Agenda Auto-Draft Available for OWA and the New Outlook

Microsoft is doing its level best to convince Microsoft 365 tenants to invest in Copilot. Given the massive capital investment in datacenters to power AI experiences, it’s unsurprising that engineering groups are busy infusing Copilot features into as many applications as possible. Features like Copilot memory add value and help dissuade tenants from investigating other options, such as the ChatGPT Connector for SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.

Of course, a SharePoint connector is limited when compared to the breadth of integration of Copilot across the Microsoft 365 apps. Because Copilot works well for some and not for others, work continues apace to find new ways to integrate AI in daily tasks. This brings me to message center notification MC1171854 (13 Oct 2025), which describes “Intelligent agenda suggestions for calendar events.” The feature is available now, but only to users with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses.

Agenda Auto-Draft Uses AI to Generate Some Bullet Points

At first glance, I didn’t see much to get excited about. The description says that AI is used “to automatically generate a proposed agenda when users create or edit a calendar event, making it easier to align meeting goals, participants, and discussion topics.” I’ve never had any problems coming up with a few salient points for a draft meeting agenda, and agendas have a nasty habit of changing as soon as meetings start. However, I can see the value of being able to create some bullet points to frame an agenda.

What happens is that Microsoft has updated the calendar scheduling form to add an auto draft an agenda option to the set of prompts available when the Draft with Copilot button is used. When the auto draft option is used, Copilot uses the meeting subject to generate an agenda composed of some introductory text and some bullet points. Copilot has always been good at generating bullet points in document and message summaries!

In Figure 1, the meeting subject is Review Chapter Updates for Office 365 for IT Pros. Copilot’s suggested agenda items seem reasonable, and it looks as if Copilot discovered that Office 365 for IT Pros is an eBook from information found internally or on the web (Bing search).

If the meeting organizer doesn’t like the draft agenda, they can simply instruct Copilot to retry or adjust the text by making the agenda longer or shorter. The changes proposed in further versions are not dramatic, likely due to using the meeting subject as the core input to the AI processing.

Eventually, the suggested text is accepted or rejected. If accepted, it can be further edited before the meeting notice is sent.

Now Available Worldwide

Auto-draft of meeting agendas is now a default feature that is enabled in OWA and the new Outlook. According to Microsoft, the feature was enabled worldwide from October 9, 2025.

There’s no administrative control to enable or disable auto-draft for meeting agendas. Given the dramatic difference between the scheduling interface of Outlook classic, it’s unlikely that auto-draft of agendas will find its way into that client.

New Feature that Won’t Move the Needle

Agenda auto-draft won’t move the needle at all when the time comes for Microsoft 365 tenants to decide whether to embrace Microsoft 365 Copilot. It’s a feature that will please some people (those who scheduled meetings and discover how to use agenda auto-draft). For most, I suspect that this is one of the Copilot features that will pass them by because they never need to create an agenda. But that’s always true for new software features.

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 insights updated monthly into what happens within Microsoft 365, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.

Client-Side Limitation or Licensing Limitation?

Microsoft launched the new message recall feature for Exchange Online in October 2022 and shipped the code in early 2023. I duly wrote about the feature and noted the restriction for email protected by sensitivity labels. The EHLO blog describing message recall says:

Does recall work for encrypted email?

Message Recall within Classic Outlook is not available for messages encrypted with OME or using MIP labels. When attempting to recall these messages, the recall option will be greyed out in Classic Outlook and unavailable. This is a client-side limitation and is by design. To recall these messages, access your mailbox using OWA or the New Outlook for Windows, and recall your message from there.

Microsoft subsequently revamped the new message recall in August 2024. Nothing more was said about sensitivity labels. All we know is that a client-side limitation stops Outlook classic being able to recall protected messages while OWA and the new Outlook can both recall protected messages with ease (Figure 1).

Having the Right License is Always Important

Roll forward to message center notification MC882266 (last updated 23 October 2024, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 413431) where we discover that a component called Microsoft Purview Information Protection Advanced Message Encryption lies at the heart of the matter. According to the notification, user accounts must have a Microsoft 365 E5 or Office 365 E5 license to be able to recall encrypted email from their Sent Items folder. The same limitations that the mailbox must be in Exchange Online and that recall is only possible for messages sent to recipients within the same organization exist.

Notice that there’s no mention of client-side limitations. When such limitations are mentioned, it implies that some software problem exists within a client that prevents the client from being able to do something. Outlook classic is perfectly capable of working with sensitivity labels that encrypt messages.

