The M365 Copilot Field Guide is a set of 26 browser-readable HTML files published at www.kesslernity.com/guides. Each guide covers one Copilot feature. All are print-ready, A4, no login required.
You can deploy them in under an hour by pointing employees to the URL. Or you can embed them in SharePoint, pin them in Teams, or add a card to your Viva Connections dashboard — the options below cover each approach.
Describe a task — get the right Copilot tool. Useful when employees ask "which Copilot do I use for this?"
Symptom → cause → fix in a single table. Reduces IT tickets. The first thing to share when an employee says Copilot stopped working.
Chat, Outlook, Teams, Word, PowerPoint and Excel, Notebooks, Pages, Scheduled Prompts, Studio Agents, Cowork, Workflows, Work IQ, Microsoft Scout, and every built-in agent.
No PDF, no account, no installation. Open the link and read. Print from browser for physical copies.
The options below go from fastest (one link, two minutes) to most integrated (Viva Connections dashboard card). All options use the same public URL — no files to transfer, no content to maintain.
| Method | Time | Skill needed | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Share the URL directly | 2 min | None | Immediate rollout — email, Teams message, or chat |
| Teams tab in a channel | 5 min | Channel owner | Copilot champions channel, IT support channel |
| SharePoint page with guide links | 20 min | SharePoint editor | Intranet homepage, digital workplace hub |
| SharePoint with guides hosted locally | 45 min | SharePoint admin | Restricted networks, air-gapped environments |
| Viva Connections dashboard card | 60 min | Viva Connections admin | Enterprise-wide rollout via Teams home screen |
Add a Website tab pointing to the Decision Map or the full series. Works in any channel where members are deploying or supporting Copilot — IT support, Copilot champions, a specific department.
Go to the Teams channel where you want to add the guide tab. This can be an existing channel — your IT support channel, a Copilot champions channel, or a department team.
Click the + icon next to the existing tabs at the top of the channel. Search for Website in the tab picker.
Tab name: Copilot Guides (or "Copilot Help" — your preference).
URL: https://www.kesslernity.com/guides/copilot-decision-map.html to start with the Decision Map, or https://www.kesslernity.com/guides for the full index.
Post a short message in the channel to let members know the tab is there. Employees who find the Decision Map once will return to it — it needs to be discoverable, not just available.
Add the Failure Triage sheet as a second tab: https://www.kesslernity.com/guides/copilot-failure-triage.html. Pin it in your IT support channel — it becomes the first thing agents check when an employee says Copilot stopped working.
Build a single SharePoint page that lists all 26 guides with a one-line description of each. Embed it in your digital workplace hub or intranet homepage. No files to upload — the links point directly to www.kesslernity.com/guides.
Go to the SharePoint site where you manage intranet content. Click New → Page. Choose a blank layout or a template with a title and body section.
Title: M365 Copilot Reference Guides.
Intro (example): "12 quick-reference guides for Microsoft 365 Copilot. Use the Decision Map if you're not sure which guide to open. Use the Failure Triage sheet when something isn't working."
Add a Quick Links web part to the page. Set the layout to List or Button. Add each guide as a link using the URLs from the guide list in this document.
Drag these two to the first positions in the Quick Links web part. They are the two guides employees reach for most often — reduce friction by making them the first thing visible.
Publish the page. Add it to your intranet navigation under a section like "Tools" or "AI & Copilot." If you use Viva Connections, this page can also be linked from the dashboard — see Option D below.
If your network blocks external URLs or you need the guides to be fully internal, download the HTML files and upload them to a SharePoint document library. They open directly in the browser — no SharePoint rendering issues since they are standalone self-contained HTML files.
Go to github.com/kesslernity/m365-copilot-field-guide. Click Code → Download ZIP. Extract the 12 HTML files.
Create a dedicated library named Copilot Field Guide. Set permissions so all employees have read access. Do not require login for document access if your intranet allows authenticated browsing.
Upload the files directly to the library root. SharePoint serves HTML files correctly when opened via their direct URL — employees click the file and it opens in browser, not in SharePoint's preview pane.
Right-click each uploaded file → Copy link. Use these internal URLs in your SharePoint intranet page (Option B above) instead of the www.kesslernity.com/guides URLs.
If you host locally, you own the update cycle. The guides at www.kesslernity.com/guides are updated when Microsoft changes features. Download fresh copies after major M365 Copilot releases (typically March and September). The file names remain stable — replace the existing files in the library to update.
