The Report You Should Be Checking Every Month

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I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen organisations proudly tell me they’ve automated patch management, only to discover they have no idea whether the updates actually made it to the devices.

Getting updates deployed is only half the job. Knowing what happened afterwards is where the real value lies.

That’s why I think one of the most overlooked additions to Windows Autopatch is its reporting capability. Microsoft has invested heavily in giving administrators visibility into both quality updates and feature updates, yet many people still seem to view Autopatch as a simple “set and forget” service. It isn’t. It’s a managed update service that still needs oversight. [learn.microsoft.com]

In my experience, the organisations that get the most value from Windows Autopatch are the ones that spend a few minutes each month reviewing the reports rather than assuming everything worked perfectly.

Compliance Is Not the Same as Configuration

When I speak with MSPs and SMBs, I often hear a variation of the same story.

“We’ve got update policies configured in Intune.”

That’s great, but having a policy isn’t proof that devices are patched.

A device can be powered off, have a failed update, miss a reboot, or simply stop checking in. The policy might be configured perfectly, yet the endpoint remains vulnerable. That distinction matters. In fact, it came up recently in a discussion about the importance of validating that updates have actually reached devices rather than relying on configuration alone.

Windows Autopatch reports help bridge that gap by showing what has actually happened on the endpoint rather than what should have happened.

Visibility at Multiple Levels

The quality update reporting in Windows Autopatch provides several different perspectives. There is a summary view that gives an organisational snapshot, a device-level status report that drills into individual machines, and a trending report that shows update progress over time. Microsoft states that these reports are designed to provide insight into readiness, update health, alerts, compliance, and update status trends over the previous 90 days. [learn.microsoft.com]

That combination is important.

A dashboard might tell you that 95% of devices are compliant. Useful information, certainly. But the remaining 5% are often where the interesting conversations happen.

Which devices failed?

Why are they behind?

Have they stopped checking in?

Do they belong to a key executive, a remote worker, or a critical system?

Those are the questions that reduce risk.

Better Conversations with Copilot

One area I think many organisations overlook is how these reports can work alongside Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Imagine exporting your Windows Autopatch status data into Excel and then asking Copilot questions such as:

  • Which devices have failed their latest quality update?

  • Summarise update issues by department.

  • Identify devices that haven’t checked in recently.

  • Explain the trend in update compliance over the last quarter.

Rather than manually analysing thousands of rows, Copilot can help surface patterns and priorities much faster. The update data becomes more than just a compliance report. It becomes a decision-making tool.

That’s where I see real value emerging. The reporting tells you what happened. Copilot helps you understand what you should do next.

Reports Help During Audits Too

Anyone who’s been through a security assessment, cyber insurance review, or customer audit knows that “we patch our systems” isn’t usually enough.

You’ll often be asked to demonstrate patch status, prove compliance, explain exceptions, and show evidence of remediation efforts.

The Windows Autopatch reporting framework provides exactly the sort of information auditors tend to request, including device status, readiness information, alerts, compliance data, and historical trends. The data can also be exported for further analysis and reporting. [learn.microsoft.com]

That means you’re not scrambling to produce evidence when someone asks the question.

The evidence is already there.

My Recommendation

If you’re already using Windows Autopatch, add a recurring monthly task to your calendar.

Open the reports.

Review the summary dashboard.

Look for failed devices.

Investigate alerts.

Check the trend lines.

Even better, use Copilot in Excel to help analyse the exported data and identify patterns you might otherwise miss.

Patching isn’t finished when Microsoft releases the update. Patching is finished when you can prove the update successfully reached the devices you’re responsible for.

Windows Autopatch helps automate deployment.

The reports tell you whether that automation is actually working.

CIA Brief 20260711

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As always, the challenge isn’t finding information — it’s focusing on what actually matters.

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Need to Know podcast–Episode 368

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The Real Power of Copilot in Excel Isn’t Formulas. It’s Repeatability.

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The first thing most people do when they open Copilot in Excel is ask it for a formula.

That’s understandable. For decades, Excel expertise has often been measured by how quickly someone can build complex formulas, create PivotTables, or untangle messy spreadsheets. Copilot changes that. You can now describe what you want in plain English and let the AI do much of the heavy lifting.

But after looking at the latest capabilities around Copilot Skills in Excel, I think many people are missing the bigger opportunity.

