Busy February for Microsoft collaborative apps and platforms engineering team - taking advantage of that extra day. And Happy birthday to all Leaplings out there!
So, let’s leap into everything that landed this past month: Copilot Dashboard for Viva Insights, SharePoint Premium; Translation (GA), Sample: Custom copilot in SharePoint with SSO, Signaling Viva Topics retirement (Feb 2025), Custom document library templates, Updated Lists apps: Sites/Teams/PWA, Copilot in Teams, Microsoft Clipchamp: Automatic captions, Teams: Hide General Channels, Initial Microsoft 365 apps on Apple visionOS, and more. To the roadmap!
Details and screenshots below, including our audible companion: The Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop: February 2024 podcast episode – all to help answer, "What's rolling out now for SharePoint and related technologies into Microsoft 365?"
All features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Microsoft 365 as of February 2024 (possibly early March 2024).
Inform and engage with dynamic employee experiences
Build your intelligent intranet on SharePoint in Microsoft 365 and get the benefits of investing in business outcomes – reducing IT and development costs, increasing business speed and agility, and up-leveling the dynamic, personalized, and welcoming nature of your intranet.
Microsoft Copilot Dashboard for Viva Insights
This dashboard helps organizations maximize the value of Copilot for Microsoft 365. It provides actionable insights to get ready to deploy AI, drive adoption based on how AI is transforming workplace behavior and measure the impact of Copilot now and over time, across three metrics: Readiness, adoption, and impact.
The dashboard access controls are managed by Global admins. The measured population consists of the people in your company—called measured employees—whose Microsoft 365 collaboration activity you want to analyze. Some organizations choose to analyze the entire population, while others use population subsets for specific analysis scenarios. If you want to get insights that reflect all Copilot users in the company, you will need to assign everyone a Viva Insights license.
- Blog + Connect to the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard (Preview) | Microsoft Learn
SharePoint Premium: Translation – now generally available (GA)
With business transactions and collaboration expanding, we’re excited to announce that we now offer a powerful way to translate files instantly and at scale. This milestone means translation is available for all commercial regions, globally. You can easily create a translated copy of a selected file (or a set of files) in a SharePoint document library among dozens of languages – all while preserving as much of the original format and structure of the file(s) as possible.
You can translate files manually on demand or automatically at scale by creating a translation rule. It's a great reason to become a SharePoint Premium customer, and one of many capabilities of advanced content management on top of the core of SharePoint in Microsoft 365.
Deploy a custom copilot to SharePoint, with a seamless single sign-on experience
We are excited to share the recent addition to the Copilot Studio Samples repository – a code sample that demonstrates how to publish a custom copilot to a SharePoint site, with - as the name implies - a seamless single sign-on experience.
Copilots created with Copilot Studio can be easily published to Microsoft Teams and other channels. However, many use cases would benefit from copilots deployed directly on SharePoint sites, allowing a conversational experience grounded in the sites’ pages and documents. For example, think about a SharePoint site consolidating HR related information, with an embedded copilot answering employee questions and referencing the relevant HR policies.
The component included in the sample allows copilots created with Microsoft Copilot Studio to be wrapped and published to SharePoint sites as a floating widget. The component also supports SSO, so users would not have to provide their credentials or use the validation code required by the standard copilot canvas.
Seamless Copilot'ing on SharePoint. Done.
Notice | Viva Topics retirement – February 22, 2025
Viva Topics will be retired on February 22, 2025 and Microsoft won't invest in new feature development for Viva Topics going forward from February 22, 2024. With the generational shift in AI technology underway, we're now focusing our strategy and efforts on building new AI-powered knowledge management experiences in Microsoft Copilot and other parts of Microsoft 365.
Topics continue to live on as SharePoint pages and sites like any other – nothing gets deleted; the notion of AI automation on those pages is what will end when this change takes hold.
- Learn more + new Knowledge Management page on the Microsoft 365 adoption center.
Teamwork updates across SharePoint team sites, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams
Microsoft 365 is designed to be a universal toolkit for teamwork – to give you the right tools for the right task, along with common services to help you seamlessly work across applications. SharePoint is the intelligent content service that powers teamwork – to better collaborate on proposals, projects, and campaigns throughout your organization – with integration across Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Yammer, Stream, Planner and much more.
Create custom SharePoint document library templates
This leverages the existing PowerShell-based tooling and methods for creating custom list templates. As a Global Administrator or SharePoint Administrator you can establish what your organization needs, specific to your business.
These templates will be visible inside the new Document library creation experience, in these two locations: 1) SharePoint Home > New > Document library, or 2) SharePoint Site > Site contents > New > Document library.