Add a card to the Viva Connections dashboard that links to the Decision Map. The dashboard appears on the Teams home screen for all employees — this is the highest-visibility placement available in M365 without custom development.
Go to your SharePoint home site → Viva Connections → Edit dashboard. You need the SharePoint admin or Viva Connections admin role.
Click + Add a card → Card Designer. This lets you create a card with a custom title, description, icon, and link without any development work.
Title: Copilot Field Guide
Description: Which Copilot do I use? Start here.
Icon: use the Copilot or document icon from the built-in set.
Card action → Link: https://www.kesslernity.com/guides/copilot-decision-map.html
Save and publish the dashboard. Open Teams on desktop and mobile and confirm the card appears on the Viva Connections home screen. Cards render differently on mobile — check that the description truncates cleanly.
Copy and adapt this message for your Teams announcement channel or all-staff email. Keep it short — employees read the first two lines and ignore the rest.
Subject: Copilot reference guides — bookmark these two links We've added a set of reference guides for Microsoft 365 Copilot to [your intranet page / the #copilot-help channel / the Copilot Guides tab]. Start with these two: → Decision Map — tells you which Copilot tool to use for your task [your URL or www.kesslernity.com/guides/copilot-decision-map.html] → Failure Triage — if Copilot isn't working, this is why (and how to fix it) [your URL or www.kesslernity.com/guides/copilot-failure-triage.html] Ten more guides cover specific features: Outlook, Teams Meetings, Office apps, Notebooks, Studio Agents, and more. All browser-readable, no login required. Questions? Reply here or contact [your IT helpdesk].
Pin the Failure Triage sheet in your IT support channel and add it to your helpdesk first-response checklist. The six most common Copilot problems — wrong licence tier, wrong toggle (Web vs Work), email cap hit, file not indexed, SharePoint permission gap, session lapsed — are all in that one table. Agents who check it first resolve faster.
As of the June 16, 2026 GA wave, several Copilot capabilities — including Copilot Cowork (now generally available worldwide) — bill on usage through a consumption currency called Copilot Credits. Pay-as-you-go is $0.01 per credit; a commit-for-discount plan ("P3") is available. This sits on top of the per-seat M365 Copilot licence: the licence is the access gate, Credits are the runtime meter. The good news for admins is that it ships off by default and with tenant-level controls.
| Control | Where | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Cost Management dashboard | M365 admin center | Reports Copilot Credit consumption by user, group, and feature. Your single view of what usage is costing. |
| Spending limits | M365 admin center | Hard caps at tenant, group, or individual user level — so one team or user can't run up the bill. |
| Usage alerts | M365 admin center | Threshold alerts at tenant / group / user level. Get notified before a limit is reached, not after. |
| Off by default | Tenant setting | Usage-based billing is disabled until an admin turns it on. Nothing meters until you opt in. |
Metered in Copilot Credits: Copilot Cowork; custom and third-party agents (Copilot Studio, Microsoft Foundry, or anything calling the raw Work IQ APIs) that ground in your M365 data via Work IQ — now GA; Dynamics 365 first-party agents; and unlicensed M365 Copilot Chat usage.
Covered by the existing licence (not separately metered): Microsoft's pre-built Copilot agents used under an assigned M365 Copilot seat. The Credits meter applies to the build-your-own and consumption layers, not to the in-box agents.
Agent 365 ($15/user/month) is the identity and governance layer — each agent gets an Entra Agent ID, and you manage and secure agents from one control plane. It does not include agent runtime: the compute an agent consumes is billed separately via Copilot Credits (or Microsoft Foundry tokens for Foundry-built agents). Budget the $15 seat and the consumption meter as two separate lines. Use the Copilot agent cost model for budget planning.
1. Set a tenant-level spending limit first. 2. Add group/user limits for pilot teams. 3. Configure usage alerts below each limit. 4. Open the Cost Management dashboard and confirm baseline reporting. 5. Note the Frontier grace period — tenants with a Cowork Frontier user (Mar 30 – Jun 16, 2026) are not billed for Cowork usage until July 1, 2026. Use that window to set limits before the meter starts.
