Microsoft SharePoint Blog articles

Beyond Benchmarks: The Lifecycle of Measuring Agentic Quality in AI Content Management

sjauhar — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 15:56:41 GMT

By Sujay Kumar Jauhar, Spriha Chandrayan, Natasha Gaitonde, Zhen Lei, Reed Pankhurst, Anush Sankaran, Amrit Shandilya, Ryen W. White

Organizations put their most important content in OneDrive and SharePoint, trusting us to deliver AI experiences they can depend on. That trust runs across everything Copilot does with their content — surfacing the right information through retrieval, and, increasingly, driving agentic workflows that reason over documents and take action on their behalf. Living up to that trust is what we care about most, and it's why we put the quality of these experiences — and consequently the ways we measure that quality — at the center of how we build.

It turns out that this is a non-trivial problem, because quality in AI is rarely binary. An agent can call exactly the right tools and still produce an answer that's subtly, confidently wrong. A search result can be technically relevant and still miss what the user was really after. An AI-generated page can be well-structured and fluent and still omit the one detail that mattered. Quality here is continuous, context-dependent, and multidimensional — and when these experiences are serving hundreds of millions of enterprise users, measuring it demands scientific rigor across the full lifecycle of building AI products.

Across OneDrive and SharePoint — the knowledge platform for Copilot and Agents — we’ve spent the past year building a rigorous practice around evaluation: determining what to measure, developing the right methods to measure it, and learning how to act on those measurements to improve our systems and experiences.

In software engineering, tests verify correctness and telemetry monitors health. The boundaries are well-defined: a function returns the right value or it doesn’t; a service meets its service level objective or it doesn’t. AI evaluation requires an analogous discipline, but the problem is structurally harder — there is rarely a single correct answer, and quality depends on factors that shift with every user, task, and context.

This post describes the evaluation practice we are building across Copilot capabilities in OneDrive and SharePoint. It follows the arc of what we think of as the evaluation lifecycle — from rapid inner-loop validation, through rigorous offline measurement, to customer-grounded evaluation that evolves with real feedback, and ultimately to understanding whether our metrics predict what users actually experience. Each stage addresses a question the previous ones cannot, but they don’t run in a straight line. What we learn downstream can reshape the data and methodology of upstream measurements. That’s what makes this a lifecycle — and together they form a strategy for building AI systems that aim to earn user trust at enterprise scale.

The stages of the evaluation lifecycle

We're on a journey — learning and evolving as we build this practice. Some of the things we're actively working on, omitted from this blog post for the sake of brevity, are: holding ourselves to public, industry-standard benchmarks such as GAIA and GDPval, with more in the pipeline; and investing in the foundations that keep evaluation trustworthy, by generating realistic synthetic evaluation data so our test sets keep pace with new models, and monitoring the health of our benchmarks for saturation.

The inner loop: "Did I break anything?"

The first requirement of any AI development workflow is a fast feedback signal. Teams are experimenting constantly on internal builds — adjusting prompts, swapping model versions, rearchitecting retrieval pipelines — and they need to know within minutes whether a change helped or hurt.

That is the role of our unit-level evaluations: a rapid inner loop for feature crews. A developer modifies a system prompt or adjusts the grounding context, runs it against a targeted set of test cases, and gets immediate feedback on whether key behaviors are preserved. These checks are fast, focused, and designed to catch regressions before they compound.

The distinction from traditional unit testing is worth noting. In software, a test asserts an exact expected output. In AI, you are validating behavioral properties — coherence, completeness, tool selection, factual consistency — against approximate expectations. The pass/fail boundary is softer, but the engineering purpose is the same: give teams confidence to iterate without fear of silent degradation.

One of the crews building Copilot's agentic features over SharePoint Lists knows this loop well. They keep a large set of prompts that engineers run whenever they change something — a tweak to a tool's description, a different setting passed to the model, a reworded prompt.

Many of those questions run over the same synthetic data: lists of bakery orders, each row carrying details like the baker, the delivery agent, the profit on the order, and its status. The same lists come in a range of sizes, from a few thousand rows up to a million. The largest are used to push the system's limits but the inner loop lives at the lower end. There, most questions are ones the system has gotten right for a long time, so when a change quietly breaks one of them, it shows up right away. An engineer can try an idea, run the set quickly, and whether they've introduced a regression.

An example of what the schema of our synthetic dataset looks like

Fast iteration checks are essential, but they only tell you whether something regressed. They cannot tell you how good the system actually is.

Offline evaluation: "How good is this, really?"

This is the domain of our offline evaluation practice. We maintain curated, scenario-focused benchmarks evaluated in a controlled harness that reflect the tasks and content types our enterprise users encounter, alongside public benchmarks that situate our systems in the broader AI landscape. The goal is to bring each AI scenario to a state of decision-readiness: explicit success criteria, representative evaluation datasets, metrics we attempt to validate against real outcomes, and systematic coverage of known failure modes.

We try to do this rigorously by running evals against the real product. Each test case is a plan — a short script of things a user might ask for — paired with criteria (or assertions) describing what a good outcome looks like, sorted by how much each one matters: Critical, Expected, or Aspirational. An LLM plays the user: it drives the live product through the browser, sends the opening request, and then reacts the way a person would, confirming an action card here or answering a clarifying question there, so the system is exercised end to end.

When the conversation finishes, the harness gathers the evidence of what actually happened — the responses in the chat, the state of the page, and screenshots where the judgment is visual. That evidence goes to a second model acting as judge — the increasingly standard "LLM-as-a-judge" approach — which scores the run against the original assertions. And because a model grading a model is only as trustworthy as its agreement with people, those scores are calibrated against human raters.

Using a high-priority, curated slice of these evals, the team ran big proposed changes side by side to see which ones came out ahead. One of those comparisons looked at how the orchestrator is told about the tools it can use. At one extreme, you hand the model the full description of every tool up front; at the other, you give it only short, tweet-length summaries and let it pull a tool's full description and parameters only when it decides it needs them.

Configuration	Quality %	Latency vs. default	Cost vs. default
Baseline	83.0	1.00x	1.00x
Default tool discovery	90.3	1.11x	0.62x
Rearchitected tool discovery	85.6	0.97x	0.73x
Semantic tool search	92.8	0.95x	0.74x
Hybrid	93.5	0.82x	0.62x

Table 1: A comparison of the different approaches for tool selection we experimented with. Based on internal evaluation results using our internal test environment, and test configurations of the product. Quality was measured through LLM judgement of AI responses based on a set of criteria, latency was measured by the harness running the evaluations, and cost is based on publicly disclosed price heuristics for token usage for the LLM API being used for orchestration. Results were calculated from 500 scenario tests based on synthetic data.

The table above summarizes our results from an internal offline evaluation on a curated slice. In this evaluation, we found that the baseline which loads everything up front was, predictably, the most expensive. The out-of-the-box tool-discovery method cut token usage sharply — but was a bit slower. Pushing further, a rearchitecting of the orchestrator for tool discovery did speed things up, but at the cost of quality. Meanwhile semantic tool search improved on both quality and latency relative to the baseline but wasn’t as cost-efficient as the default tool discovery method. Overall, in this evaluation, a strong balance of quality, token usage, and latency came from a hybrid — the standard tool-learning architecture with a few targeted semantic-search changes, which still resulted in a more than 35% reduction in token usage when compared with full tool descriptions.

