HOWTO: Disable Cortana’s Daily Briefing in Office 365

The Cortana Daily Briefing is a feature that provides helpful reminders of commitments an individual’s made in email or request others have made to the user.

Phrases like:

• “If you’re open to meeting, I’ll find a time slot that works for us this week.”
• “Please resolve these issues by visiting your dashboard.”

…are noticed by Cortana and will remind you to take action.

DISABLING DAILY BRIEFING

If you’re interested in preemptively disabling the upcoming Cortana Daily Briefing arriving in your Office 365 tenant, you’ll need to do so using Powershell commands.

End users can disable the daily briefing themselves via cortana.office.com.
(See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/briefing/be-admin)

Administrators wishing to disable the feature on specific users may do so by running are variety of PowerShell cmdlets.

DETERMINING THE STATUS OF A MAILBOX

The Get-UserBriefingConfig cmdlet is available to check the daily briefing status of mailboxes:

Get-UserBriefingConfig -Identity [email protected]

DISABLING CORTANA DAILY BRIEFING FOR ONE USER

The PowerShell Set-UserBriefingConfig cmdlet, part of the new Exchange Online management module is the Admin’s best friend. Set-UserBriefingConfig enables/disables the feature for a mailbox.

To disable the daily briefing for a specific user, run a command like:

Set-UserBriefingConfig -Identity [email protected] -Enabled $False

DISABLING CORTANA DAILY BRIEFING FOR ALL USERS IN A TENANT

If you need to disable the daily briefing for all users you can process all mailboxes with cmdlets like Get-ExoMailbox. The following code finds all user mailboxes and disables them for the daily briefing, the rough equivalent of disabling the feature for an entire tenant:

$Accounts = Get-ExoMailbox -ResultSize Unlimited -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox

ForEach ($Account in $Accounts) { Set-UserBriefingConfig -Identity $Account.UserPrincipalName -Enabled $False }

DISABLING CORTANA DAILY BRIEFING FOR A LIST OF USERS

If you wish to be more selective, you can:

• Create a .csv file with all users that were processed with their current status.

Identity

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]

• List the user principal name fort each user.
• Set the specified Enabled parameter for each user.

$inFileName=”<path and file name of the input .csv file that contains the users, example: C:adminUsers2Opt-in.csv>” $outFileName=”<path and file name of the output .csv file that records the results, example: C:adminUsers2Opt-in-Done.csv>” $briefingEmailMode = $true

$users=Import-Csv $inFileName

ForEach ($user in $users) {

$user.identity
$upn=$user.identity
Set-UserBriefingConfig –Identity $upn -Enabled $briefingEmailMode
Get-UserBriefingConfig –Identity $upn | Export-Csv $outFileName -Append
}

More available at:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/briefing/be-admin