Group and team-level cost reporting reached general availability on July 13, 2026: Viva Insights shows Copilot credit spend for Cowork and the Work IQ API at group or team level, for managers with five or more direct reports, analysts, and global admins, on by default (Roadmap 566302). A preview Viva Insights view for GitHub Copilot spend and usage is progressing on the same access model (Roadmap 566470). Domain exclusion for web grounding was announced generally available in July, then rolled back by Microsoft on 4 August 2026 while it evaluates next steps (Roadmap 503144). See the early-August note below, and treat a web-grounding block list as unavailable until Microsoft says more. The Copilot Prompt Gallery reached GA for tenant-wide prompt publishing (Roadmap 486695), and Organization Prompts (admin-curated prompts surfaced in Chat suggestions and the Prompt Gallery) are rolling out. Organizational Messages for hybrid-joined devices (both AD and Entra ID) rolled out in June. A Brand Kit Picker and a branded footer in the M365 Copilot app both surface admin-approved brand assets to users. Departed-user content workflows for user-owned Loop workspaces reached GA (Roadmap 421612). Two Copilot Studio credential-safety previews landed: block maker-provided credentials for AI agents (Roadmap 566997) and detect credential oversharing at publish/share time (Roadmap 566873). From July 2, 2026, Copilot Studio and agent roadmap updates now publish exclusively to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap. Release Planner is no longer the source of truth.
Agent governance surfaces widened. Agents built with the Model Context Protocol (MCP) reached GA in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Catalyst on July 15, 2026, accessed through the Copilot pane; rollout is gradual under Microsoft's safe deployment model, so review which MCP agents are approved before users meet them in the pane. Agent Store submissions from Agent Builder are GA: makers can submit agents to the store's "Built by your org" section, gated by admin review and approval in the Microsoft 365 admin center, so decide who reviews submissions and against which criteria. The Frontier and Microsoft agent approval flow is GA (Roadmap 494809, July 10, 2026): these agents now appear in the Copilot Control System agent inventory, blocked users can request access, and admins approve or reject each request, so assign an owner for the approval queue. Federated Copilot Connectors (the MCP-based kind) are now manageable from the Connectors tab under Copilot in the admin center (GA, July 15, 2026); they authenticate as the user at runtime rather than indexing content centrally, preserving source permissions. The Confluence and ServiceNow connectors now evaluate parent-level permissions in addition to item-level ACLs when deciding access to child items (GA, July 15, 2026; the roadmap entry also names Jira, while the Learn release note lists only Confluence and ServiceNow), so recheck connector permission mappings that assumed child-only evaluation. In preview: an Agent 365 Dashboard in Copilot Analytics (Viva Insights) showing activity across all agents registered through Agent 365, for tenants with both Agent 365 and Copilot (Roadmap 567667, as of July 15, 2026), and enterprise store plugins for Copilot in SharePoint, bundling skills and MCP servers under Microsoft 365 admin governance, with preview listed for August 2026 and GA for December 2026 (Roadmap 567669).
ServiceNow connector connections can now be edited: admins can change the user mapping and query filter on an existing connection instead of recreating it (Roadmap 503590, GA). A new People Skills removal and deletion control in the People Skills settings lets administrators permanently delete the organization's People Skills data, including the skills library and all confirmed, inferred, and imported skills, to support offboarding, data governance, and compliance (Roadmap 565905, rolling out). Copilot Studio adds run-only sharing for autonomous agents, so makers can share an agent with end users without granting edit permissions or ownership (Roadmap 567894, preview). Admins can also configure a policy link for blocked Copilot Chat users, pointing users who are blocked from Copilot Chat in the Microsoft 365 Copilot app to company policy or internal guidance. In development: unified agent and app installation management lets admins apply an install change once in the Microsoft 365 admin center or Teams admin center and have it enforced consistently across Teams, Outlook, and Microsoft 365 Copilot (Roadmap 567883); authoritative content management for Copilot Search lets admins designate up to 100 SharePoint sites as authoritative to improve their ranking in Microsoft 365 Copilot Search (Roadmap 503553); the Agent 365 dashboard in Copilot Analytics is extending to managers who already have team-level analytics access (Roadmap 567893); and Agent 365 agents, already managed in the Microsoft 365 admin center, will be usable within Copilot Chat and declarative agents, acting as connected agents when they implement the Agent2Agent protocol (Roadmap 567670).
A correction first. Domain exclusion for web grounding has been rolled back. Microsoft's 4 August post says the feature described in its earlier announcement is withdrawn at this time and that it is evaluating next steps (Roadmap 503144). The July note above reported it generally available on the strength of that roadmap entry. If a rollout plan of yours depends on blocking specific domains from Copilot web results, it currently has no product behind it, and the fallback is the broader web-search controls in the Copilot Control System.