Offline benchmarks, however carefully constructed, have an inherent limitation. They represent a fixed snapshot — based often on what product teams believe will be important use cases, particularly for features that have not yet shipped to real customers. As the product evolves and real usage patterns emerge, the gap between what our benchmarks measure and what actually matters can widen.

The evals flywheel: "Are we measuring what users care about?"

This is the motivation behind what we call the Evals Flywheel: a closed-loop system that translates real user dissatisfaction directly into better evaluations and, ultimately, better systems. In software engineering, there is a well-established discipline of turning production bugs into tests. In the AI analog, user feedback provided with appropriate consent helps produce new evaluation data, systematic failure diagnoses, and targeted improvements.

Take for instance a user that consents to share feedback with us (via a thumbs down). At first glance, this seems like a single interaction. But to us, it's an opportunity to learn. We investigate what happened, identify the underlying reason for the user dissatisfaction, and ask a critical question: was this an isolated mistake, or does it reveal a broader weakness in how the system understands documents like this one?

Here's a representative example. A user uploaded a 120-page quarterly financial report packed with dense tables, nested headers, footnotes, and appendices. They asked a straightforward question: "What was our actual spending in Q3?" The answer seemed like it should be easy — the relevant numbers were all in the document. The assistant responded confidently with a figure from one of the summary tables; but it cited the budgeted amount, not the actual spend.

The mistake stemmed from the document's complexity. The table spanned multiple pages, with a top-level "Q3" header extending across several sub-columns such as Budget, Actual, Forecast, and Variance. On its own, that's one mistake in one document. However, it pointed at something more general: whenever a table uses a heading that spans multiple columns, or stacks two rows of headers, or tucks a small table inside a larger one, then the link between a header label and its value turns fragile. Understanding the text is often not enough — the assistant must also accurately preserve and reason over intricate document structure, table relationships, and context that can span dozens of pages.

An evaluation document built in an automated manner that deliberately reproduces the exact structure of the table that was the root cause for the customer dissatisfaction.

Hence, instead of patching that single file, we built a family of evaluation documents that deliberately stress that exact structure. Each eval document pairs a question with the single correct answer and a short list of "tempting but wrong" answers which are the nearby values a confused reader would most likely grab. That last part is the key: an eval that only checks for the right answer can be passed by luck, but an eval that includes likely distractors tells you whether the system is genuinely reasoning or just guessing.

This example reflects a repeatable method. The first step is resisting the urge to treat a user dissatisfaction as an isolated bug. Instead, we ask why it happened and not "what's the right answer for this question." That root-cause identification is what turns the user feedback into a useful signal. The payoff is a flywheel between real-world experience and offline evaluation. The improvement ships back into the product, where future interactions validate it — and surface the next gap. Each loop widens our coverage and, just as importantly, helps us prioritize the improvements that matter most to the people using the product.

But it raises a deeper question: when our benchmarks are representative of user concerns, do improvements actually translate into better experiences in production?

Real-world insights: "Does this actually matter to users?"

It is possible to improve a benchmark score and have it mean nothing in practice. A model that scores five points higher on an offline evaluation may produce no detectable difference in user satisfaction or task success. Conversely, a change that barely moves the needle offline might transform the user experience in unexpected ways.

This gap between offline measurement and real-world impact is the focus of our online evaluation work. Through production telemetry, we study user-AI interaction patterns at scale. The objective is not simply to monitor system health, but to develop an empirical understanding of how users experience our AI features in context.

In traditional software, production telemetry provides crisp, well-defined signals: uptime, latency percentiles, error rates. In AI, the equivalent signals — satisfaction, intent alignment, task success — are inherently noisier and harder to define. The central challenge here is alignment: do our offline metrics predict real user value? Answering that depends first on being able to measure value reliably in production at all.

Consider a recent experiment on one of our top-of-funnel entry points — the most common way users first reach the assistant. The team suspected that engagement was low (around 1%) simply because users weren't noticing the entry point. So they ran a user-level A/B test across a sample of 900,000 Copilot-licensed users over 21 days, swapping the entry point's icon for a more contextually relevant one. The effect was a statistically significant 42% lift in click-through, alongside a 1.7% increase in active users.

That result is encouraging, but it also illustrates a subtle nuance. We moved an engagement metric sharply without touching quality at all — this tells us that we had an education gap, but didn’t inform our understanding of the AI system’s performance.

To get closer to that distinction, we looked at kept rate: the share of AI responses where the user does something that signals the answer was worth keeping — copying the result, clicking through to a citation or a suggested follow-up, or providing a thumbs up. And because it's captured passively, from actions users take anyway, it scales to every response rather than the small fraction where someone leaves explicit feedback.

Even an indirect, partial signal like kept rate lets us close the offline-online loop. Once we have a read on what users valued, we can start to ask how well it correlates with our offline benchmarks. When offline gains track with a rise in kept rate, for example, it's early evidence the benchmark is steering us toward something real; when they are uncorrelated, it's a warning that we may be hill-climbing in a wrong direction.

Beyond quality

Quality matters — but in production systems, it is entangled with cost and latency in ways that cannot be evaluated in isolation. A high-quality response that is unacceptably slow degrades the user experience regardless of its correctness. Or a frontier model that is marginally better than a smaller alternative may not justify the cost differential.

This is the next frontier of our evaluation work: learning to reason about quality, cost, and latency as a tradeoff surface rather than independent dimensions. The goal is to build the instrumentation and frameworks that make these tradeoffs visible and deliberate, so that teams can make principled decisions about how they ship.

To make this concrete, consider some early findings from our internal evaluations. We took a range of system configurations — models, reasoning levels, tool access — and, for a set of representative tasks — QA over lists, the AppWorld public benchmark, and a collection of complex multi-step plans that stress-test the Copilot in SharePoint agent — plotted each one by the quality it achieved against what it cost to run. The result is a Pareto frontier: the curve of the best quality reachable at each price, with everything below it dominated by something strictly better.

The Pareto frontier of cost vs. quality estimated across three different benchmark datasets from an internal evaluation run.

Two things stand out. First, different tasks live in different performance regions. Simple, factual lookups like those in ListsQA cost fractions of a cent; harder, more agentic tasks like those in AppWorld and Copilot in SharePoint run to cents or dollars; there is no single answer to what "good" costs. Second, the shape of each curve tells you where spending more is actually worth it. Where the frontier rises sharply, additional cost buys real quality; where it flattens, you have hit diminishing returns, paying more for gains a user may not notice.

In short, the decision stops being "is the quality good enough to ship?" and becomes "which point on this curve is right for this scenario?" given budget and latency constraints — a question a feature crew can answer, with the tradeoffs in front of them.

What we've learned so far

We are still early in this work. Models are improving rapidly, user expectations are evolving, and the definition of quality continues to shift. But several principles have become clear to us.

No single evaluation approach is sufficient. Inner-loop checks catch regressions but cannot establish absolute quality. Offline benchmarks provide rigor but go stale. Customer feedback grounds evaluation in real needs but covers only the cases where dissatisfaction is expressed. Online metrics reveal real behavioral patterns but cannot always explain the mechanisms behind them. A credible evaluation practice requires all of these, operating in concert and informing each other.

Evaluation is not a gate you pass before shipping — it is a continuous discipline that evolves with the product. The teams that build the best AI experiences are not necessarily those with the highest benchmark scores, but those with the clearest understanding of where their systems fall short and the most systematic approach to closing those gaps.

