Checklist
Microsoft 365 Copilot readiness checklist
Copilot works within the access your people already have. Work through this before a pilot, and before access widens beyond it.
Scope
- Who is in the pilot, and what data do they work with?
- Which departments hold the most sensitive information?
- Who in the business will approve go-live for each department?
Oversharing
- Have you found sharing links scoped to the whole organisation on sensitive content?
- Are broad groups such as "Everyone except external users" granted access to sites that don't need it?
- Which Teams are public, and should they be?
- Where has inheritance been broken, and does anyone still own those permissions?
- Have guest accounts from finished projects been removed?
- Are the tenant's default sharing link settings set to the narrowest sensible option?
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Sensitive content
- Do you know where HR, payroll, legal, board and customer data lives?
- Is a small sensitivity label set published, with a default label?
- Is encryption applied to the most sensitive label?
- Do data loss prevention policies cover labelled content where it matters, including in Copilot?
Controls for the pilot
- Is search restricted to approved sites for the pilot group while clean-up continues?
- Are the most sensitive sites excluded from discovery until they are fixed?
- Is Copilot activity included in your audit logging?
Ownership
- Does every important site have a named owner?
- Are site access reviews scheduled?
- Is someone reporting on sharing trends each month?
Go-live
- Fix the highest-risk sites and publish the label set.
- Run the pilot with search restrictions in place.
- Widen access department by department, as each one's content meets the go-live conditions.
- Lift search restrictions once clean-up is complete, and keep the review process running.
Next step
This guide supports Copilot and AI data readiness. Talk to an engineer if you want it worked through for your environment.
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