M365 News for February 2026
This post will be updated throughout the month as new items are added to the tag.
Be sure to subscribe to my M365 Newsletter for more M365 expertise and news.
This post will be updated throughout the month as new items are added to the tag.
Be sure to subscribe to my M365 Newsletter for more M365 expertise and news.
This post will be updated throughout the month as new items are added to the tag.
Be sure to subscribe to my M365 Newsletter for more M365 expertise and news.
OneDrive retention presents several challenges due to the variety of items that reside there by default. Share a file in a Teams chat and collaborate on it? It’s in OneDrive. Upload a file for Copilot to summarize, which will be copied to OneDrive. Meeting recordings and notes? OneDrive. Items from your local desktop and documents folders? Likely synced to OneDrive.
Use OneNote to store notes that you want to keep as a historical record? Yeah, OneDrive.
How do you establish a single policy to cover the retention of all these different scenarios?
Everything about Teams—security, retention, eDiscovery, privacy, and so on— starts with understanding the data involved. To understand the data involved, you need to be familiar with all the details of this chain reaction. You’re not protecting and investigating data in a Teams channel; you’re dealing with data in Exchange, SharePoint, and potentially in various other locations, depending on the apps used in the channel.
The slop problem is the kind of PR problem that kills industries. It’s the Ford Pinto’s exploding gas tank, New Coke, and the iTunes U2 album fiasco all rolled into one. People see all the hype about AI, then experience entire websites and tens of thousands of social media accounts spewing content no one wants, generated by AI.
That’s a perception problem that won’t go away because you want customers to stop talking about it. You have to build a tool that doesn’t create this problem.
There is more detail in the announcement above, but the bottom line is this. You can get Defender and a range of e5 Purview tools for an additional $15 USD per month per user. With Business Premium costing $22 per month per user when paid annually, that’s a significant savings over a full E5 license if you have fewer than 300 users.
I want to be charitable and say that this doesn’t reek slightly of desperation, but is instead a strategic decision, possibly to be followed by a price increase next year. Or even that they are trying to lessen the confusion around the different versions of Copilot.
Then I counted the number of “Try Copilot Chat Now!” buttons on that page and immediately realized how desperate they are to get people to use Copilot.