And measuring what matters is itself a scientific problem, one that demands the same rigor we apply to the systems being measured. Developing evaluation methods that are reliable, predictive of real user value, and robust to the rapid evolution of AI capabilities is core to our mission across OneDrive and SharePoint. It is how we work to earn the trust of the enterprise users who depend on these experiences, and we are committed to advancing this work and sharing what we learn.

What’s New in Copilot in SharePoint: July 2026

julieseto — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 16:05:23 GMT

Copilot in SharePoint helps you do more with your content — ask questions, run workflows, and create sites, pages, interactive reports, and Office files using natural language. June was a big month: starting June 16 Copilot in SharePoint began rolling out as on by default for everyone with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, and we shipped a wave of new capabilities for creating content, automating work, and getting trustworthy answers. Here’s everything that’s new.

🛠️ Create content with natural language

Create Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files

What’s new: Ask Copilot to create a Word document, Excel workbook, or PowerPoint deck directly from your content in SharePoint — no blank-page start required.

Why it matters: Turn the knowledge already living in your sites into finished, shareable deliverables in minutes, without copy-pasting across apps.

Sample use case: A program manager turns a project site’s notes into a first-draft status deck before a leadership review.

Try this prompt “Create a press release as a Word doc based on the sales performance dashboard [doc link]. Summarize key results, highlight top growth areas, call out trends, and frame it for an internal leadership audience.”

If the player doesn’t load, open the video in a new window: Open video

Generate interactive HTML reports

What’s new: Copilot can build an interactive HTML report from content stored in SharePoint.

Why it matters: Get a polished, shareable, interactive view of your information — great for readouts and dashboards — without manual formatting.

Sample use case: A team lead generates an interactive summary of a document library to share progress with stakeholders.

Try this prompt “Create an interactive dashboard based on this quarter’s sales performance data [folder link]. Include total revenue, quota attainment, top and bottom performing regions, and trend over time. Add filters for region and product, and make it suitable for a leadership review.”

If the player doesn’t load, open the video in a new window: Open video

📁 Work with files through chat

Organize files and folders

What’s new: Manage your library right from chat — Copilot can help you organize files and folders conversationally.

Why it matters: Tidy up and restructure content without clicking through menus — just describe what you want.

Sample use case: Cleaning up a messy project library at the end of a sprint.

Try this prompt “Based on the contents of this folder, please suggest a folder structure to better organize my files. Show me a mapping structure, and once I approve, apply it.”

If the player doesn’t load, open the video in a new window: Open video

Share a file

What’s new: Ask Copilot to share a specific file with a specific person — directly in the flow of chat.

Why it matters: Skip the hunt-and-click sharing dialog; share what you’re looking at, right when you need to.

⚙️ Automate your team’s work

Approvals

What’s new: Natural language configuration for simple request tracking and approvals on your site.

Why it matters: It's now easy to use built-in approval tracking for managing your sign-offs, requests, and reviews all within SharePoint list or library, no custom approval flows required.

Sample use case: A content manager sets up a quick approval step for documents before they’re published.

Try this prompt “Help me track approval requests for this library and create a view grouped by status. Highlight overdue or stalled items and suggest next steps.”

If the player doesn’t load, open the video in a new window: Open video

Rules

What’s new: Configure simple email notifications when content or metadata changes.

Why it matters: Stay on top of what matters — get notified automatically instead of manually checking for updates.

Try this prompt “Send an email reminder to the file owner, 5 days before the review by date.”

Quick Steps

What’s new: Add your favorite actions right into the grid for one-click reuse.

Why it matters: Put the actions you repeat most within instant reach, reducing routine clicks.

Try this prompt “Add a button to update the review by date to today and set the status as under review.”

🧩 Build and use Skills

Built-in (out-of-box) Skills for the full Skill lifecycle

What’s new: Copilot now uses built-in skills to help you create your own skills, set up automation, and initialize a site (including a SharePoint.md starter).

Why it matters: It's now easier to turn your team’s repeatable processes into reusable AI skills — without starting from scratch — so work stays consistent and scalable.

Try this prompt “Follow approved layouts and branding — then save this as a skill so my team can reuse it.”

If the player doesn’t load, open the video in a new window: Open video

Discover skills with /Skills

What’s new: Anyone on a site can type /Skills to see the list of skills available in that context.

Why it matters: /Skills makes your team’s custom skills more discoverable, so people actually use the shortcuts you’ve built.

💬 A clearer, more trustworthy chat experience

This month brings a set of refinements that make answers easier to read, verify, and trust:

Better citations — Citations are now compact and clickable, so you can jump straight to the source.

Sensitivity labels in chat — Copilot now surfaces sensitivity labels on content to help prevent oversharing and meet privacy requirements.

Clickable links — All links in chat are now properly formatted and clickable.

Reasoning transparency — For reasoning models, Copilot can now show its chain-of-thought so you can follow how it reached an answer.

Try this prompt “Based on the documents in this library, what are the key deliverables for the Q3 product launch and who is responsible for each?”

⚡ Faster ways in — the Copilot button

1-click Q&A — A prompt box right in the Copilot button lets you fire off a question faster, without opening the full pane.
Helpful nudges — Contextual coach messages introduce people to Copilot and point them to the button, so more of your team discovers what it can do.
--about — A handy power-user command that tells you which model and version you’re using.

🔐 For admins & site owners

One model provider — Copilot in SharePoint now runs on the latest reasoning OpenAI model for everyone, without a fallback model. This means high quality answers and easier management.
Show/Hide the Copilot button per site — Site owners get a setting to disable the Copilot button for site visitors on a per-site basis — useful for governance on sensitive sites.

Try it today

Copilot in SharePoint is available for users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. For ready-to-use prompts and step-by-step guidance, explore the Copilot in SharePoint adoption hub and the Getting Started prompt library. If Copilot in SharePoint has not yet rollout to your tenant as on by default, your IT Admin can opt in to the preview following the instructions here.

Bring us your business challenge! Work directly with Microsoft Engineering to design and deploy a real Copilot in SharePoint solution for your organization. From knowledge management to custom skills and workflow automation, we'll help selected Microsoft 365 Copilot customers go from idea to production. For free. Nominate your scenario here.

See you next month for the next round of what’s new! 🚀

Streamlining business processes with Microsoft 365 - ShareCloud - SharePoint Partner Spotlight

VesaJuvonen — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:14:28 GMT

SharePoint and Microsoft 365 have evolved into a powerful platform for building business applications that meet organizations where they already work. With SharePoint as the content, collaboration, and process foundation, and Microsoft 365 services such as Teams, Power Platform, and Azure extending the experience, partners can deliver practical solutions that simplify everyday work, improve compliance, and help organizations move faster.

This partner showcase highlights ShareCloud, an Estonian software company that has been delivering productized and tailor-made solutions on top of Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Power Platform, and Azure services since 2016. ShareCloud focuses on making business processes smarter, faster, and more efficient for organizations across the Baltics and Nordics, serving both SMEs and large enterprises.

ShareCloud helps organizations turn Microsoft 365 into practical business solutions across communication, administration, HR, and adoption. Their work spans intranets, employee portals, instructions management, document collaboration, e-signing in SharePoint, asset management, absence management, onboarding, training, and consulting that aligns SharePoint, Power Automate, Teams, and Microsoft 365 with business goals.

