Microsoft Copilot
On 21 October, we’re opening up the product team to you.
Inside Rencore is a new, regular session where you hear directly from the people deciding what Rencore builds. We’ll show you what we’re working on, explain the trade-offs behind it, and tell you where we’re heading. It won’t be a polished keynote or a sales call, rather a straight conversation with the people who rely on our product every day.
Before the first session, I want to share what’s been on my mind this year. This is the first of two short posts. Here I’ll cover what we’ve built this year and why. In part two, I’ll look at the journey into AI.
If you’d like the full picture first, with all the evidence, a stage-by-stage model and a readiness checklist, read my guide: Governing the journey into AI.
Governance doesn’t scale from the centre
Every large Microsoft 365 environment I’ve seen hits the same wall.
In the early days, IT can keep track of things. There are a few hundred teams and sites, most have a clear purpose, and someone in IT knows roughly who should have access to what. Then adoption takes off. Teams get created for every project, every working group and every customer. Guests are invited in. Files are shared with external partners. A few years later, there are thousands of workspaces, and nobody in IT can say with confidence who should still be in them.
The usual response is more central control: tighter request processes, bigger review spreadsheets, more tickets. It rarely works for long. IT ends up making access decisions about content it has never seen, and the people who do know the content are left out of the loop.
We believe the answer is to put decisions with the people closest to the work, and give IT the policies and visibility to stay in control. That idea shaped most of what we built this year.
Putting governance where people already work
The biggest piece of work for our team this year has been the Rencore Governance Teams app.
Workspace owners now complete access reviews and approve requests directly in Microsoft Teams, the tool they already have open all day. They confirm who should be a member, which guests still need access and what is shared externally, for their own teams and sites. IT sets the rules and sees the results. Owners make the calls they are best placed to make.
It took a great deal of effort to get right. A review that asks too much of a busy owner simply doesn’t get done, so we spent a lot of time on making each step quick and clear. The feedback from our customers and partners tells us it was worth every hour.
One customer summed it up well:
For us, the Teams app is the standout feature. Our workspace owners handle access reviews and requests in Teams, without ever needing the admin portal. They decide who stays in their teams and sites, which guests keep access and what stays shared externally. That takes pressure off IT and leaves the decision with the people who know the content best.
Managing director, enterprise organisation with 1,000+ employees
That last line is the point. Good governance puts the decision with the people who know the content, and lets IT focus on the rules, the exceptions and the evidence.
We’ve also made Rencore easier to work with day to day. Global Search lets your team find any report, policy, automation or review in one search. And custom metadata lets you tag resources by department, data classification or cost centre, then report on them and apply policies using those tags.
Keeping up with Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365 never stands still. A steady stream of updates lands every month, and new Copilot capabilities keep reaching users. Each one can change how data is found, shared and used, often in ways nobody planned for when the workspace was first set up.
At the same time, let’s keep this grounded. Most of the large organisations we work with tell us they are just getting started with Copilot. Many haven’t approved other AI tools at all. Big companies move carefully, and that’s sensible.
The catch is that people don’t always wait for approval. Deloitte’s 2026 survey of UK workers found that 31% of people using generative AI at work do so without their employer knowing. Demand is there, whether the tools are approved or not. And whichever AI tools your organisation approves next, much of the data they rely on will still live in Microsoft 365.
So governance has to keep pace. In practice, that means knowing what you have, setting the rules once, and letting owners and automation handle the rest. When it relies on a yearly audit, it is out of date the day it finishes.
Three questions to ask before Copilot goes further
If you’re planning to roll Copilot out more widely next year, these are the questions I’d ask first:
- Does every team and site have an owner who is still at the company? Ownerless workspaces are where access problems go unnoticed.
- When was external sharing last reviewed? Links and guest access created for one project often outlive it by years.
- What happens to a workspace when its project ends? If the answer is “nothing”, its content and permissions are still there for Copilot to find.
If any of those are hard to answer, you’re in good company. Most organisations we speak to are working through the same questions, and it’s exactly what we’ll be talking about on 21 October.
Coming in part two
Next time, I’ll look at the journey into AI: where most organisations really are, why they move carefully, and what it takes to move forward with confidence.
Or hear it first: join me, Sven and Tobias at the first Inside Rencore on 21 October at 4pm CEST (3pm BST, 10am EDT). Forty minutes from us, twenty minutes for your questions.
Register for Inside Rencore: Built in 2026. Bigger in 2027.
Tiina Rytkönen
VP of Product and Engineering, Rencore
Last updated 16 October 2026
