Finally got an answer here after a month of waiting:
"Engineering has responded today on this case and confirmed that users without Exchange Online Mailboxes are currently having this issue/behavior with Copilot. They are working on fixing this but there is currently no available time frame on when that will be completed"
Microsoft 365 Copilot seems to require Exchange Online mailboxes, despite this not being listed as a requirement
As the title says, Microsoft 365 Copilot is broken when your mailbox is hosted on-premises.
Reviewing https://video2.skills-academy.com/en-us/microsoft-365-copilot/microsoft-365-copilot-requirements, there is nothing that says hosting your mailbox on Exchange Online is required. However, the "chat" interface at https://www.microsoft365.com/chat is useless without it (will not work at all). Other functionality like within word documents does work, so I know the licensing is good.
Moving a user to Exchange Online solves it immediately. See screenshots of errors and browser errors pointing to an outlook.office.com URL and authentication failing.
The only breadcrumb of evidence i can find is here, where it says "For content search, because user prompts to Copilot and responses from Copilot are stored in a user's mailbox, they can be searched and retrieved when the user's mailbox is selected as the source for a search query."
So it seems the documentation is missing this key piece of info for functionality here. I have a support case open, but figured I'd help others who may hit this. This is a long-running theme unfortunately, that random M365 services simply do not work in a hybrid email setup where some users have mailboxes on-premises, and MS product teams just assume everyone has Exchange Online, building core dependencies into their products without documenting it.
Thanks in advance.
4 answers
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m49808 10 Reputation points
2024-03-01T16:11:05.4433333+00:00 -
Ahmad Khan 0 Reputation points
2024-02-15T15:40:52.1966667+00:00 Please update us when you hear from Microsoft. Thanks for posting this.
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m49808 10 Reputation points
2024-03-26T17:50:05.4966667+00:00 This appears fixed now, with a new pop-up authentication. My test user without an exchange online mailbox can now use this.
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Cristian Sava 21 Reputation points
2024-03-28T09:33:03.0566667+00:00 Hello m49808. Do you have any support ticket number that you could share so when I open mine I could point to yours? Thank you