In this partner showcase, ShareCloud introduced two productized SharePoint-based solutions that show how organizations can use Microsoft 365 as a practical business application platform:

Secure e-Signing in SharePoint – a solution for managing e-signing flows directly from SharePoint, including internal and external signers, while maintaining security, compliance, and QES-level signature integrity. The solution supports cross-border e-signing across 100+ countries and helps make signature collection easier, faster, and more efficient.
Instructions and Procedures Management in SharePoint – a solution that streamlines the creation, approval, distribution, versioning, and acknowledgment of employee instructions and procedures. Automated reminders and clear visibility into acknowledgments help improve HR, quality, and compliance-related processes.

In this SharePoint Partner Showcase, Vesa Juvonen sat down with Anders Abel to discuss ShareCloud’s offerings and how their solutions streamline business operations directly where employees already work.

Learn more about ShareCloud:

Microsoft 365 and SharePoint provide powerful out-of-the-box capabilities that can be extended and tailored to your user experience goals using no-code, low-code, or pro-code approaches. This flexibility enables customers to configure and build unique and powerful experiences at Microsoft 365 for corporate communications, employee experiences, and business processes.

Microsoft SharePoint
SharePoint 25th anniversary announcements - new AI features and more
SharePoint help & learning
Intelligent intranet overview
SharePoint Framework provides a secure, modern way to build custom and AI-enhanced experiences in SharePoint and Microsoft 365.
SharePoint Embedded enables building solutions outside of Microsoft 365 with a custom user interface, but continues storing files in SharePoint.
Microsoft Community Learning YouTube channel for videos and guidance

Do you have SharePoint-based solutions that end users can benefit from and would like to showcase to the community? Let us highlight your solution(s). We welcome all kinds of solutions which highlight the art of possible with SharePoint. Please fill in the following form to get us connected with you and we will get back to you on planning the right model together - https://aka.ms/sharepoint/partner/showcase.

The Microsoft 365 ecosystem continues to thrive through partners who innovate, contribute, and share with the broader community. Amazing ecosystem building AI and Copilot powered solutions with SharePoint and Microsoft 365 👏

SharePoint Showcase: How Microsoft uses Copilot in SharePoint, and how you can get started

John_Mighell — Thu, 09 Jul 2026 17:56:32 GMT

For this month's SharePoint showcase, we're zooming in on AI skills in SharePoint and real Microsoft use cases for Copilot in SharePoint. We're also introducing a new "Product Drops" standing section to recap all the new GA functionality across the platform each month.

As always, would love to hear from you in the comments. Let's get into it!

Start with the playbook: building AI skills that actually work

Before the new capabilities below, start with the thinking behind them. In a new companion post, our team distills what we've learned working with customers building real skills in Copilot in SharePoint — why some AI workflows take off and others stall after the demo. Three lessons stand out:

Pick the right workflow. Most efforts succeed or fail here. A quick filter: is it worth building, is it content-centric, and is there a repeatable path to a known-good outcome? Proposal drafting, compliance checks, and vendor evaluation pass; one-off creative work doesn't.
Build it the way work actually happens. Skills beat ad-hoc prompts the moment judgment needs to be consistent. Design around the handoff to the next person, set the human checkpoint first, and let site memory carry lessons forward.
Make it stick. Skills survive when skipping them costs more than using them. Target high value and high volume workflows at starter scenarios.

→ Read the full post: Lessons from Building AI Skills in the Real World

How Microsoft uses Copilot in SharePoint, and how you can get started

Every month in the SharePoint Showcase we walk through new capabilities across SharePoint. This month we want to show you something different: how we use it.

As a complex company with over 200,000 employees, Microsoft has a massive data estate. We deeply understand the need for complex data estate management; the actions we take ourselves translate into the features we build.

Copilot in SharePoint delivers an agentic experience that helps teams create, organize, and act on content with AI. We introduced these capabilities at Microsoft Ignite 2025, and moved to an expanded public preview this month.

Here are 4 examples of where it’s making a difference for us, the numbers behind it, and exactly how you can get started.

Partner Incentives & Operations An employee-built solution automated the creation of retail partner offer letters for sales incentive campaigns. The automation improved finance and sales operations efficiency — saving roughly 6,000 hours — and improved Microsoft Partner organization interactions by 30%.

Microsoft Advertising AI-generated metadata tags made a sales-collateral site far easier to navigate, boosting content discovery by 75% and cutting the time to surface the right material from about two days to half a day. The result: less time searching, faster document processing and publishing, and more productive sellers.

Legal Frontline Support Auto-categorization of incoming emails into predefined categories streamlined the support process, with a 95% reduction in time spent on data tracking and a 15% reduction in follow-up cases. Power Platform automation supplied scripted replies to employees asking common legal questions.

Nuance Business Operations AI surfaced clauses and terms in contracts to speed reviews, accelerate deal processing, and strengthen data accuracy and legal compliance in customer subscription renewals. It saved two vendor resources annually and cut processing time per renewal cycle by 35%.

In their words

Two of our own teams on what changed in their day-to-day:

We have a team of legal professionals who provide legal counsel and guidance to internal product groups and engineering teams during product lifecycle, development and release planning (we call this team “CELA E+D”). A SharePoint orchestration initiative maintained over 10K contracts and legal documentation in a SharePoint "Data Lake" to enable this team to provide better support to E+D.

“By replacing ad-hoc storage with a structured, AI-ready repository, the team reduces duplicative legal work, improves time to answer for product groups, and increases trust in Copilot and Agent outputs.”

Jaymee Torres, Senior Paralegal, Microsoft CELA E+D (SharePoint orchestration initiative)

Agent Launchpad is an internal user adoption campaign for Agent Extensibility, run by Microsoft Digital (MSD) with a SP site, Viva Engage community and a series of showcases, demos and user story sessions promoting custom Copilot Agents built by employees.

“We used the AI capabilities in SharePoint, paired with targeted SEO and metadata optimization, to improve how Copilot understands, ranks, and surfaces the Agent Launchpad site. As a result, Copilot responses are now more consistently pointing users to the right guidance when needed, reducing friction, improving time to value, and driving better adoption of AI tools across the organization.”

Cadie Kneip, Senior BPM, Microsoft Digital (Agent Launchpad)

How you can get started

Simply go to SharePoint Online to begin. You need one high-value library and one repeatable workflow. Here’s are some example paths you can follow:

Turn on metadata. Pick one high-value library, choose the Copilot button, and select Add autofill columns. Let Copilot tag what manual effort never finished. Then, ask Copilot in SharePoint to use the metadata to generate an HTML report summarizing the content of the document library for easy visibility to what’s there.
Make a site answerable. Enable Copilot in SharePoint chat (contextual Q&A) on an HR, Legal, or IT site so employees get cited answers instead of digging through pages.
Build a page with AI. Use Copilot in SharePoint to turn a prompt into a structured first draft.
Codify one workflow. Choose something repeatable and content-centric, build around the handoff, and design the human checkpoint first.
Mind your labels. Confirm sensitivity labels are applied so AI processes what it should while leaving Highly Confidential content untouched.

Get started with Copilot in SharePoint

Adoption page: the home for everything Copilot in SharePoint
Nominate your scenario: partner with the SharePoint product team to co-build your solution at no-cost (subject to selection – see link for full details).

