Built in 2026. Bigger in 2027. Here's what we shared at the first Inside Rencore

On Wednesday 21 October we ran the first Inside Rencore, a new quarterly session where the people building Rencore Governance talk directly to the people using it. I hosted, and two of our Product Managers, Sven Seidenberg and Tobias Tiehmann, joined me. Sven opened with an admission: he’d retitled his “year in review” slide because, with two months still to go, he wasn’t ready to call the year done.

I couldn’t blame him. There’s a lot still landing. If you couldn’t make it, or you’d rather read than watch, here’s what we covered and what it means for you. The full recording is here.

Governance only scales when owners take part

I wanted to start with the idea behind most of what we built this year. Admins can write the rules, but in an organisation with thousands of teams and sites, they can’t make every decision. The people who own a workspace know who should be in it. The job is to get the question in front of them, in a way they’ll answer.

That’s what the Rencore Governance Teams app is for. Owners request, manage, approve and review from inside Microsoft Teams, in plain language, with no Rencore login and nothing new to learn. Sven was clear that users shouldn’t need “a SharePoint degree” to take part. They need to know what’s shared, who it’s shared with, and whether they need to act.

The Teams app is your reach into the organisation.

Sven Seidenberg, Product Manager

Customers are already seeing the effect. Sven said several have told us their ticket volumes are dropping for provisioning and approvals, because those requests now go to workspace owners instead of the IT queue.

The biggest piece is Reviews, now available to everyone. You decide what each review covers, whether that’s owners, members, guests, visitors or file access, and whether it runs on a schedule, after a policy violation or on demand. Owners are guided through it step by step in Teams, see a summary of their changes before they confirm, and can be asked to add a comment as justification. Every decision is logged and can be exported for audit.

Sven walked through a quarterly owner review from end to end. One detail stood out: the admin view shows not just who completed their review, but who didn’t, so you know exactly where to follow up.

A few smaller releases matter if you’re rolling the app out now. Approvals display in German or English depending on each user’s Teams client. You can send a fuller explanation by email and keep the Teams version short. And you can add a custom banner with links and buttons to support your rollout, then see how many people actually engage with it. Power Apps reviews are rolling out now, and Agent Builder agents are next.

Watch the Reviews demo from 12:52

Plan for this before year end

Rencore Nova and the classic Access Reviews feature both retire at the end of 2026. Reviews in the Rencore Governance Teams app replaces both, and only runs there. The access tab in the inventory is moving to an automation too, with a scheduled access export due in the coming weeks. As Sven put it, we only retire something once there’s a better replacement. Your Customer Success Manager can help you plan the switch.

Bringing your business into Rencore

If there was one feature Sven was visibly excited about, it was custom metadata.

Microsoft 365 knows a lot about your tenant. It knows nothing about your departments, how you classify data, or which cost centre pays for what. Until now, neither did we. Custom metadata closes that gap. You tag workspaces, agents and AI seats with your own properties, and those tags then work everywhere: in provisioning, reviews, policies, reports, dashboards and automations, and across Teams, SharePoint, Copilot Studio, Claude and ChatGPT.

Sven described it in four steps. You capture the data, either by asking requesters during provisioning or by importing a CSV from SharePoint. You enrich it by running a review that asks owners to fill the gaps, picking from your real list of cost centres so nobody mistypes anything. You scope your policies and reports with it. And you act on it with automations.

The examples made it real. Tag your public intranet sites and you can exclude them from oversharing reports, which removes a whole category of false positives. Flag an “internal only” team that has a guest in it, and ask the owner to review. Tag agents and AI seats by department and you can see what each department spends, or report SharePoint storage by department as a starting point for chargeback. Some early users are even importing projects from SAP or their project management tools, so a project and every team and site behind it sit in one place.

Context is really important. If you don’t have the context of the platforms you want to govern in one place, you’re missing out on use cases.

Sven Seidenberg

Custom metadata is in a closed preview at the moment, and we’ll be opening it to more customers soon. Your Customer Success Manager will be in touch, or you’ll see an invitation in the app.

Alongside it, we’ve added global search to the left-hand navigation of the new portal. Type a word like “teams” and you’ll get every matching policy, report, automation and segment, whether you built it or it came out of the box. It’s a small change that saves a lot of clicking.