The real value isn’t that Copilot can generate a formula.

It’s that it can help you repeat a proven process over and over again.

In most organisations, especially SMBs and MSPs, there are a handful of people who know how to make Excel sing. They’re the people who understand financial models, reporting structures, forecasting tools, and data analysis techniques. Everyone else tends to rely on them whenever something complicated appears in a workbook.

That creates a bottleneck.

I’ve seen it countless times. Month-end reporting arrives and everyone waits for the same person. Quarterly forecasting needs updating and the same expert gets involved again. A new staff member arrives and spends weeks learning spreadsheet processes that only exist in somebody’s head.

That’s not really an Excel problem.

It’s a knowledge-sharing problem.

Copilot Skills in Excel feel like Microsoft’s attempt to address exactly that issue. Rather than repeatedly explaining the same process, you can package those instructions into a reusable skill that Copilot can invoke when required. According to Microsoft’s documentation, skills allow Copilot in Excel to perform repeatable tasks using predefined instructions, and organisations can create custom skills stored in OneDrive for reuse. [support.mi…rosoft.com], [support.mi…rosoft.com]

That might sound like a small change, but I think it’s significant.

From Spreadsheet Expert to Process Expert

Imagine you’ve spent years refining a monthly reporting workbook.

You know exactly how the raw data is imported. You know which columns need cleaning. You know which calculations matter and which charts management expects to see.

Traditionally, every new employee needed training. Documentation had to be updated. Mistakes inevitably crept in.

Now imagine creating a skill that guides Copilot through that process.

Instead of asking a colleague to remember twenty separate steps, they simply invoke the skill and allow Copilot to perform the work in a consistent manner.

The expertise becomes transferable.

That’s a very different proposition from merely generating formulas.

Excel Is Becoming More Conversational

Something else strikes me here.

For years, becoming good at Excel meant learning Excel’s language. You memorised formulas, syntax, functions, and workarounds.

Copilot flips that model.

Now Excel is increasingly learning your language.

You can ask questions about data. Request analysis. Generate charts. Create reports. Import information. Explain formulas. Build dashboards. And increasingly, define repeatable business processes using natural language instructions. [support.mi…rosoft.com], [support.mi…rosoft.com]

That’s a major shift.

The barrier to entry drops dramatically.

People who previously avoided advanced spreadsheet work now have a capable assistant sitting beside them.

The Opportunity for MSPs

From an MSP perspective, I think this capability will become particularly interesting.

Most advice around AI focuses on content generation, meeting summaries, or email drafting. Those are valuable, but they’re often incremental productivity gains.

Skills have the potential to standardise operations.

Imagine creating repeatable Excel processes for:

  • Monthly financial reporting

  • Customer profitability analysis

  • Service desk trend reporting

  • Project forecasting

  • Licence consumption tracking

  • Security compliance reporting

Rather than documenting procedures in lengthy manuals, organisations can embed that knowledge directly into skills that guide Copilot.

That’s a much more scalable approach.

And importantly, it helps preserve organisational knowledge when staff move on.

The Human Still Matters

Of course, none of this removes the need for human oversight.

One lesson I’ve repeated many times with Microsoft 365 Copilot is that AI works best when it’s treated as a capable assistant, not an autonomous decision maker.

If Copilot analyses data, review the results.

If it creates a forecast, validate the assumptions.

If it generates a report, make sure the conclusions make sense.

The person remains accountable. Copilot simply removes much of the repetitive effort.

Final Thoughts

When people think about AI in Excel, they often focus on saving a few minutes creating formulas or formatting data.

That’s useful.

But I think the more interesting story is the ability to capture expertise and make it reusable.

The organisations that benefit most from AI won’t necessarily be those with the smartest prompts. They’ll be the ones that systematically turn repeatable knowledge into repeatable processes.

Excel Skills look like another step in that direction.

And for many businesses, that could end up being far more valuable than any individual formula.

You Didn’t Build a Business. You Built a To-Do List That Breathes.

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I had coffee with an MSP owner a few weeks back who couldn’t tell me what his business actually did anymore. Not because he didn’t know — but because there was too much to say. Three service lines. A new marketing funnel. A second office. A partner program he’d signed up for and half-forgotten. A stack of AI tools nobody had time to learn. He listed it all, then went quiet, and said the thing I keep hearing: “I’m busier than I’ve ever been and I can’t feel any of it.”