In fact, Outlook classic is the most capable client in terms of working with encrypted messages because it can operate offline, including the ability to issue message recall requests for unprotected email by selecting a message and using the option in the File menu (Figure 2). The recall option isn’t available if the selected message has a sensitivity label with encryption.

Recall requests are kept in the Outbox folder until a network connection is available. Synchronization then occurs to send the recall request to Exchange Online for processing.

The ability of Outlook classic to work offline almost as well as when online is where the real issue might lie. OWA and the new Outlook are both designed to work online and that’s how they usually work. It’s therefore easy for the clients to check the licensing status of the signed in user, specifically to check that the account holds the Azure Information Protection Premium P2 service plan that’s included in the Microsoft 365 E5 and Office 365 E5 products. Outlook classic would need additional code to check user licensing when online so that it could work offline, much like the client stores rights management use licenses to allow it to work with protected messages when offline.

It can be argued that the limitation exists both in the client (can’t check a license unless Outlook classic is online) and licensing (can’t recall protected messages unless the right license is available), so the somewhat torturous text MC882266 is accurate without being clear.

Message Recall in Outlook Mobile

Meanwhile, message center notification MC1025213 (7 March 2025, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 471444) announces that Outlook for iOS and Android can recall messages. The option is available from the […] menu after selecting a message (Figure 3).  Outlook mobile clients cannot recall protected messages.

In Case of Protected Recall, Look for OWA

I’m not sure how many people will want to recall encrypted messages. If you find yourself in this situation, it’s easy to fire up OWA or the New Outlook and issue the recall request. Of course, the added time required to remember to use a different client and perform the message recall might mean that the recipient has read the text, but that’s a risk you must take.

Keep up to date with developments like the new Outlook by subscribing to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. Our monthly updates make sure that our subscribers understand the most important changes happening across Office 365.

Preserve Declined Meetings in Calendars to Retain Meeting Notices

Announced in message center notification MC684218 (26 October 2023, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 154056), the ability to enable the preservation of details for declined meetings is now available in the OWA and Outlook Monarch (the “New Outlook”) clients (Figure 1).

The setting is also controllable through the Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration cmdlet. This command enables saving of declined events for a mailbox:

Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration -Identity Kim.Akers -PreserveDeclinedMeetings:$true

There’s no organization-wide control to preserve declined meetings. Because it’s an individual choice to keep declined meetings in a calendar, the setting must be enabled for individual mailboxes. However, to enable the setting for all user mailboxes, it’s easy to do this with PowerShell:

[array]$Mbx = Get-ExoMailbox -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox -ResultSize Unlimited
ForEach ($M in $Mbx) {
   Set-MailboxCalendarConfiguration -Identity $M.UserPrincipalName -PreserveDeclinedMeetings:$true
}

Enabling any calendar setting for a mailbox isn’t fast but it should be a one-time operation. On the other hand, the setting must be enabled for new mailboxes as they are created.

Why It’s a Good Idea to Preserve Declined Meetings

Ever since the first version of Outlook appeared in 1997, when people decline an incoming meeting, Outlook removes all details of the meeting to keep the calendar clear and not block time that might be needed for another event. This scheme works well but it means that once someone declines an inbound meeting, they have no further knowledge about the meeting even if they have no intention of attending the event. They can forward the meeting invitation to someone else (if meeting settings permit forwarding), review any attachments included with the invitation or access content created during a meeting such as the meeting chat or meeting recap (if it’s a Teams meeting). Alternatively, they can decide to attend the meeting if their schedule clears up.

Preserving declined meetings means that Outlook enters details of an event in an invitee’s calendar but does not block the event time in the user’s free/busy data. This means that the Outlook scheduling assistant regards the slot as available and can be used for other meetings.

As a Microsoft MVP, I receive many meetings organized by Microsoft engineering group to discuss new product details. Some of these events are interesting, but only if I can find time to attend. Having the calendar retain the event details allows me to go back to attend an event when I can.

No Declined Meetings for Outlook Desktop

Outlook desktop doesn’t obey the settings used by OWA and Monarch. Its settings are often implemented in values held in the system registry. Even if its implementation has caused some difficulties, roaming signatures are a good example of how Microsoft is moving Outlook desktop from its PC-centric heritage to cloud settings.

With this in mind, it shouldn’t be a surprise to learn that meetings declined using Outlook desktop are not preserved. Meetings declined using the Outlook for Mac and Outlook mobile clients are preserved, even if their UI doesn’t include the ability to control the setting.

Declined meetings kept in the calendar are the same as any other calendar events (Figure 2). The sole difference is that the event doesn’t occupy a slot in the user’s free/busy data. Because the meetings are calendar events, they show up as normal in all clients and any other application that uses calendar data.

