disabling a user app certainly works and the license change will be effective within fifteen minutes for browser-based apps (Figure 3) and a few hours for desktop apps, depending on when the app refreshes its license information.
But if an organization is paying $360/year for Copilot for Microsoft 365 licenses, surely the imperative is to extract maximum value for the investment instead of restricting what people can use? But if you do decide to disable service plans from the Copilot for Microsoft 365 license, the script will happily do the job for you.
So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive monthly insights into what happens, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.
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