That’s the trap nobody warns you about. We’re told growth is addition. More clients, more staff, more channels, more tools. So we add. And every addition feels like progress on the day you make it. The problem is what addition does over time. It buries the thing that made the business worth building in the first place.

More Doesn’t Sound Like More

When you started, people could hear you. A client rang and got you. An email went out and it sounded like a person. The whole thing had a voice because there was one person behind it, and that person was unmistakable.

Then you scaled. You hired. You layered in process and policy and a second tier of support. All sensible. All necessary. But somewhere in there your voice got distributed across fifteen people and four systems, and the signal faded. The business got louder and you got quieter. That’s not a failure of growth — it’s the natural physics of it. The bigger the thing, the harder it is to hear the person who started it.

The Calendar Owns You Now

Here’s the part that stings. You built this to get freedom, and now it runs your week. Your inbox sets your priorities. Your calendar tells you where to be. Saturday morning you’re at the desk again, not because anyone made you, but because the machine you built only runs if you keep feeding it. You didn’t escape the job. You promoted yourself into a bigger one.

I don’t think the answer is to add a productivity app to manage the other productivity apps. That’s just one more thing on the pile. The answer is subtraction — and the uncomfortable truth is that subtraction takes more discipline than addition ever did. Anyone can say yes to a new channel. Saying no, or worse, dismantling something you already built, feels like going backwards.

Where Copilot Actually Earns Its Keep

This is the one place I’ll defend the AI tools, because most of them genuinely are just more noise. The useful ones give you back the thing you lost: your attention.

I use Copilot in Outlook to clear the overnight pile in minutes instead of an hour — not to write clever emails, but to tell me which three actually need me and draft the rest so I can move on. I’ll open a week’s worth of Teams meetings I half-listened to and ask Copilot to pull out what was decided and what’s mine to do, so I’m not carrying it all in my head. When a client account feels foggy, I ask Copilot to summarise everything across the emails, the files in SharePoint, and the chat history into one page. That’s not adding a tool. That’s using a tool to remove the overhead the other tools created.

The test is simple. Does it give you back time, or does it ask for more? If a new system needs three people and a fortnightly meeting to maintain, it isn’t growth. It’s weight. I’ve quietly killed more standing meetings and subscriptions this year than I started, and the business got clearer for it.

Audit What You’ve Added

Try this. Open your calendar in Outlook and look at last month honestly. Every recurring meeting, every program, every channel — ask what it actually returns. Not what it promised when you started it. What it returns now. Most owners I know find a third of it could go tomorrow and nobody would notice, except them, who’d suddenly have their head back.

The strongest businesses I work with aren’t the ones that added the most. They’re the ones that stayed recognisable — where you can still hear the person who built it, because they were ruthless about what they let in.

You can add forever. There’s always another channel, another tool, another hire. But at some point the thing you built starts to own you instead of the other way around. The way out isn’t more. It’s less, chosen on purpose.

One macOS login that finally uses Entra

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Most MSPs treat the Macs in a client tenant like orphans. Enrol them in Intune, push a couple of profiles, tick the box, move on.

But the user still signs into that Mac with a local password. One nobody rotates, nobody recovers, and nobody can tie back to a real person. The Entra identity you spent all that effort hardening — MFA, Conditional Access, the lot — stops dead at the macOS login window.

That’s not managed. That’s two identities wearing the same hoodie.

Platform SSO closes the gap. And here’s the part that annoys me: it’s been sitting in your Intune licence the entire time.

What is Platform SSO, really?

It’s the thing that finally makes a Mac sign in with Entra ID the same way a Windows device does with Windows Hello for Business.

When you turn it on, the Mac gets joined to your Entra tenant and a hardware-bound certificate is locked to the device. From then on, the user’s Entra account is their login. Touch ID unlocks the machine. Apps and browsers get single sign-on off the back of it. No more re-typing the work password into every prompt.

You pick one of three flavours — Secure Enclave, smart card, or password. Microsoft recommends Secure Enclave, and so do I. It’s passwordless, phishing-resistant, and conceptually identical to Windows Hello for Business. The other two exist for edge cases.

Here’s the real win: it’s included with every Intune licensing plan. No add-on, no separate SKU. If you’ve got Business Premium, you already own this.

