Group Product Manager on the #MicrosoftEDU team, building AI in EDU, Learning Accelerators, #MicrosoftTeams, Immersive Reader, #OneNote Class Notebooks
Redmond, WA
Joined March 2009
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Mike Tholfsen retweeted
Who’s ready to creat beautiful dashboards!!
Create incredible interactive dashboards with Microsoft Copilot in Excel, PowerPoint & SharePoint! 🚀 In my new step-by-step tutorial, I’ll show you how to turn your data into dashboards in just minutes with clickable filters, interactive charts, and visual insights - all using natural language prompts.
📊 Excel: Explore your data with interactive dashboards
📽️ PowerPoint: Build dashboards with Copilot Interactive Slides
🌐 SharePoint: Create HTML dashboards to share with your team
youtu.be/-XeCMdR7Zz4?si=nUdJ…
A popular topic in the news today has been tying the ability to Search with use of AI in the Classroom, with some companies requiring both to be enabled or disabled (tied together)
The good news is that Microsoft gives you choice here. Schools or educators can turn off AI in Bing, while keeping search, and schools also have the option to enable/disable AI in the classroom as a separate option.
If you want to explore how you have more flexibility with Microsoft AI, check out these Bing AI addins for either the Edge or Chrome browser. These addins can also be deployed and controlled by school IT admins, group policies, etc.
🌐Edge: microsoftedge.microsoft.com/…
🌐Chrome: chromewebstore.google.com/de…
Mike Tholfsen retweeted
Still repeating the same brand-specific instructions for every presentation?
Bring your organization’s brand expertise into Copilot in PowerPoint with shared custom skills in Brand Kit.
Give teams reusable, brand-specific workflows—so they can spend less time repeating instructions and more time shaping their message.
Your brand’s expertise. Shared across teams. Ready to use in PowerPoint.
Some useful details on the big Windows 11 memory improvements 🧠
Great product design is built on fundamentals. We've been working across the full Windows stack, from the kernel to the shell to apps, to make Windows feel faster and more responsive on 8 GB PCs.
A few things worth knowing about today's Windows 11 performance updates:
1. You'll feel the difference in everyday use. Opening Start, launching an app, getting back to a tab. In our lab tests, we're seeing up to 20% better responsiveness and up to 40% faster multitasking on 8 GB PCs.
2. Making better use of the memory you already have. Windows can now keep up to 2 GB more of your active data in memory instead of moving it to slower storage. More of what you're working on stays ready when you need it.
3. The work goes beyond Windows itself. We've been improving how Windows, Edge, and Microsoft 365 apps use memory, helping your PC stay responsive as you move between apps.
These improvements are available today in the latest Windows 11 update, and we're continuing to build on this work.
More details here: blogs.windows.com/windowsexp…
Educators asked, we listened 👂 The top request for our Study and Learn agent in K-12 schools was the ability to lock Copilot Chat to just the Study and Learn agent mode 🔐, which keeps students focused on the learning.
This feature will be rolling out with IT Admin controls in December and we are putting on a set of webinars next week to get early customer feedback. Please check out the blog link below and join us for a webinar to learn more.
Register for a webinar 👇
techcommunity.microsoft.com/…
Mike Tholfsen retweeted
Windows 11 26H2 is within reach of all users running supported eligible PCs, Microsoft has confirmed, including Windows 10 systems too. #Microsoft #Windows11 neowin.net/news/microsoft-co…
Create incredible interactive dashboards with Microsoft Copilot in Excel, PowerPoint & SharePoint! 🚀 In my new step-by-step tutorial, I’ll show you how to turn your data into dashboards in just minutes with clickable filters, interactive charts, and visual insights - all using natural language prompts.
📊 Excel: Explore your data with interactive dashboards
📽️ PowerPoint: Build dashboards with Copilot Interactive Slides
🌐 SharePoint: Create HTML dashboards to share with your team
youtu.be/-XeCMdR7Zz4?si=nUdJ…
Tons of new updates this month for Copilot in October! Some of my favorites include:
✅ Updated Home navigation, projects, Workspaces and Autopilot in Copilot
✅ File editing, audio updates, and more references for Copilot Workspaces
✅ Knowledge base in SharePoint
✅ Model update, brand kit improvements, and skills for Copilot in PowerPoint
✅ New life sciences connectors for Copilot
All the details in the blog 👇
techcommunity.microsoft.com/…
Useful explanation of how Copilot auto mode chooses the best model for the job
There isn’t one model that’s best at everything anymore.
Choosing the right one for each task (without sacrificing quality or paying more than you need to) is a hard engineering problem.
That’s what we’re working on with Auto in Copilot.
Today, more than 90% of Copilot queries use Auto to dynamically route work across models and optimize for quality, speed, and cost. In this video, I share how it works and chooses the right model for the job...
Mike Tholfsen retweeted
Excited to see McGraw Hill bringing trusted educational content into Microsoft 365 Copilot. This is the kind of AI progress that matters in education: giving educators new ways to build relevant learning experiences while keeping credible content at the center.
We’re collaborating with @MicrosoftEDU to bring McGraw Hill’s trusted education content to Microsoft Copilot—giving educators and students AI-powered support grounded in the materials they already use in the classroom. Read more: bit.ly/4kkr7FJ
Mike Tholfsen retweeted
We're redefining the SDLC for the agentic era.