If the user changes their response and accepts the meeting, Outlook updates the calendar event and reserves the time in the user’s free/busy data.

A Change in Habit

Microsoft doesn’t make changes like this without some form of feedback that points out why a new approach is necessary. I don’t know if the input came from customers or from inside Microsoft, but I suspect that the driving factor is the increasing amount of information shared with meeting invitations and added to events during Teams calls. Being able to go direct to the event makes it a lot easier for meeting participants to access the information, even if they choose to decline the invitation to attend.

Learn how to exploit the data available to Microsoft 365 tenant administrators through the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook. We love figuring out how things work.

Outlook Voice Dictation Supported by Monarch and OWA

Announced in message center notification MC679312 (4 October, 2023, Microsoft 365 roadmap item 171199), the ability to dictate the body text for Outlook messages is now rolling out to all tenants with the intention that Microsoft will complete the deployment in early December 2023.

The title of MC679312 is “Dictation Support Coming to the new Outlook,” which implies that this feature is only for the Monarch client, but message text dictation works for OWA too.

Setting up for Outlook Voice Dictation

The basic idea is that you can turn on a PC microphone when composing a new email and speak instead of writing the message body. Outlook connects to the Microsoft Azure speech-to-text service (hence the need for a “reliable internet connection” to translate words captured by the microphone into text. Transcribing audio to text is well-known within Microsoft 365. It’s the basis for meeting transcription in Teams and video transcripts in Stream.

To begin, make sure that the PC microphone is enabled before creating a new message. When positioned in the message body (voice dictation doesn’t work for the message subject or to select recipients), select the Dictate (blue microphone icon) option and the language you plan to speak in. As Figure 1 shows, Outlook supports a limited set of languages for now with another set in preview. Microsoft Azure speech-to-text can handle “more than 100 languages and variants,” so it’s likely that the set of available languages will expand over time to deal with all languages supported by Outlook.

I was impressed to find Gaeilge (Irish Gaelic) in the list of preview languages (the list of preview languages is much longer than shown in Figure 1).

Switching languages is easy and it’s possible to compose a message in multiple languages, assuming that you have sufficient fluency in the target languages to create passible text. My efforts in Irish were OK but my French accent proved an obstacle that dictation (or the back-end voice processing service) had difficulty with. In any case, it was fun testing out languages.

Composing Messages with Outlook Voice Dictation

After settling on your preferred language, dictation can start. I found that a slight delay occurred between selecting the Dictation option and a beep indicating that the microphone was ready to accept input. Perhaps this is due to the need to connect to the Azure transcription service.

Once connected, composing message text is a matter of speaking normally. Microsoft says that voice dictation is “a quick and easy way to draft emails, send replies, and capture the tone you’re going for.” I’m not sure that dictation is any faster than typing, especially with the help of intelligent editors, but that applies to people with good typing skills. Those who struggle to compose message text might well find it easier to speak and edit the output before sending the message.

Figure 2 shows a message that I composed with voice dictation. You can see that dictation captured double instances of words twice (easily fixed). The output text is very usable if you don’t mumble or say “Uh” too often.

Creating Better Text Output

Microsoft says that Azure transcription has “automatic formatting and punctuation.” Perhaps Outlook doesn’t use this functionality because the text I generated seemed like a real stream of consciousness devoid of punctuation. To have any punctuation, you need to remember to use commands like:

• Full stop.
• Comma.
• New line.
• New paragraph.

I haven’t yet worked out how to insert a quotation or to bold, or underline text. On the other hand, I discovered that the profanity filter works when I swore at my inability to master dictation.

Outlook voice dictation doesn’t seem to use the Azure speech-to-text disfluency removal feature. This cleans up “stutter, duplicate words, and … filler words like uhm or uh” to produce text that reads better.

Dictation only works when the compose message window is active. If you move focus to another application, like switching to a document to check a fact, the connection to Azure drops and dictation stops. The connection also drops if you pause and don’t speak for more than ten seconds (approximately). I can understand why voice dictation works like this. It would be wasteful to persist a connection while waiting for the user to return and produce some more pearls of wisdom. However, it’s something to remember as no one likes to speak into a message without generating text.

Fixing Dictated Text is a Copilot Thing

Being able to rewrite and improve text is one of the benefits advanced for generative AI. I asked Bing Chat Enterprise (BCE, soon to be plain “Copilot”) to add the missing punctation from text generated from speech and then make the text more concise (you could equally use ChatGPT or Bing Chat to do the job). The output was very good and it’s easier to do this than rewriting the raw text. Interacting with BCE required me to copy text to BCE, run the prompt, and paste the amended text (Figure 3) back into the Outlook message.

