365 Explained

Agent Builder or Copilot Studio: where should you actually build an agent in Microsoft 365, and do you even need an agent, or was it a flow all along?

In episode fifteen of 365 Explained, Ben and Zach finally deliver the agents episode we promised back in the Power Automate one. Ben opens by admitting his agent count is padded with sub-agents, then walks through building an agent in Agent Builder and what's inside Copilot Studio. Microsoft renamed one of the harnesses the night before we recorded, so this is accurate as of 29 October 2026 (and quite possibly not by the time you hear it).

In this episode, we explore:

◆ Agent or flow? If the job is "find this, pull that out, do the same thing every time", it's a flow. An agent earns its place when there's ambiguity to work through

◆ Skills: the instructions you'd otherwise paste into every chat. They're just Markdown files, so they travel between Copilot, Claude and ChatGPT, and they're far less of a sprawl risk than agents

◆ Agent Builder end to end: describe the agent, refine its instructions, add skills and knowledge, preview it and share it

◆ Why the agent you share may not answer your colleague the way it answers you, because knowledge runs on their permissions, not yours

◆ Copying an agent to Copilot Studio makes a copy, not a migration, and the harness changes underneath it, so test it again

◆ When to move up to Studio: external tools and MCP servers, flows, evaluations, or picking the model yourself

◆ What a harness actually is, and why it matters more than which model you choose

◆ Licensing: Agent Builder sits inside the $30 Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, but the new Microsoft Copilot harness in Studio runs entirely on usage-based billing, licence or not

◆ Governance through Agent 365, and why you still need a human process for who owns an agent and why it exists

◆ The classic harness in Copilot Studio: model picker, MCP tools, sub-agents and evaluations (where answering "I don't know" counted as a fail, which was rather the point)

◆ The new harness: newer models, skills and memory, so an agent gets better for you over time

◆ Agent flows and workflows, where a flow hands the fuzzy middle step to an agent

◆ How to build anything when the platform changes overnight

Whether you've been asked to "build an agent" and suspect it's really a flow, or you've been avoiding Copilot Studio because it looks complicated, this one's for you. Ben's advice: find a stupid problem and build an agent that solves it.

What's the daftest problem you've solved with an agent? Let us know.

Follow the show for a new episode every month (ish). The video version, with the screen walkthroughs, is on YouTube: https://youtu.be/2KjSvjmMJ5g

How many unread items are sat in your Message Center right now? We counted at the top of this one, and between the three of us we had 2,179.

In episode fourteen of 365 Explained, Ben and Zach are joined by Tom Arbuthnot of Empowering.Cloud, whose team watches close to a hundred tenants' Message Centers, to work out how you turn that pile into decisions: what to read, who owns it, and what happens next.

In this episode, we explore:

◆ Roadmap versus Message Center, and why one is public direction of travel and the other is what's actually landing in your tenant

◆ Why no two tenants see the same list: licensing, geo, tenant type, and messages targeted right down to a single customer

◆ The numbers — around 2,500 messages a year for a typical tenant, of which roughly 260 genuinely matter

◆ 60% of messages changed at some point last year, against a product that keeps no change history at all (so good luck proving what it originally said)

◆ What notice you actually get, and why it's a window rather than a date

◆ Who can see Message Center, and why the internal comms team expected to announce the changes usually can't

◆ Frontier, Standard and Deferred: three release audiences replacing the targeted release model you already know

◆ The native gap. No assignment, no sign-off, no audit trail, and a Planner sync that keeps dragging your triaged items back to square one

◆ Multi-tenant and MSPs: Lighthouse saves you the logins and not much else, and partners get no early access or secret feed

◆ The two MCP servers, one you point a URL at and one that wants an enterprise app, consent and an exposed endpoint (guess which one we'd recommend)

◆ Azure updates — a separate feed again, and just as noisy

◆ What good looks like: named owners per product area, items that get assigned rather than eyeballed, and a written record of why you said yes or no

Plus the cautionary tale: a message about Android devices, an Intune team who said "we don't allow Android, ignore it", and every Teams phone in the building going offline. Teams phones run Android.

Whether you've got a Message Center you've never opened, or you're the one person in the org who does read it and then can't get anyone to act on it, this one's for you.