This has been an often-requested feature - harkening back to the "we used to be able to x and y on-premises"… well, count down the list of limitations to one less thing: Custom library templates are now doable in the cloud.
- Learn more:
Updated Lists in Team Sites, Lists progressive web app (PWA), and in Microsoft Teams
This first improves the overall performance for all Lists creation and consumption entry points. It also introduces new features, including the ability to add ratings to any list, drag and/or paste images directly into a list, see who is collaborating with you in real-time, switch views by clicking tabs, and more.
You will see these updates when browsing lists in SharePoint sites, the Lists progressive web app (PWA), and Lists in Teams. Note: All Lists in SharePoint sites will maintain the SharePoint site's chrome, theming, and navigation; effectively keeping you in SharePoint.
- Learn more.
- Roadmap ID: 124867
Related technology
Microsoft Copilot in Microsoft Teams
Starting in February, Copilot for Microsoft 365 users began to see a new Copilot experience in Microsoft Teams. This is an improved version of the Copilot app in Teams that you may have used before (formerly known as Microsoft 365 Chat or M365 Chat).
This new Copilot experience in Teams offers the same functionality and content access as the current app, and brings additional benefits, including: 1) Better prompts, including details specific to you like the people you work with, your meetings, and your files, 2) Ability to see your Copilot chat history, and 3) Leverage a library of prompts via Copilot Lab (try this one for sure - it severely, prompt'ly cuts down the learning curve of using Copilot).
Microsoft Clipchamp now has automatic captions
All things improve with broader AI innovation; once it's in one place, it's much easier and more pervasive across apps. Thus, Microsoft Clipchamp, like Stream preceding it, now offers automatic captioning to make your organization's videos more accessible.
All users can use the new auto-captions for all videos, at no additional cost. The Caption menu is an icon in the top right corner of the Clipchamp editor. Captions will be automatically generated using AI and added to the video as text.
The transcript creates an index of timestamps to help you navigate and edit their videos. You can choose to edit the captions, hide the captions, or download the caption as an SRT file (the standard subtitle file recognized by video players). And you control how the captions appear in the video with settings such as font size, styles, and placement in the video.
- Roadmap ID 381128.
- Learn more.
Microsoft Teams: Hide General Channels
Sometimes the General channel is all you use. And other times, you have a ton of channels for very specific reasons. Now you will be able to hide general channels as well - when they aren't the primary channel you use.
Note, if general is the last channel in the team, then the team will get hidden as well. If the general channel is hidden by the user, the channel will no longer show in their teams and channels list. They will still be able to show the channel by going to the hidden channels in the teams and channels list or manage teams > channels tab > and select "show for me".
The channel is always there, general'ly speaking, should you wish to see it, or not.
- Roadmap ID: 324840
Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft Teams are now on Apple visionOS
To give you a sense, Teams on Apple Vision Pro is a spatial computing app for collaborating with your colleagues, family, and friends. You can call, join meetings, chat, and share files from your Apple Vision Pro device while staying immersed in your surroundings.
The initial release of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams on Apple visionOS supports both Enterprise and Consumer accounts.
To see it in action, here are a few posts from Jeff Teper and Omar Shahine, plus a great Teams meetings + Vision Pro tutorial by MVP, John Moore.
March 2024 teasers
Psst, still here? Still scrolling the page looking for more roadmap goodness? If so, here is a few teasers of what’s to come to production next month…
- Teaser #1: Microsoft Lists: New forms experience [Roadmap ID: 124865]
- Teaser #2: Answers in Viva content in Microsoft Search [Roadmap ID: 182258]
… shhh, tell everyone.
Helpful, ongoing change management resources
- "Stay on top of Office 365 changes"
- "Message center in Office 365"
- Install the Office 365 admin app; view Message Center posts and stay current with push notifications.
- Microsoft 365 public roadmap + pre-filtered URL for SharePoint, OneDrive, Yammer and Stream roadmap items.
- SharePoint Facebook | Twitter | SharePoint Community Blog | Feedback
- Follow me to catch news and interesting SharePoint things: @mkashman; warning, occasional bad puns may fly in a tweet or two here and there.
Thanks for tuning in and/or reading this episode/blog of the Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop – February 2024. We are open to your feedback in comments below to hear how both the Roadmap Pitstop podcast episodes and blogs can be improved over time.
Engage with us. Ask those questions that haunt you. Push us where you want and need to get the best information and insights. We are here to put both our and your best change management foot forward.
Stay safe out there on the road’map ahead. And thanks for listening and reading.
Thanks for your time,
Mark Kashman – senior product manager (SharePoint/Lists) | Microsoft)