Every agent should have an owner, a purpose and a known cost

Copilot and agents came up, as Sven said, in pretty much every customer call he’s on. Microsoft has made it very easy for anyone to build an agent, and the controls haven’t kept up.

This year we added actions to quarantine, delete and reassign owners of Copilot Studio agents, and automatic discovery of Copilot Studio environments, so you no longer need to choose them by hand. Three bigger releases are in progress now. Agent Builder agents are coming into your inventory with their knowledge sources and connectors, so you can make sure every one has an owner, even after the person who built it leaves. Agent 365 will arrive as a full service with its own policies, reports and automations, alongside the rest of your environment instead of in another admin console. And Copilot and agent cost visibility will show which agents and departments drive spend before the invoice arrives.

AI governance doesn’t stop at Microsoft

Most organisations we speak to are using more than one AI tool, often adopted by different parts of the business for different reasons. So the policies, reports and automations you already run for Microsoft 365 now cover Claude Enterprise and ChatGPT Enterprise too, both in Preview.

Every Claude and ChatGPT user is matched to their Microsoft 365 account, which is where it gets useful. Sven’s example: you can see that someone has both a Copilot licence and a Claude seat, and hasn’t touched Copilot in 90 days. You can see seats and spend by department, which models are being used, and which projects and custom GPTs nobody uses or are shared with the whole company. There are already policy templates to find custom GPTs and ask their owners to migrate or delete them, so no team is caught out when the business relies on one.

As with everything in Rencore, we only read metadata. We never store chat transcripts or read prompts. In Sven’s words, that’s none of our business.

What’s coming next

Beyond the agent work above, the team is planning Power Automate flows in Reviews, which should help clear out the orphaned and broken flows many of you told us about. There’s a SIEM integration so your audit logs can flow into tools like Microsoft Sentinel or Splunk, and more automation actions, starting with Power Automate.

The one I’d watch is the MCP connector. It will let Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT or whichever AI assistant you’ve already approved ask questions of your governance data in Rencore. That tool has already been through your security and compliance review, so we simply provide the context. Further out, the team is exploring AI assistance inside Rencore Governance and a Rencore API. If you have use cases for either, Sven would like to hear them.

Roadmap plans are as of October 2026 and may change. Weekly updates are at releases.rencore.com.

You set the goal. Agents do the legwork.

The last part of the session looked further ahead, at what we’re calling agentic governance.

Most tools hand you a list of findings and leave the work to you. On top of everything else in your day, and with Microsoft announcing and deprecating things at its current pace, that adds up. The idea is that agents watch your tenant and the wider market, spot what needs attention, and prepare the fix for you, whether that’s a policy, an automation or a note to an owner. Then you decide.

You’re still in the driver’s seat. You’re amplified by this agent, not replaced.

Sven Seidenberg

Sven was careful about how we’ll do this, because customers have been clear with us. Nothing runs without an admin’s approval. AI only sees what your role allows. Anything AI-generated is labelled, so you can always tell it apart from a standard report. We’ll be transparent about what data AI processes and where. And the interface you know today stays. Start small, stay in control.

What you asked

We had some good questions in the Q&A. One customer asked how to get started with the Teams app when they have a lot of teams. Sven’s advice was to start small. You can switch features on one at a time, and several customers began with Workspaces, so people can see what they own, before turning on Requests and Reviews as demand grew.

Another asked why they should move from Nova at all. It’s simpler and far less technical for everyday users, it looks and feels like Teams, light and dark mode included, and it’s the only place Reviews runs. Asked for his favourite feature, Sven didn’t hesitate: Reviews, followed closely by custom metadata.

And one attendee simply told us their team is excited about what’s planned and expects to use most of it. That one made my day.

See it in your own environment

The full recording is here. If you’re new to Rencore, or onboarding new admins, our product guides are short walkthroughs with voiceover, most around four minutes.

And if one of these features would save your team time, ask your Customer Success Manager for a 30-minute session on your own environment, or get in touch. That includes a place in the custom metadata preview.

The next Inside Rencore is planned for early January 2027. I’d love to see you there.

Last updated 22 October 2026