Additional resources:

Quick start guide: a step-by-step path to your first wins
Intro video: a quick product overview to share with your team
SharePoint skills: a blog on tips for incorporating skills into your AI workflows
Get started with Copilot in SharePoint: see learn documentation about Copilot in SharePoint
SharePoint Showcase landing page: every monthly post in one place

Product drops

Here's what's new in SharePoint this month, all now generally available:

Create a SharePoint News post from Copilot Pages: Once you've finished researching, creating, and collecting content in Copilot Pages, take it to a SharePoint News post with the press of the 'SharePoint' button under 'Create.' Roadmap 557566

AI news summary for SharePoint News in Teams: Access an AI-generated audio summary of SharePoint News posts in the SharePoint app for Teams (Viva Connections). Roadmap 562018

eSignature for Microsoft 365: recipient groups: Recipient groups let a signing slot be assigned to multiple people, so any one of them can fulfill the signing requirement on behalf of the group. Roadmap 560822

A reimagined SharePoint experience: A simpler, more intuitive SharePoint centered on discovering knowledge, publishing content, and building solutions. It sets the foundation for AI-assisted creation across the product, with updated information architecture and a cohesive design language for a clean, consistent experience across surfaces. Roadmap 547732

Updates to SharePoint home sites: A new resources web part, a new way to customize the SharePoint app (Viva Connections) for Teams desktop and mobile, and the ability to set up a home site in the SharePoint admin center. The Announcements web part and the new News web part layout will also become available in all sites. Roadmap 557983

Stay tuned every month for the SharePoint Showcase, where we share updates, best practices, and real-world examples of how SharePoint helps teams move faster, work smarter, and stay in control as AI reshapes work.

Lessons From Building AI Skills in the Real World with Copilot in SharePoint

Matt Wolodarsky — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:00:00 GMT

Matt Wolodarsky, a principal program manager at Microsoft, has led an early access program, testing out how skills in SharePoint can drive value for customers.

You can roll AI out and still have nothing to show for it. We've all seen the headlines about companies spending big on AI and getting little back. But it doesn't have to go that way. Over the past few months, I've worked alongside teams doing the opposite - one got a usable proposal draft in a fraction of the time it used to take; another got a clear read on where a project actually stood, when the information they needed was scattered across documents and hard to surface. What ultimately set these teams apart was how intentionally they applied Copilot to real work.

This is where skills matter. In SharePoint, skills transform Copilot from a general-purpose assistant into a specialist grounded in your content, policies, and business logic - enabling it to perform meaningful work on your behalf. They capture the repeatable judgment your teams already use to make decisions and move work forward. The rules your legal team applies when reviewing marketing content before it goes live? That’s a skill. The rules that determine whether a vendor is approved, needs additional review, or can move forward? That’s a skill. The process your project team uses to identify risks and turn them into action? That’s a skill.

Each skill is valuable on its own - it does a specific job well and delivers immediate impact. But the real power comes from how they work together. When you start chaining skills together in SharePoint, you move from solving individual tasks to solving the full workflow.

I’ve spent the last few months working with a handful of customers doing exactly this. I started to see patterns - which workflows create momentum, and which ones look promising in a demo but struggle when real users and real content get involved. A few things consistently show up:

Pick the right workflow. Most failures start here.
Build it the way work actually happens. Not the way it should.
Make it stick. Adoption and proof decide whether it keeps running after the pilot.

Pick the right workflow

This is where most workflows either take off or stall. Get the workflow right, and everything else has a chance to work. Get it wrong, and it rarely gets off the ground.

You see it when you start working through real scenarios. Some workflows don’t just look promising - they solve the problem in front of you. You can trace the inputs through to a clear outcome, and the value is obvious. Others never quite get there.

At that point, it’s not a tooling problem - it’s a selection problem. Before you build anything, pressure test it. I use a simple three-question filter to decide which workflows to enhance with Copilot in SharePoint:

Is it worth building? There’s enough repeatability to justify the effort, and enough value to make reuse worthwhile.
Is it a content-centric process? When the work is driven by content, Copilot in SharePoint can access the right source material, follow the rules encoded in the skill, and produce an output the team can review, reuse, and build on.
Is there a clear, repeatable way to get to the right outcome? Repeatable doesn't mean identical - each draft or decision differs - it means there's a known standard for what "good" looks like and a consistent path to reach it. That's what a skill encodes and applies at scale.

When you run those three questions, certain patterns show up:

What passes:

Proposal drafting
Contract or policy compliance verification
Procurement or vendor evaluation
Risk identification and mitigation planning
Launch readiness or go/no-go reviews

What fails:

One-off creative work - no repeatability, nothing to compound
Open-ended brainstorming or ideation - no fixed target and no shared standard for a "right" result, so there's nothing for a skill to encode

Proposal automation is a good example. The work repeats, the source material usually lives in SharePoint, and strong proposals follow a clear playbook: answer the RFP, hit the win themes, reuse approved content, and stay on voice. I’ve seen teams aim for a 60% complete first draft, with AI skills extracting requirements, mapping them to approved content, and flagging compliance gaps before the first review. That can save hours and give the pursuit team a stronger starting point.

The RFP Response Engine sample shows this proposal automation pattern in practice. You can find the sample skills in the pnp/sharepoint-skills GitHub repo, under Skills, by looking for the folders prefixed with rfp-response-. They can be used individually or adapted together as a connected proposal workflow.

Build it the way work actually happens

Once you have picked a workflow worth building around, the next question is whether the skill matches the real shape of the work.

The tempting version of proposal automation is: “Give AI the RFP and draft the response.” But in real workflows, writing is often not where the work starts. The first challenge is turning a messy RFP, scattered across paragraphs, tables, appendices, and evaluation criteria, into a working checklist. A useful skill starts there: extracting requirements, normalizing overlaps, flagging inconsistencies, and categorizing items.

Now the team is not starting with a blank spreadsheet and a long, messy document. They are starting with a structured first pass they can review, correct, assign, and build on.

A strong skill does not just produce an impressive output. It turns messy work into structured work, captures repeatable judgment, and gives the next person a clearer decision to make.

Once you see it that way, a few building lessons fall out.

Skills beat prompts the moment judgment needs to be consistent

Ad-hoc prompts work for one person, one time. But when the same decision or output needs to be repeated consistently, the judgment needs to be codified. In a proposal workflow, that might mean prioritizing approved references from the same industry, flagging unsupported claims, and escalating anything that requires pricing, legal, or delivery-owner input.

Build around the handoff, not the AI task

The natural instinct is to define skills around what AI can do: summarize this, draft that, extract these fields, generate this response.

But the better starting point is the handoff: what does the next person in the workflow need to move the work forward?

In an RFP workflow, the useful skill may not be “draft the answer.” It may be “create the response checklist,” “map requirements to approved source content,” or “prepare the reviewer’s decision packet.”

That shift matters. AI tasks produce outputs. Good handoffs move the work forward.

Design the human checkpoint before you design the automation

In one vendor evaluation scenario we worked through with a customer, the skill scored responses and produced a ranking with rationale. On paper, the reviewer still had the final say. In practice, the output looked complete and re-evaluating it took more effort than accepting it.

That is the trap. A checkpoint only works if the reviewer has a real decision to make, clear evidence to inspect, and a reason to override when something looks wrong.

The fix is not more review. It is better review design: confirm the criteria up front, show the evidence behind the recommendation, and require a reason for approvals or overrides.

Skills that work long-term do not remove the human from the loop. They put the human where judgment matters most.

