Microsoft 365 Copilot

AI assistance built into the Office apps for licensed faculty and staff — documented as a vendor suite: a service card plus a tenant note, with vendor model cards underneath.

Fictional example. The configuration shown is invented to illustrate the framework, not Microsoft's actual product behavior.

See them as documents. The Service Card and the internal Tenant Note are also available as formatted, printable documents — use the View as document links below.

Service card

Layer 4 · Service Institution-wide View as document 
Document Title:    Microsoft 365 Copilot — Service Card
Document Type:     Service Card
Primary Audience:  Licensed faculty and staff
Visibility:        Institution-wide
Owner:            Productivity Services
Approver:         AI Governance Committee
Version:          1.4
Review Date:      2026-04-22

What it is

Copilot adds AI assistance inside Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Teams. It works over your own files and messages within the MSU Microsoft 365 tenant, under the university's data-protection terms.

Audience
Licensed faculty & staff
Access
Assigned license + SSO
Data allowed
Public & Internal
Cost
Department-funded license
Approved uses
Drafting and summarizing documents and email, building spreadsheets and slides, and recapping Teams meetings you participate in.
Not approved
Processing Confidential or regulated records, or using Copilot output as the sole basis for decisions about students or employees.
Data guidance
Copilot can reach content you already have access to. Keep your file permissions tidy, and don't introduce Confidential data into documents you process with it.
Related artifacts
MSU tenant note · Model references · Acceptable Use · Data Classification

Tenant note

Layer 5 · System (light) Restricted Internal View as document

Because Copilot is a vendor suite rather than an institution-built deployment, it gets a lightweight tenant note instead of a full system card — recording how it's configured in the MSU environment.

Tenant scope
Enabled for licensed users only; assignment managed by Productivity Services.
Identity & access
University SSO with conditional-access policies; honors existing file and mailbox permissions.
Data handling
Processed under the university's enterprise data-protection terms; not used to train foundation models.
Boundary
Approved up to Internal. Departments handling Confidential records must complete an additional review before enabling Copilot in those workflows.

Model references

Layer 6 · Model Public (vendor)

Copilot runs on the vendor's hosted models. Because the vendor publishes its own model documentation, Meridian links to it rather than maintaining an internal summary.

  • Vendor foundation model — general reasoning and drafting
  • Vendor embedding model — grounding answers in your documents
  • Vendor model cards are public and linked from the catalog entry

Why no internal model summary: for vendor suites, the vendor's public model cards are sufficient. Meridian only writes internal summaries when it makes its own model-selection or deployment decisions — as with Meridian GPT and the Research Cluster.