So who owns Message Center where you work? Be honest, "whoever notices first" is an answer. Let us know.

Follow the show for a new episode on the last Thursday of the month. The video version is on YouTube: https://youtu.be/Hj1rLZHhLEM

What turns a meeting room into a Teams Room? After twelve episodes of software, Ben and Zach finally walk into the physical world — with guest Carsten Meilbak, MVP and meeting-room consultant, as the guide.

In episode thirteen of 365 Explained:

◆ Windows vs Android rooms — the Skype legacy, all-in-one bars, and where each one fits

◆ Certified hardware, and why "Teams optimised" isn't a thing — plus sizing kit to the room, not the demo

◆ The vendor ecosystem: HP, Yealink, Cisco running native Teams inside a Webex box, Lenovo, Jabra and friends

◆ Scheduling panels — the most underrated device in the portfolio: check-in, auto-release, and extending bookings from the corridor

◆ Room types from huddle spaces to meeting pods (and the quiet death of the content camera)

◆ Licensing: Teams Rooms Basic vs Pro, and Carsten's case that there's really only one licence once you look at security

◆ The Pro Management portal becoming the single portal for every Teams device as Teams admin center device management is decommissioned — custom update rings, templates, vendor settings and anonymised call-quality data

◆ BYOD rooms: crowdsourced peripheral discovery, the Teams Shared Space licence, and the upgrade path to a proper room

◆ AI in the room: speaker attribution without a Copilot licence, edge AI vs IntelliFrame, and a teaser of rooms growing agents

And Carsten closes with the war story to end them all: 800 cancelled meetings, 20 dead rooms, and an Intune policy that was rolled back nine months earlier. Rollbacks are never 110%.

Prefer audio? Find 365 Explained on your usual podcast platform: https://redcircle.com/shows/e0528b70-77d2-46bf-a69a-ba4345a8f493

#TeamsRooms #MicrosoftTeams #Microsoft365 #365Explained

What actually is Teams Phone? After episodes on voice apps, the Queues app and full contact centres, Ben and Zach finally go back to the beginning.

In episode twelve of 365 Explained, Zach takes the lead and covers Teams Phone from the ground up:

◆ What a PBX is, and why Teams Phone is one living in the cloud

◆ The four ways to get phone lines into Teams — Calling Plans, Direct Routing, Operator Connect and Teams Phone Mobile — and how to pick between them

◆ Emergency calling and the regulatory side, plus where to check country coverage

◆ Licensing: Teams Phone Standard, the bit you might already own in E5, and Shared Calling

◆ The PBX table stakes — hold, transfers, forwarding, multi-line, presence-based routing and cloud voicemail

◆ SIP Gateway for keeping older handsets (and the phone on the warehouse wall) working

◆ What happens when the internet goes down: SBAs, redundant ISPs and satellite backups

◆ Copilot in Teams Phone — Teams Phone agent, Copilot call delegation, mid-call Copilot and AI transfer summaries

Whether you've inherited a Teams Phone estate or you're staring at a PBX contract renewal wondering if there's a better way, this is the grounding episode.

We say 101, but naturally it gets complicated fairly quickly.

What's carrying your calls today: Calling Plans, Operator Connect, Direct Routing, or a PBX that refuses to die? Let us know.

#TeamsPhone #MicrosoftTeams #Microsoft365 #Copilot #365Explained

What is Power Automate, really, and why should an IT Pro care when it’s usually pitched at citizen developers?

In episode eleven of 365 Explained, Ben and Zach look at Power Automate from the admin’s side of the fence.

We cover:

• How triggers, actions and connectors fit together
• Cloud flows, desktop flows and generative flows
• When a personal flow should probably become an Azure Logic App
• Power Platform environments and why they matter
• Standard and premium connectors
• The Workflows app in Teams and its slightly confusing AI workflows
• How Power Automate supports parts of Copilot Studio and agent flows

Whether you’re new to Power Automate or you’ve been using flows without looking too closely at what sits underneath them, this is our attempt at a 101.

We say 101, but naturally it gets complicated fairly quickly.

What are you automating with Power Automate, and where do you draw the line between a personal flow and a proper business process? Let us know.