Site memory turns one-shot AI into shared proposal context

Copilot in SharePoint does not have to start from zero every time someone uses it. With site-level memory, a team can capture rules and lessons once and apply them across future work on the site.

A lost bid is a good example. If the feedback was, “Evaluators could not tell what they would actually receive at the end of each phase,” the team can turn that into a reusable rule: future implementation plans should include a phase deliverables table with named outputs, formats, and approvers.

The next proposal writer does not need to know about the lost bid or remember the instruction. Every proposal can start stronger because the site remembers what the team learned last time.

Make it stick

Building the workflow is not the finish line. In some ways, it is where the harder work starts.

Even a good skill can fail to become part of the team’s normal workflow. Usually, it fails for one of two reasons.

The first is abandonment. People try it once or twice, decide it is interesting but not essential, and drift back to the old way of working. If the skill doesn't clearly make a core part of the job faster, easier, or better - something people do often and genuinely care about - it stays a nice-to-have, and nice-to-haves get dropped the moment things get busy. The skills that survive are aimed at work central enough that skipping them costs more than using them.

The second is fuzzy proof. The team believes the skill helped, but cannot show how much time it saved, how much rework it reduced, or whether the output got meaningfully better.

I would not treat adoption and measurement as launch-plan items. They need to shape the workflow from the start.

Adoption breaks in four places

When I look at the workflows that stick, they usually get four things right:

Value: Does the skill make the work faster, easier, or better?
Effort: Do people get through their first few uses without feeling slower than before?
Trust: Can they see sources, rationale, and checkpoints clearly enough to review the work?
Fit: Does it match the real handoffs, exceptions, and decision points in the workflow?

For a proposal team, legal team, or project team, the pattern is the same: the skill must make the next task easier. It should give people source-grounded work they can inspect, a clearer handoff, and a workflow that fits how the team already moves from intake to review to decision.

Usage is not proof

A common mistake is treating usage as the main success metric.

Usage matters, but it is not proof of business value. A team can use AI hundreds of times and still see no meaningful improvement in the work. They may be experimenting, rewriting prompts, checking answers, or using it for low-value tasks.

The better question is: did the workflow improve?

For many content-centric processes, three signals matter most: time saved, cycle time, and rework. Did the work get faster? Did the process move from start to finish more quickly? Did the team need fewer review cycles before it shipped?

Do not launch with a dashboard full of metrics. Pick the one number that would make a leader say, “Yes, this is worth scaling.”

For proposals, that might be hours saved getting to a usable first draft. For policy review, fewer missed compliance issues. For launch readiness, faster time from readiness review to launch decision.

The goal is not to prove people ran the skill. It is to prove the work got faster, cleaner, or easier to ship.

Copilot in SharePoint will bring AI into more of the places where people already work. But access is only the starting point. The real test is whether teams can turn that access into better workflows: choosing the right process, building around how the work actually happens, and proving the result was worth it.

A quick checklist

Pick the right workflow

Start with one workflow worth improving - repeatable, content-driven, with a clear outcome.

Build it the way work actually happens

Model the messy real workflow, not the ideal one.
Codify judgment so the same decision comes out consistently.
Build around the handoff and the human checkpoint - move the work forward, not just the AI task.
Use site memory so the workflow gets smarter every run.

Make it stick

Watch the four adoption killers: unclear value, high effort, weak trust, poor fit.
Prove the work got better - time saved, cycle time, rework - not that people used it.

Build with us!

Bring us your real-world business problem, and we’ll help co-build the solution with Copilot in SharePoint.

If your organization is selected, Microsoft Engineering will partner 1:1 with you at no cost to design, implement, and deploy a Copilot in SharePoint solution in production. Whether you’re looking to streamline knowledge management, automate business processes, or create custom skills, we’ll help you get from concept to deployment. Nominate your scenario.

Learn more

Business Applications Built for Microsoft 365 – Cubic Logics – SharePoint Partner Spotlight

VesaJuvonen — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:15:26 GMT

Organizations increasingly view Microsoft 365 as more than a productivity platform. They use it to streamline business processes, modernize operations, and empower employees with solutions that integrate into the tools they use every day.

For more than 11 years, Manoj Kumar, Anirban Mitra, and the team at Cubic Logics have helped organizations extend the value of Microsoft 365 through business applications built on SharePoint and the broader Microsoft ecosystem. Through their Apps365 portfolio, customers can deploy solutions for contract management, human resources, help desk operations, asset management, learning management, expense management, and other business scenarios directly within their existing Microsoft 365 environment.

With more than 12,100 deployments across 172 countries, Cubic Logics serves organizations ranging from small and medium businesses to large enterprises, government agencies, nonprofits, and highly regulated industries. Their solutions help customers accelerate time to value while leveraging existing investments in SharePoint, Teams, Power Automate, Microsoft security capabilities, and increasingly, Microsoft Copilot.

What stands out in Cubic Logics' approach is their focus on bringing business applications closer to where users already work. Rather than introducing disconnected systems, their solutions integrate directly into Microsoft 365, creating a unified and collaborative experience that helps organizations improve business processes while maintaining governance, compliance, privacy, and security requirements.

As artificial intelligence continues to reshape workplace experiences, Cubic Logics is also helping customers adopt AI-powered solutions by combining Microsoft Copilot, agents, Azure OpenAI, and other AI technologies with their existing business processes and data. This enables organizations to unlock new insights, automate routine tasks, and extend the reach of AI across both Microsoft 365 and connected business applications.

Beyond their commercial offerings, Cubic Logics is actively contributing to the Microsoft 365 and SharePoint community through open-source projects and reusable components. Their recent open-source initiative begins with the 1-on-1 Sharing web part (coming soon), designed to help organizations structure recurring meetings through templates, actions, automation, and AI-assisted insights. This reflects their ongoing commitment to giving back to the ecosystem that has supported their growth and success over the past decade.

In this SharePoint Partner Showcase, Vesa Juvonen sat down with Manoj Kumar and Anirban Mitra to discuss the Apps365 platform, their vision for business applications in Microsoft 365, the opportunities created by Copilot and AI, and their recent investments in open source and community contributions.

Learn more about Apps365 and Cubic Logics:

Microsoft SharePoint
SharePoint 25th anniversary announcements - new AI features and more
SharePoint help & learning
Intelligent intranet overview
SharePoint Framework provides a secure, modern way to build custom and AI-enhanced experiences in SharePoint and Microsoft 365.
SharePoint Embedded enables building solutions outside of Microsoft 365 with a custom user interface, but continues storing files in SharePoint.
Microsoft Community Learning YouTube channel for videos and guidance

A new SharePoint Look and Feel: What’s Changing and Why It Matters

JasonBlackheart — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 15:00:00 GMT

SharePoint is getting a refreshed look and feel designed to make the product feel simpler, clearer, and more focused on your content. We’ve recently introduced a new SharePoint experience, organized around helping you discover knowledge, publish content, and build solutions. Along with that new experience, we’re introducing visual updates across key product surfaces that reduce visual noise, improve readability, and bring more consistency to the interface while preserving the branding investments your organization has already made. We call this work the SharePoint visual refresh: a thoughtful update to the product’s visual language that helps SharePoint feel more modern, approachable, and easier to use.

Background

Over time, SharePoint’s capabilities have continued to grow, which has given us an opportunity to update the look and feel as well. These updates not only make the SharePoint UI fresh, but it ensures that we are consistent across M365.

