We are exploring the possibility of introducing Copilot for Exchange Server (on-premises). Your feedback on this subject will help us understand your interest and requirements.
If this is of interest to you, please take a moment to complete this short survey:
https://forms.office.com/r/DwAKJLSJV1
The Exchange Team
The answer is "it all depends" really. I could see a role for AI (CoPilot) in revamping all the "managed availability" monitoring stuff where the AI monitors Exchange health and takes actions based on what is happening vs the current probes and responders type thing. I think I would view anything where either a subscription is required and/or data is sent to the cloud would probably be not useful at all.
You must be joking right? i don;t think there is one on-Prem Exchange admin out there that would agree to this ill conceived charade. Its best to leave on-Prem Exchange alone and as the other persons are saying concentrate to providing. fixing real issues and not forcing garbage that on one wants.
I agree privacy is a strong reason to keep Exchange on-Prem, I see no point in using CoPilot to eliminate that advantage by sending al kinds of data to MS.
I wouldn't mind if it was possible to FULLY disable it and gave us in the licensing writting that if disabled MS guarantees no data whatsoever will be forwarded to their AI systems.
They need ROI for the massive AI spend.
As mentioned below "A company that doesn't listen to its customer base and pushes its own agenda will lose confidence with the market and eventually fail.". In Microsoft's case its almost too big to fail, but it will eventually happen if they continue heading in this direction.
I prefer Copilot in the actual classic Outlook application, not in the new Outlook garbage, which is nothing more than a website embedded in a window, very slow, very limited, consuming a lot of resources, few features compared to the actual Outlook real application, does not connect to Exchange On-Premises, and to top it all off, everything is stored in the Microsoft cloud, including third-party accounts and passwords, which means that this new Outlook is blocked in most companies and is not an option.
How about addressing actual items your on-prem customers want:
- Removing basic auth across the product stack and making it easier to integrate MFA solutions such as DUO/RSA etc across more than web-based portals that third parties have filled in (i.e. ActiveSync, EWS, OAB distribution etc).
- Not making the licensing for on-prem products so ridiculously uneconomical to push your cloud-first agenda.
Customers have a legitimate requirement to keep data on-premises for data solvently, privacy or other business related requirements.
Little tip Microsoft - a company that doesn't listen to its customer base and pushes its own agenda will lose confidence with the market and eventually fail.
FYI - I like Microsoft 365 it fills a big gap - but it's not for everyone and customers should be given a fair option with a suite of products under the Microsoft umbrella.
