North American Cloud & Collaboration Summit
Join us at the North American Cloud & Collaboration Summit, Sept 7-9, 2025, in Branson, MO! Envision IT is proud to be a Gold Sponsor and will be exhibiting. Visit our booth to connect with our team and explore the latest updates on Microsoft 365, Power Platform, Copilot, Teams, and more. Peter Carson, President of Envision IT and a 15-time Microsoft MVP, will lead two sessions at the event; be sure not to miss these!
Session Highlights
Teams and Microsoft 365 Sharing - Unstructured and Structured
Tuesday, Sept 9, 2025 | 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM | Room: Copper Creek
External sharing in Teams and Microsoft 365 is all about publishing or collaborating with people outside your organization. Users will find ways to do it with or without IT support (typically through email or shadow IT), so IT needs to provide an easy way to do it effectively and securely.
Sharing can be done in several different ways. Unstructured sharing to a small set of external users works well with the OOTB SharePoint and OneDrive features. External users can also be invited in as full Microsoft Teams guests for collaboration. Teams Shared Channels can be used to improve the user experience for external users, eliminating the need for tenant switching in Teams.
As the scale increases, structured sharing with many external users requires alternatives such as Azure AD B2B, custom code, or third-party solutions. Using real-world examples, we'll discuss the options available and what makes sense where.
In this session, we will cover configuring sharing appropriately and the user experience for both content sharers and recipients. We'll go through several different scenarios.
- External sharing in Microsoft Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint Online
- Azure AD B2B (Business to Business)Teams
- Shared Channels and Azure AD Direct Connect
- Microsoft's Entitlement Management portal's Access Packages for external users
- Custom and third-party options leveraging the Graph API
- We'll also touch on how to leverage Microsoft's security stack to improve the security of your Microsoft 365 Extranet
Building Solutions using Azure AI and Copilot Studio
Tuesday, Sept 9, 2025 | 3:00 - 4:00 PM | Room: Roark Creek
AI-powered agents feel like they're coming everywhere, but how do you light up your own data in them, not just for staff, but also for external guests? How can you incorporate an AI Agent into both scenarios securely?
We'll start the session with a level set on how AI really works, and in particular, Retrieval Augmented Generation. A combination of Search and Large Language Models, it lets your chat interface answer questions it hasn't been trained on by leveraging search. Built properly it also respects security, and only answers from content the user has access to, which can live in Dataverse, Microsoft 365, or any other search accessible repository.
One approach we'll cover is Copilot Studio, a low-code environment where you can build intelligent chat experiences using ready-made large language models, a dialog manager, and numerous data connectors. These can be published in a variety of ways, and can enforce security against your enterprise data.
The other approach is more roll-your-own, leveraging Azure AI Search, Azure OpenAI, and supporting code based on Microsoft published architectural examples.
We'll also cover consumption based pricing from Microsoft for both.
Feeling faint of heart with all this tech talk? Don't despair. Yes we'll be showing code, but we'll also go over real-world business cases, and the solution architectures that leverage the Microsoft AI stacks.