The SharePoint visual refresh, rolling out to general availability now, is part of a broader collaborative effort across Microsoft 365 to modernize the suite and improve usability with this bold, new visual design, while also responding to customer feedback about visual clutter and the need for clearer focus on content. These updates are grounded in core design principles that prioritize usability, coherence, and a sense of delight in everyday interactions. This bold, new design is part of a larger update across many apps (such as Microsoft 365 Copilot) and platforms that family together to create a cohesive, modern look and feel.

Goals
The Visual Refresh is guided by several key goals:

Deliver a more contemporary, polished look aligned with the broader Microsoft 365 experience to existing and new SharePoint experiences
Improve consistency, usability, and accessibility across key SharePoint surfaces, including Sites, Pages, and Document Libraries and the new Discover, Publish, Build destinations.
Reduce visual clutter to improve focus on what matters most: your content
Create a design system that scales, from simple team sites to complex enterprise scenarios

Consistency Across Experiences

Once adopted, the visual refresh will strengthen alignment between SharePoint, OneDrive, Teams and the Microsoft 365 shell, reducing visual fragmentation across navigation, pages, and components.

By aligning how our UI looks and our theming approaches, we aim to create a more predictable experience for users moving between tools and surfaces, helping avoid visual dissonance and reducing cognitive load across day‑to‑day workflows.

What’s being updated

Canvas elevation: putting content in the spotlight
One of the most noticeable changes is the elevation of the SharePoint site canvas. By adding a subtle shadow, refined spacing, and a light gray shade to backgrounds, the refreshed design helps your content stand out, making it easier to scan, read, and interact with pages.

Importantly, this is not achieved by changing your content. Instead, the improvements come from thoughtful adjustments to padding, layout spacing, and visual framing, ensuring that the emphasis remains on the information you create and manage. This does not effect existing layouts or how sites reflow.

Page view before / after Visual Refresh

Neutral theming for app surfaces
We’re also evolving how themes are applied within SharePoint to improve consistency, accessibility, and clarity across experiences by separating the core SharePoint user interface from customer content. Updated neutral theming of app surfaces provides a more stable visual foundation and establishes a unified set of navigational UI, where the customer brand remains in an anchor position and is in harmony with the new neutral navigation. This approach allows customer branding to be expressed more clearly without competing with structural UI elements, clarifies the distinction between customer branding and the SharePoint app, reduces visual competition, and improves focus on primary content.
Previously, surfaces were a mix of SharePoint and Customer theming; simplifying how surfaces are themed improves clarity and reduces visual noise, improving usability.

Styling updates
Additional updates to typography, spacing, and corner rounding introduce a more cohesive and contemporary visual language across SharePoint surfaces. Updated typography and spacing enhance readability and create more consistent rhythm across pages and components, making information easier to scan and interact with. At the same time, increasing corner radius of the UI makes it feel more approachable, and through a flexible system brings greater consistency to our products, helping related components feel more integrated and visually connected. Together, these refinements simplify the overall interface, reduce unnecessary visual noise, and contribute to a lighter, more modern experience that aligns more closely with the broader Microsoft 365 design ecosystem.
Increasing roundedness of UI improves the approachability and overall product aesthetics; on the right are examples of how the rounded corners may appear on a page with a group of cards.

What’s Not Changing

While the visual refresh introduces meaningful visual improvements, core SharePoint concepts and workflows remain familiar.

Your content, structure, and brand are preserved
Existing site architecture remains unchanged
Day‑to‑day workflows continue to work unchanged
There is no impact on existing SPFx extensions or solutions with this change

This update focuses on evolution, not reinvention, so users can benefit from improved clarity and modern visuals while familiar work flows and patterns remain the same.

Evaluated with Research

Across our research studies, participants consistently favored the Visual Refresh due to the cleaner and more contemporary look and improved labeling and structure.

A calmer, more modern UI that’s easier to scan. Elevation + neutral theming made the page feel cleaner and it is easier to focus on the content.
Clearer actions in the command bar. Stronger affordances (like button outlines) make common tasks - edit, undo, save, share - more obvious and easier complete workflows.
Less guesswork when navigating. Icons and labelling in the app bar reduced friction and participants spent less time hovering and interpreting icons, especially those less familiar with SharePoint.

Overall, the Visual Refresh provides users with a new look they prefer without slowing down their workflow.

Looking Ahead

The SharePoint Visual Refresh is part of an ongoing journey. We’ll continue refining the experience, learning from customer feedback provided directly in-product, and shipping improvements incrementally, so SharePoint keeps getting better without disrupting how people work.

Familiar workflows will remain in place, now enhanced by improved clarity, consistency, and a more modern feel. We welcome all feedback!

See this post for more information about SharePoint’s exciting next chapter.

SharePoint Showcase: From Chaos to AI-Ready with the SharePoint Admin Agent

sophiapeng — Fri, 29 May 2026 16:52:08 GMT

By: Sesha Mani and Sophia Peng

The way governance gets done continues to evolve. Across organizations, agents are no longer a sidebar conversation; they are showing up in everyday work, reasoning over content, and stretching how IT thinks about permissions, lifecycle, and recovery. At the Microsoft 365 Community Conference, nearly every demo this year landed on the same grounding question from CISOs and admins alike: "What will it reason over, and how do we stay in control?"

That question is exactly what the SharePoint Admin Agent was built to answer. In this month's SharePoint Showcase, we're spotlighting Microsoft's first-party AI assistant for managing your digital estate, along with the six-step Content Governance Journey it powers, designed to take a tenant from chaos to AI-ready through a practical governance journey.

Meet the SharePoint Admin Agent

As the content backbone of Microsoft 365, powering Teams, OneDrive, Loop, Copilot, Copilot Cowork, and a growing ecosystem of agents, SharePoint sits at the center of content governance. Permissions, lifecycle, resilience, and relevance now span users, apps, and AI agents. Managing that surface with portals and PowerShell alone doesn't scale.

The SharePoint Admin Agent brings these capabilities together in one simple conversational experience. Admins can ask questions in natural language, gain actionable insights, and take meaningful action without switching portals or writing scripts. Behind the scenes, it's powered by SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM), the foundation for Copilot-native governance, and aligned to the 3Rs framework: Readiness, Relevance, and Resiliency.

Because the SharePoint Admin Agent is a declarative agent, you aren't locked into a single surface. You can summon it from the SharePoint admin center, the Microsoft 365 admin center, Microsoft Teams, or directly inside chat, all gated by role-based access so only the right people can see admin-level insights and take admin-level actions.

The Content Governance Journey: a practical path to AI-readiness

We've mapped governance into a practical, six-step path that helps move a tenant from "I don't know where to start" to AI-readiness: Assess, Structure, Lifecycle, Oversharing, Access, and Resiliency. The agent rides along through every step, surfacing insights, recommending actions, and helping admins execute.

1. Assess content state

Status: Generally Available

Step one is the easy button. From the Advanced Management page in the SharePoint admin center, a single click kicks off a tenant-wide scan across SharePoint sites OneDrive’s, and tenant settings, with no manual data pulls or cross-referencing reports. The assessment returns a prioritized map of your content risks across Site Lifecycle, Oversharing, and Storage, with recommended next steps for each issue.

From there, you can ask the agent to go deeper, for example: “Which sites were last accessed by external users?” or “What policy should I create next?”

The agent reasons over your tenant signals and recommends actions you can take in place.