Lots of GitHub updates this morning at Universe:
• GitHub Copilot Fusion delivers frontier-level quality, 40% faster and at up to 77% lower cost
• Our unified Copilot harness is now in Foundry, a managed service for building long-running agents that reason, use tools, and get work done
• Copilot Projects gives you an orchestration loop to build with multiple agents across repos
And we’re expanding capacity and strengthening GitHub’s architecture to make the home of agentic development more resilient.
POSTED: the Copilot Notebooks and Learning Zone webinar our Microsoft Education Product team led last week. This webinar was recorded on October 21st and is practical, educator-focused webinar exploring Copilot Notebooks, Study Guide, and Microsoft Learning Zone. We show how to bring AI into everyday teaching and learning, from working with classroom materials to supporting independent student learning and active participation in the classroom.
Agenda
✅ Copilot Notebooks: Explore ways to work with your teaching and learning materials.
✅ Study Guide in Copilot Notebooks: Discover approaches to supporting student review and independent learning.
✅ Microsoft Learning Zone: Learn how to turn any teaching idea into an interactive lesson in minutes, then share it with students for self-paced learning or use it to facilitate active participation in the classroom.
YouTube 📺 youtube.com/watch?v=jPVKRvJY…
Join us tomorrow to learn about the latest updates from @MicrosoftEDU! We have two options to cover the global time zones 🌐
Join the Microsoft Education Product team on Wednesday, October 28 at 8am Pacific Time or 4pm Pacific time for a webinar exploring the latest updates in Microsoft Education! Discover new tools and exciting features designed to save educators time, personalize learning, and boost student engagement. We'll share demos, practical tips, and ways to get started with these powerful tools. You'll also have time to ask the team any questions that are top of mind.
Agenda:
✅ Teach module in Copilot
✅ Study & Learn agent
✅ Microsoft Learning Zone
✅ Copilot Notebooks
✅ Teams for EDU
✅ OneNote Class Notebook
✅ Learning Activities
Register here: techcommunity.microsoft.com/…
Mike Tholfsen retweeted
MAI-Image is now the #2 image edit model in the world!
... once again beating Google, Meta, xAI, and GPT-Image-2.5-Flare.
Try it today on MAI Playground. Links below 👇
Microsoft's MAI-Image-2.7-Preview takes #2 on AA-Image-Editing v2.1, close behind OpenAI's GPT Image 2.5 Sunburst (max) and a clear step up from MAI-Image-2.6
MAI-Image-2.7-Preview is Microsoft AI's newest image editing model, succeeding MAI-Image-2.6, released in August.
In our testing, MAI-Image-2.7-Preview scores higher than MAI-Image-2.6 on all 7 editing actions we measure, and ranks #1 on 4 of them: Scene & Style Edit, Text or Symbol Edits, Reasoning-Based Edit, and Enhancement & Restoration. This new model improves on MAI-Image-2.6 with the biggest gains in Composition & Framing (+57 Elo), Text or Symbol Edits (+49) and Scene & Style Edit (+48). We see its best use cases to be in Live-Action Film, Consumer and Frontier edits, where it ranks #1.
MAI-Image-2.7-Preview is available today in MAI Playground for image editing only, with text to image stated to be coming soon.
Congratulations to @MicrosoftAI on the release!
See below for our detailed analysis and example outputs of MAI-Image-2.7-Preview in the Artificial Analysis Image Arena 🧵
Welcome. @loganaiyer!
Excited to start posting and engaging here👋.
I lead the Windows Platform + Developer team at Microsoft, where we spend a lot of time thinking about what it takes to make Windows a great platform to build on.
I’m looking forward to sharing more of what we’re building, how we’re thinking about the engineering behind it, and what we’re learning along the journey. I’m here to listen, too. If you build on Windows, I’d love to hear what’s working, where there’s friction, and what you want us to be thinking about.
A step-by-step tutorial on how to use the new Interactive Slides feature in PowerPoint Copilot, which is one of the best features I’ve ever seen! I’ll show you how to turn a simple prompt into interactive experiences for business, education, and just plain fun. Interactive Slides is now generally available.
youtu.be/9ESy0tNudng?si=NGTn…
This one is super cool in SharePoint. I've been using it quite a bit. Get a ton of visualization value from the docs and knowledge in your organzation.
Create interactive HTML pages in SharePoint with Copilot or upload your own HTML.
Edit, publish, and share alongside modern pages. Rolling out through the Microsoft 365 Frontier program.
See what’s possible → msft.it/6011aaU2J
#SharePoint #Copilot
Check out Cowork for Education 🎓
Education just got its own Copilot Cowork toolkit. 🎓
🧠 10 education-specific skills
✅ 20 ready-to-use tasks
🏫 Built for educators, leaders + researchers
📚 From AI rollouts and accreditation to lesson accessibility + research
📎 techcommunity.microsoft.com/…
Some great Windows updates ⬇️
A great Windows experience starts with strong fundamentals and is ultimately defined by the moments people experience every day.
Our latest Windows 11 updates build on the foundational work we're doing across the product. They include more seamless phone-to-PC integration, a modernized Photos experience, a new Search experience, and new features for gamers. All designed to make everyday moments on your PC simpler and more intuitive.
More on what the team has been working on: blogs.windows.com/windowsexp…