In addition to gobbling up most of the internet, ChatGPT now wants access to your OneDrive and SharePoint files, too. One of the earliest uses of AI was to summarize documents and folders of documents, and there's only so many times you can ask it whether Spider-Man would beat Wonder Woman in a fair fight. It would be more productive for AI to collate and make sense of your own personal information, assuming you want to grant access to it. According to OpenAI, ChatGPT can now connect to your OneDrive or SharePoint document libraries, assuming you're a paid ChatGPT Plus, Pro, or Team user who lives outside the EEA, Switzerland, and the UK (via Windows Central). You'll obviously have to connect ChatGPT and give it permission to start poring over your cloud documents.

Insider threats pose a significant challenge to organizational security, often evading traditional rule-based detection systems due to their subtlety and contextual nature. This paper presents an AI-powered Insider Risk Management (IRM) system that integrates behavioral analytics, dynamic risk scoring, and real-time policy enforcement to detect and mitigate insider threats with high accuracy and adaptability. We introduce a hybrid scoring mechanism - transitioning from the static PRISM model to an adaptive AI-based model utilizing an autoencoder neural network trained on expert-annotated user activity data. Through iterative feedback loops and continuous learning, the system reduces false positives by 59% and improves true positive detection rates by 30%, demonstrating substantial gains in detection precision. Additionally, the platform scales efficiently, processing up to 10 million log events daily with sub-300ms query latency, and supports automated enforcement actions for policy violations, reducing manual intervention. The IRM system's deployment resulted in a 47% reduction in incident response times, highlighting its operational impact. Future enhancements include integrating explainable AI, federated learning, graph-based anomaly detection, and alignment with Zero Trust principles to further elevate its adaptability, transparency, and compliance-readiness. This work establishes a scalable and proactive framework for mitigating emerging insider risks in both on-premises and hybrid environments.

Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) both recently disclosed that they suffered corporate email breaches at the hands of Russia's "Midnight Blizzard" hackers. The group, which is tied to the Kremlin's SVR foreign intelligence, is specifically linked to SVR's APT 29 Cozy Bear, the gang that meddled in the United States 2016 presidential election, has conducted aggressive government and corporate espionage around the world for years, and was behind the infamous 2021 SolarWinds supply chain attack. While both HP and Microsoft's breaches came to light within days of each other, the situation mainly illustrates the ongoing reality of Midnight Blizzard's international espionage activities and the lengths it will go to to find weaknesses in organizations' digital defenses. "We shouldn't be surprised that Russian intelligence-backed threat actors, and SVR in particular, are targeting tech companies like Microsoft and HPE. With organizations that size, it would be a much bigger surprise to learn they weren't," says Jake Williams, a former US National Security Agency hacker and current faculty member at the Institute for Applied Network Security.

"Every business process will be collaborative, powered by data and AI, and will bridge the digital and physical worlds," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during the opening keynote of his company's Ignite conference this week. Nadella and other Microsoft executives speaking at the event gave numerous examples of this. One implication of this view is that collaboration can't just happen within Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, or Outlook; it should flow between them and operational applications. Data and intelligence derived from the interactions between people -- what Microsoft calls the Microsoft Graph -- should allow the organization to refine and perfect business processes and make employees more productive. "This digital fabric enables flexibility and strengthens connections from people to people, people to teams, employees to managers," said Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Microsoft 365. "It makes weak ties stronger, and connects people to mission and culture.

Some hardworking Microsoft sleuths have been unearthing some new codenames and leads this weekend. Thanks to @h0x0d (The Walking Cat) and Tero Alhonen (@terhoalhonen) we have a bit of information about Microsoft's "MeTAOS" and "Taos." Microsoft already has a "productivity cloud" in place with its Microsoft 365/Office 365 set of offerings. Underpinning Office 365 is a layer called the "substrate," which is Microsoft's customer data platform. Microsoft is now endeavoring to build a large-scale distributed platform, or foundation, which will sit on top of SharePoint, the Office 365 substrate, Azure, Microsoft's machine-learning infrastructure and more.

This week Microsoft hosted its annual Build conference completely online. That meant streaming keynotes, panels, digital breakouts and workshops for developers. The company's investments in cloud and machine learning are starting to deliver real products. Businesses continue to be the main target of its software offerings -- things like Outlook, Office, Teams and SharePoint. Microsoft has been working to make its 365 services more powerful.

When AI comes to the digital workplace, it is not to replace employees, but to make their daily work more productive, along with increasing their engagement, reducing manual effort, and speeding up time-consuming workflows. Good news is that the widely used collaboration solutions, such as SharePoint, can already bring all of these benefits to your enterprise. Your HCM System controls the trinity of talent acquisition, management and optimization - and ultimately, multiple mission-critical performance outcomes. Technology has been making our lives easier for centuries. But now, as we're running head-on into the 4th Industrial Revolution, it's obvious that even the pace of change is shifting.

Microsoft steps ahead in its commitment to bring mixed-reality and artificial intelligence to all its products. At its SharePoint Virtual Summit, the tech giant announced the preview version of SharePoint spaces, and new AI innovation to SharePoint and OneDrive. The SharePoint spaces will enable users to view and interact with content from every angle, and visualize and manipulate data and product models in real-time, Microsoft said. SharePoint with mixed reality experience will help businesses in onboarding new employees, learning new objectives, and developing new products. It comes with simple point-and-click functionality and smart templates, allowing users to create mixed reality environments with ambient sounds, lighting, beautiful surroundings, and rich textures.

We are all of us at one level or another beset with information management problems. These problems might be considered information governance issues or technology problems. But for every one of us who is inventing good practices on the leading edge, 20 more are struggling to get a good grip on our information. Some organizations still worry about their employees understanding what information constitutes a record, some have moved onto more flexible governance structures allowing them to focus on business problems. The split between on premises infrastructure and the cloud keeps some up at night, while others worry about the proliferation of applications and systems. Still others are frustrated by the constant complaints from colleagues that they cannot find anything on the intranet and others are needled by their legal department with e-discovery questions.

What used to be a well-defined, vendor-versus-vendor competition is now spread across multiple categories, platforms and hosting sites. Box content management is more of an enterprise than web content tool, competing with Documentum, SharePoint and OpenText more than Drupal and WordPress. It is all cloud, and it has become an API-driven collaboration platform, as well. We caught up with Jeetu Patel, Box's chief product officer, to discuss his company's roadmap for competing in this changing market. How does Box content management and its 57 million users fit into the overall enterprise content management (ECM) market right now? Jeetu Patel: There's a convergence of multiple different markets, because what's happened, unfortunately, in this industry, people have taken a market-centric view, rather than a customer- and user-centric view.