Using an external generative AI is slightly clunky, but it works and is a lot cheaper than paying $30/month for the fully-integrated Microsoft 365 Copilot. Admittedly, Microsoft 365 Copilot offers many more features and functions and no one would ever buy it simply to improve text. Or would they?

Insight like this doesn’t come easily. You’ve got to know the technology and understand how to look behind the scenes. Benefit from the knowledge and experience of the Office 365 for IT Pros team by subscribing to the best eBook covering Office 365 and the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem.

Storm in a Teacup as the New Outlook Appears

There’s a lot of fuss and bother about the new Outlook client (aka Monarch) caused by an article in a German website that begins with the assertion that “The new free Outlook … sends secret credentials to Microsoft.” Quelle surprise! It goes on to say “But beware: If you try the new Outlook, you risk transferring your IMAP and SMTP access data to mail accounts as well as all mails to Microsoft servers.” The author concludes that synchronization (which is what happens) of email and credentials “allows Microsoft to read the mails.”

I fear that the article falls firmly into the category of hysterical clickbait. However, its assertions will cause worry and concern for people who don’t fancy the idea of transferring information to the cloud where the cloud provider might possibly access their data. This hasn’t worried the hundreds of millions of people who use Gmail or the 400 million users of Office 365, but I can understand the concerns expressed by others.

Sending Plain Text Credentials

The author is very upset that Microsoft stores IMAP4 and SMTP credentials for user accounts (I’m pretty sure that this happens for POP3 too). Outlook sends these plain-text credentials over a TLS connection. I guess Microsoft could enforce some form of modern authentication with Monarch, but that requires the mail servers it connects with to support modern authentication, and that’s not going to happen for most IMAP4 and POP3 connections. So credentials must be plain text to allow Outlook to connect to the servers that host user accounts (Outlook does use OAuth2 to connect to Google accounts, and uses that access to synchronize data from those accounts).

Synchronization of User Data in Azure

The author is also upset that Microsoft synchronizes user email data to Azure. This is the same mechanism as Outlook mobile has used since Microsoft moved from the AWS-based infrastructure used by the original Acompli client (bought by Microsoft in 2014) to Azure in 2018. Data is held in special forms of mailboxes that cannot be accessed by normal email clients and it’s stored like this to make functions like search and the focused inbox work.

If Outlook did not synchronize email, contacts, and calendar items to Azure, the client would be limited to whatever features are supported by IMAP4, an obsolete email access protocol that only persists because the standards community has not developed a replacement. Moving copies of items to Azure allows background processes to make the data more like the information retrieved from a full-blown Exchange Online server. If you want, massaging the data makes it possible for Outlook to work with the data as if it came from Exchange.

The New Outlook is a Better Client

The mail client is part of Windows and has changed dramatically as Windows evolved. Few would want to go back to Outlook Express at this point. The latest change benefits users because they get more feature and a better client. Microsoft also gains through reduced engineering expenses by eliminating a client from its mix of mail clients. Comparing the old Windows mail client to Outlook is like comparing the default mail client on a smartphone to Outlook mobile. Both will do the basics of sending and receiving email, but Outlook mobile does much more besides.

It’s reasonable to be concerned about the storage of email data but people do have a choice. To get the additional functionality (see the list of features enabled by synchronization), they can use the new Outlook. On the other hand, if they fear that Microsoft might compromise their information (an infinitesimal and highly unlikely occurrence) they can use another client. This is called user choice.

Other Clients Available

The simple solution for those unhappy about the way the new Outlook works is to seek an alternative. Fortunately, many other free email clients are available, such as the well-respected Thunderbird IMAP4 client. The latest versions of the Thunderbird client support OAuth2 connections, including to Exchange Online, proving that not all IMAP4 connections depend on plain-text credentials.

The combination of server and client create a secure connection. Perhaps people should worry more if the server hosting their mailbox still uses basic authentication and clients send plain-text credentials to the server. In this situation, accounts are more likely to be compromised by attack techniques such as password sprays. I’d be a lot more worried about compromise of accounts on servers that use basic authentication than attackers gaining access to email data stored in Azure.

To me, this is a storm in a teacup. Once people think through how and why Microsoft synchronizes email data to make the new Outlook work better, I think they’ll be OK with the mechanism used. I’ve never worried about the processing of email data for mobile Outlook and I doubt that it’ll cause me any concern for Monarch.