Step-by-Step: turning it on

Portal only. No scripts.

Check the prereqs first

Devices need macOS 13 or newer — push for macOS 14 Sonoma(opens in new window) for the cleanest experience. The Company Portal app must be version 5.2404.0 or later, because that’s what carries the SSO plug-in. And the user has to be allowed to join devices to Entra. Miss any of these and registration silently never happens.

Build the profile

In the Intune admin center, go to Devices > Manage devices > Configuration > Create > New policy. Platform: macOS. Profile type: Settings catalog.

Drop in the values

In the settings picker, expand Platform SSO and add the core settings:

Authentication Method   UserSecureEnclaveKey
Extension Identifier     com.microsoft.CompanyPortalMac.ssoextension
Team Identifier          UBF8T346G9
Registration token       {{DEVICEREGISTRATION}}

Notice what’s missing? No password field. No certificate to mint. No on-prem ADFS box wheezing in a cupboard. The Mac proves who it is with a key baked into its own silicon.

Deploy Company Portal, then assign

Push the latest Company Portal as a required app — that’s what installs the plug-in. Then assign the policy. One catch that bites people: for devices with user affinity, assign to users, not device groups or filters. Get that wrong and Conditional Access can lock the user out of the very resources you were protecting.

Why this actually changes behaviour

The first time the policy lands, the user sees a “Registration required” notification. They click it, sign in with their Entra account, do MFA once, and it’s done.

That prompt trips up every first-timer. It looks like something broke. It didn’t. That’s the moment the device gets Entra-joined and the certificate binds. Tell your clients it’s coming and the support ticket never gets raised.

“Why does it still ask for my old Mac password after a reboot?”

Because FileVault uses the local password as the disk unlock key. So after a cold boot you enter it once — then Touch ID takes over for the rest of the session. That’s by design, not a half-finished feature. Worth saying out loud before a client assumes it’s flaky.

And if there’s still an on-prem domain in the picture, you can layer Kerberos SSO to on-premises Active Directory onto the same policy. The Mac quietly handles both worlds.

Get this in place and a client’s Mac stops being the weak identity in the room. Same MFA. Same Conditional Access. Same audit trail as every Windows device. One login, one identity, one set of rules.

If you’re rolling out Macs and not showing clients this, you’re handing them a managed device with an unmanaged front door.

Platform SSO isn’t there to make Mac logins prettier. It’s there to make the local password irrelevant.

GAIN: Knowing What to Hand to AI and What to Hold Onto

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A while back I caught myself spending a Saturday morning copying figures into a spreadsheet by hand. Forty minutes in, it landed on me — Copilot could have done this while I made a coffee. I wasn’t being thorough. I was being slow. And when the person at the top moves slowly, everything behind them backs up too.

That morning is why I keep coming back to a simple way of sorting the work in front of me: what to pass over, what to speed up, what to build alongside the machine, and what I should never let go of. Four buckets. GAIN.

Pass over the work that doesn’t need you

Most of us hold on to tasks out of pure habit. The first draft. The long document that needs boiling down. The background reading before a client call. None of that needs your judgement — it just needs doing. So let it be done. I’ll ask Copilot in Word to condense a forty-page proposal, or have it pull the recurring themes out of a month of client emails in Outlook. I’m not after ideas. I’m after a finished job. Once you start looking, the size of this pile is genuinely surprising.

Speed up the things that already work

Every business runs on small, repeatable steps. An enquiry arrives, someone qualifies it, someone books the meeting, someone sends the follow-up. You’re not reinventing that — you’re stripping out the waiting in between. With Power Automate sitting under Copilot, a new lead can be sorted, routed, and have a meeting request out the door before anyone’s even read it. Two hours back a week, every week, for as long as the doors are open. That compounds in a way that’s easy to dismiss when you’re staring at the setup.

Build something you couldn’t make alone

This is the part people skip past. The real value isn’t AI standing in for you — it’s the two of you producing something neither would on its own. I’ll have Copilot take ideas I’ve already worked through, connect them in ways I hadn’t spotted, and hand them back in a different shape. Sometimes I’ll drop a Loop page of rough notes and let it pull the thread together while I’m out of the office. I come back and I’m editing, not starting from a blank page. Minutes of shaping instead of hours of grinding. You shift from making the thing to sharpening it — and that’s a far better use of your attention.