#PowerAutomate #PowerPlatform #Microsoft365 #CopilotStudio #365Explained

Recorded live at CommsvNext in Denver, Colorado. Ben and Zach are joined by Oli Lifely from Luware to talk about what happens when native Teams call queues aren't enough and you need a full contact center.

In this episode, we cover:

• The three Microsoft certification models for contact center integration: Connect, Extend, and the newly renamed Unify
• How each model handles the call differently — from SIP trunk hairpinning to Graph API signalling
• What a contact center adds beyond Queues App: skills-based routing, cradle-to-grave reporting, omni-channel, and outbound
• Where AI fits beyond chatbots — proactive SLA monitoring, natural language workflow configuration, and automated remediation
• The biggest mistakes organisations make when migrating off legacy PBXs to Teams

Whether you're hitting the limits of Queues App or planning a move off Avaya, Mitel, or Cisco, this one's for you.

How does Microsoft actually roll out updates across M365 — and how much control do you really have? Ben and Zach break down the update lifecycle across the entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem in episode seven of 365 Explained.

In this episode, we explore:

• The "rings" model — from dev teams to dogfooding to your tenant
• Targeted release vs standard release — and where to find the settings
• Office app update channels — current, monthly enterprise, and semi-annual (spoiler: Microsoft no longer recommends semi-annual for most users)
• How Teams updates differently to the rest of Office
• The OneDrive sync client and its own update rings
• Where Windows fits into the picture
• Message Centre vs the M365 Roadmap — and why you need to watch both
• How Copilot Frontier adds yet another layer to all of this

Whether you're an admin trying to get ahead of changes, or you're just tired of users asking "why don't I have that feature yet?", this one's for you.

Or listen on all good & bad podcasting platforms alike

Microsoft has announced Microsoft 365 E7, "The Frontier Suite", the first new enterprise tier above E5 since 2015. It goes GA on May 1st at $99/user/month, wrapping E5, Copilot, Agent 365 and the full Entra Suite into one SKU.

In this episode, Ben and Zach break down what's inside E7, how the enterprise licensing ladder has evolved from E1 through to E7, and whether the pricing math adds up vs buying à la carte. They also get into what's still missing from the bundle (Teams Premium, calling plans, attendee packs) and whether E7 actually solves the add-on sprawl problem.

There are also questions Microsoft hasn't answered yet: is Agent 365 a tenant-level unlock or a per-user licence? Who do you actually need to licence? And what does this mean for organisations still on E3 or E5?

Topics covered:

• History of Microsoft enterprise SKUs (E1, E3, E4, E5, E7)
• What E7 adds: Copilot, Agent 365, Entra Suite, advanced security
• Pricing breakdown: $99 bundled vs $117 à la carte
• What's NOT included: Teams Premium, calling plans, attendee packs
• The Agent 365 licensing question
• Who should consider E7 vs staying on E5

Links:

• Microsoft announcement: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2026/03/09/introducing-the-first-frontier-suite-built-on-intelligence-trust/
• Microsoft 365 blog: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2026/03/09/powering-frontier-transformation-with-copilot-and-agents/

Copilot Frontier keeps showing up across M365 admin centres, but it's not well explained and the documentation doesn't make it much easier. In this episode, Ben and Zach dig into what Frontier actually is, why it exists as a separate thing from targeted release, and what's in it right now. From Researcher and Analyst agents through to the Opal computer use agent.

We talk through the admin controls (and the inconsistencies across them), licensing questions nobody has answers to yet, MCP servers appearing under the Frontier banner, and whether you should turn it on for your users.

We'd love to hear what you're doing with Frontier in your environments. Get in touch on LinkedIn or leave a comment on YouTube.

Ever wondered if the Teams Queues App could save you from a full contact centre deployment? Ben and Zach get into Microsoft's Contact Center Lite experience in episode six of 365 Explained. In this episode, we explore:

• What the Queues App actually is (and what it isn't) 🔹The Teams Premium licensing question—who needs it?
• Monitor, whisper, barge, and takeover functionality explained
• Real-time analytics (spoiler: it actually updates in seconds)
• Shared call history, the feature that finally arrived
• When Queues App is enough vs when you need a proper contact centre
• What's still missing (hello, Copilot button?)

Whether you're already running Call Queues and curious about the upgrade, or evaluating whether to skip the third-party contact centre entirely, this one's got you covered.

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