The metered layer picked up its enforcement mechanics. Microsoft lists three cost-management changes for usage-based billing services: spending alerts, policy logic in which the highest per-user limit wins, and overage handling that lets an in-progress task finish without billable charges. The same update covers Copilot Credits visibility. Read the second one carefully before you set group and user limits: overlapping policies resolve upward, not downward, so the most generous limit that applies to a user is the one that takes effect. This sits on top of the per-seat licence, it does not replace it.
Admin surfaces. A dedicated License Requests page in the Microsoft 365 admin center is GA, for discovering, reviewing, and managing the Copilot licence requests users submit (Roadmap 561206). Microsoft's July roundup also lists an Agent 365 Dashboard in Insights as rolled out: it unifies Agent 365 data, supports organisation-wide reporting with filtering, shows adoption by group, retention, and top agents, and offers a toggle for Copilot Studio historical reporting. The roundup carries no roadmap ID, so treat it as the same dashboard listed in preview above (Roadmap 567667) only once you can see it in your own tenant.
In development, worth an owner now. Purview in the Microsoft admin center gives AI and IT admins visibility into oversharing risk and lets them drive remediation from the same place, shows how much of their sensitive Copilot interaction volume is protected, and allows Purview DLP for Microsoft 365 Copilot to be turned on in place (Roadmap 559617). Targeted audience surveys in the Copilot dashboard are in preview: change leaders can launch a Copilot Pulse survey to all licensed or active users, the audience updates automatically from Insights data and respects existing dashboard filters such as organisation and job function, and reporting is population-level only (Roadmap 568072). A Workforce Insights Agent answering questions about an organisation's workforce data for leaders, managers, and their delegates is also in development (Roadmap 515145); decide who is allowed to ask it what before it arrives.
Two governance arrivals, one of them reportable. An agents usage report is coming to the Microsoft 365 admin center, covering agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Chat. It gives total active agents and total active agent users, segments active users by licensed and unlicensed, segments both users and agents by publisher type (user-created, built by the organisation, built by Microsoft, built by Microsoft partners), and reports usage per user, per agent and per user-agent pair (Roadmap 497999). The unlicensed split is the part to look at first, because it counts agent use by people who hold no Copilot licence at all. Separately, Microsoft Entra Tenant Governance reached general availability on 10 August across four capabilities: related tenants, governance relationships for least-privileged cross-tenant delegated administration, tenant configuration management against baselines spanning Defender, Entra, Exchange Online, Intune, Purview and Teams, and secure tenant creation. It belongs in a Copilot deployment guide because it is the control plane the multi-tenant agent management story sits on, and that agent management capability is stated as still in preview.
One default worth knowing before someone asks. Learn now documents a Copilot Frontier user access control at Copilot > Settings > View all > Copilot Frontier in the admin center, governing access to experimental and preview features in web apps, desktop apps and agents. The documented default is No access, so no users reach Frontier features until an admin changes it. In the same period Microsoft began merging the consumer Copilot app and the Microsoft 365 Copilot app into a single app, with sign-in supporting a personal account, a work or school account, or both; for work or school accounts the page states the icon and name update and otherwise minimal changes. Third-party coverage claimed Group Chat threads and messages would not carry forward, while Microsoft's own page says Group Chats migrate as one-to-one chats with their history retained. The first-party wording is the one to answer helpdesk questions with.
Three smaller items with an owner attached. Planner Agent is now available in all group-based Planner plans, including basic plans, for users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence, where it had been limited to premium plans (GA). A LegalZoom agent was announced on 12 August running inside Microsoft 365 Copilot, reachable through the Microsoft Marketplace, but the post names no roadmap milestone and no admin control, so there is nothing yet for tenant policy to point at, and Microsoft's own footnote states that Microsoft 365 Copilot does not provide legal advice or legal services. And in development, the Microsoft 365 Copilot mobile app will send unprompted push notifications for common productivity workflows, named in the entry as Your Day at a Glance and Items waiting for you, with the notification opening the matching Copilot response (Roadmap 560339). That one changes when Copilot speaks first, which is a communications decision as much as a configuration one.
They are free resources under the Kesslernity licence. Deploy them across your organisation as widely as you want, and keep the credit on them.
Not permitted: removing the Kesslernity credit, rebranding the guides as your own material, or reselling them.
Full terms: kesslernity.com/license