Keep what only you can do

Not everything belongs on these piles, and pretending otherwise is how people lose the plot. Taste can’t be handed over — it’s learned, never taught, and certainly never prompted. Vision stays yours, because the machine has no idea what your clients will want next year. And care — actually feeling something for the work and the people on the other end of it — that’s the whole point of doing any of this. Copilot can draft the message; it can’t mean it. Guard those three closely.

The aim was never to turn yourself into the software. It’s to clear away everything else so there’s more room for the part of the job that’s unmistakably yours. I’m curious how far that line shifts over the next year — but those last few things, I don’t think they move at all.

Is Microsoft Losing Its Memory?

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Over the last few weeks I’ve had more than a few conversations that have nothing to do with technology and everything to do with people.

The topic? Microsoft.

Not the products. Not Copilot. Not Azure. The company itself.

With another round of layoffs and a steady stream of experienced employees announcing their departure, many people are starting to ask the same question: Is Microsoft becoming a completely different company? And if so, is that a good thing?

It’s a fair question because a lot of the people leaving aren’t newcomers. They’re the people who have spent years, sometimes decades, building products, relationships, culture and institutional knowledge. They know why certain decisions were made. They remember what worked, what failed, and what lessons were learned along the way.

When that experience walks out the door, something goes with it.

Every Generation Reinvents the Company

One thing I’ve learned from watching Microsoft over many years is that the company is constantly reinventing itself.

The Microsoft that built Windows isn’t the same Microsoft that built Azure.

The Microsoft that created Office isn’t the same Microsoft that now delivers Microsoft 365.

And the Microsoft that is investing heavily in Copilot and AI today is once again becoming something different.

In many ways that’s exactly why the company has survived when so many technology giants have faded away. It has shown an ability to change direction when the market changes.

The challenge is that reinvention often comes with a cost. New people bring new ideas, new priorities and new ways of working. That’s healthy. But if too much historical knowledge disappears at the same time, organisations can find themselves solving problems that were already solved years ago.

Sometimes experience isn’t about knowing what to build. It’s about knowing what not to build.

The Hidden Value of Institutional Knowledge

When people think about layoffs, they often focus on roles and headcount.

What doesn’t get measured so easily is context.

Every organisation has unwritten knowledge. The things that never make it into documentation. The conversations that explain why a process exists. The lessons learned after a customer escalation. The accumulated understanding of how products, teams and markets really work.

Ironically, this is exactly what many businesses are now trying to capture with AI.

When organisations deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot, one of the first discoveries is that their knowledge is scattered everywhere. Some of it lives in SharePoint. Some is hidden in Teams conversations. Some is trapped inside Outlook mailboxes. And some only exists inside the heads of experienced employees.

When those employees leave, that knowledge often leaves with them.

That’s why I believe one of the greatest values of Microsoft 365 isn’t just productivity. It’s preserving organisational memory. Every Teams meeting transcript, every shared document, every Copilot-assisted summary creates a record that can help future employees understand the context behind decisions.

Technology can help capture knowledge, but it can’t replace the judgement that created it in the first place.

Could This Actually Make Microsoft Stronger?

The other side of the argument is equally compelling.

Large organisations can become attached to the way things have always been done. Fresh perspectives can challenge assumptions. New leaders can move faster because they’re not carrying the weight of past decisions.

You can certainly argue that Microsoft’s rapid shift towards cloud computing and now AI required new thinking that may have been difficult inside a company built around legacy business models.

A business that never changes eventually becomes irrelevant.

The risk isn’t change itself. The risk is changing so quickly that you forget what made you successful in the first place.

There’s a balance to be found between respecting experience and embracing new ideas.

What I’ll Be Watching

As Microsoft pushes deeper into the AI era, I think the real test won’t be how many people leave or how many new people join.

The test will be whether the company can preserve the culture, engineering discipline and customer focus that helped build its reputation while simultaneously creating something new.

Most successful organisations stand on two foundations: experience and innovation.

Lose innovation and you fall behind.

Lose experience and you repeat old mistakes.

The companies that thrive find a way to keep both.

Microsoft has reinvented itself many times before. The question now is whether this latest transformation strengthens the foundations of the company or slowly erodes the knowledge that helped make it one of the most influential technology organisations in the world.