2. Control content structure with Catalog Management

Status: Built-in grouping: Generally Available · Custom catalogs: Public Preview

Many admins find it hard to answer questions like “which sites belong to Finance, and is Finance oversharing more than Sales?” Catalog Management makes that kind of grouping straightforward. Out of the box, your sites are grouped by region, department, and user type using built-in Microsoft 365 metadata, so you can target policies, reports, access reviews, and Copilot rollout with precision, department by department or region by region.

And because organizations are unique, custom catalog creation is rolling out now: build site groups by direct CSV upload, by custom site properties, or by Entra ID extension attributes, for example, an "Executive Leadership" group that's excluded from certain lifecycle notifications. This structure gives the system a stronger foundation for more precise insights and recommendations, and it sets the stage for deeper anomaly detection over time.

Storage runways, growth trends, and ranked cleanup opportunities all become more precise the moment you give the agent the coordinates of your organization.

3. Control content lifecycle

Status: Generally Available

Insights without ongoing automation drift back into chaos. Lifecycle skill turns inactive site management into an always-on system: a five-minute wizard lets you scope a policy (start with North America, or Finance, or just executive sites), set inactivity thresholds, choose who gets notified, and customize the message that lands in site owners' inboxes.

Run the policy in simulation mode to preview which sites would be flagged before any notifications go out, then flip to active to let it run automatically every month. Ask the agent "Identify sites with low activity owned by Sales and Marketing" and it returns a ranked table in seconds, with recommendations like "Archive these top 10 sites to free up 5 TB," and a one-step path to create the policy that prevents the same buildup next quarter.

4. Control content oversharing

Status: SAM Admin role: Generally Available · EEEU at file/folder: Private Preview

Oversharing is one of the first questions organizations want to answer as they prepare content for Copilot. Most enterprise oversharing traces back to five common causes: site privacy set to public, default sharing set to "Everyone," broken permission inheritance, the "Everyone Except External Users" (EEEU) group, and content without sensitivity labels. To make those root causes visible at scale, Data Access Governance (DAG) reports give you a tenant-wide permission view, supporting up to one million sites, with insights into root causes and built-in mitigation actions.

New in this wave: file-level reporting, starting with content shared via Everyone groups. Because file-level visibility is sensitive (a report can reveal what an executive is working on), we're introducing a new SharePoint Advanced Management Admin role, the SAM Admin, that grants the right people the right view without expanding broader tenant rights.

These reports are available in SAM today, while file-level integration with the agent is still to come. In the meantime, the agent can help admins identify overshared sites and answer broader governance questions, while the new reports provide deeper file-level visibility where needed.

5. Control content access

Status: Generally Available

Site Access Reviews help you delegate access reviews to the people closest to the content, site owners, while you maintain tenant-level visibility. The agent can help admins identify where reviews are needed and guide next steps. Site owners get a clear, branded email and a focused view that shows only the files and folders presenting an oversharing risk, not the entire site. Pair this with Restricted Access Control (RAC) and Restricted Content Discovery (RCD), both honored by Copilot and both delegable to site admins, to keep sensitive content out of AI reasoning until access is right.

6. Plan for resiliency

Status: Microsoft Baseline Security Mode GA · Microsoft 365 Backup GA - Multi-Geo Skill: Private Preview

Resiliency is the part of the journey that's easy to skip, and the part that matters most when something goes wrong. The agent is already connected to more than 60 tenant settings spanning sharing, storage, and permissions, so you can ask, "Is Microsoft Baseline Security Mode enabled in my tenant?" or "Where can I optimize sharing?" without digging through admin centers.

If recovery is needed, the agent helps you locate restore points across SharePoint and OneDrive from your Microsoft 365 Backup, and because recovery is high-stakes, the agent guides you step by step rather than acting on its own. Sign-up for Recovery Skill Private Preview.

New this month: the Multi-Geo Skill (Private Preview), starting with move-status tracking. Ask the agent about the status of user or content moves at the geo or user level, with no more hunting through reports for an update. More Multi-Geo capabilities, including initiating moves, are on the roadmap. Interested? Sign-up for Private Preview.

Designed with admins in the loop

One of the most important design principles behind the SharePoint Admin Agent is what it won't do. Ask it to delete overshared sites and it will say no. The agent is built to analyze, recommend, and take safe actions, but destructive operations like deleting content or removing sites stay in the admin's hands, with full context. By design, you can stay in control with the agent.

That's also why the new SAM Admin role exists: file-level insight is powerful, and the people who use it should be the ones who own it. The combination of conversational reasoning, a layered policy framework (RAC, RCD, inactive site policy, catalog management, and more), and clear role boundaries gives admins a governance posture that matches the pace of agent adoption: discover, decide, and act, without leaving the admin center.

What's next

The journey doesn't stop here. In the second half of 2026, expect deeper anomaly detection and notifications in the Storage skill, cross-skill queries that chain insights across permissions, lifecycle, and storage, the ability to control the agent's tone and temperament, and voice-driven tasks. A new Assess Progress capability will let admins track tenant readiness over time, and the Multi-Geo skill is set to expand from status tracking into initiating moves. Site owners will get their own governance hub, and we'll continue extending agent governance, including agent access insights, so the agentic estate stays as well-governed as the content beneath it.

Governance is the grounding question, and the strategic enabler

The real unlock is control. Instead of treating Copilot rollout as a tenant-wide switch, admins can roll out department by department or region by region. Take Finance as an example: scope inactive-site and ownership policies to that catalog, run the DAG permission report for the same set of sites, initiate Site Access Reviews with site owners, apply Restricted Content Discovery where labels or access aren't yet in place, and then enable Copilot for Finance with confidence. Repeat for the next group.

The SharePoint Admin Agent, together with the broader SAM portfolio, is how we’re meeting admins where they are: managing a rapidly expanding digital estate with conversational tools that make readiness, relevance, and resiliency something you can act on in real time, not just plan for. Open the SharePoint admin center, start the assessment, and let the agent show you how quickly focused governance can drive progress.

Learn more

Stay tuned every month for the SharePoint Showcase, where we share updates, best practices, and real-world examples of how SharePoint helps teams move faster, work smarter, and stay in control as AI reshapes work.

Proven intranet framework - Involv Intranet - SharePoint Partner Spotlight

VesaJuvonen — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:16:23 GMT

We are excited to share a new episode on our partner showcase series focused on SharePoint in Microsoft 365. In this brief discussion Tim Bogemans and Pascal Herreweghe from Involv Intranet are joining Vesa Juvonen from Microsoft to highlight capabilities they've built for Microsoft 365 and SharePoint using SharePoint Framework (SPFx).

Involv Intranet is trusted by over 300 organizations across healthcare, the public sector, construction, finance and beyond. It provides a fully branded, mobile-ready intranet experience with more than 50 configurable components out of the box. These include personalized news, onboarding experiences, employee directories, mandatory reading, social interactions and targeted communication - all designed to support modern internal communications and engagement scenarios.

Built entirely on Microsoft 365, the solution runs within your existing tenant, ensuring that data residency, compliance and governance remain fully in your control. Users benefit from a seamless experience across familiar tools such as Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Microsoft Search, without the need for separate platforms or disconnected systems.

By combining SharePoint’s extensibility with a curated set of ready-made capabilities, Involv Intranet accelerates time to value while maintaining flexibility for customization. The approach brings together prebuilt components, a structured implementation methodology and ongoing support, enabling organizations to evolve their intranet as needs grow.

The platform supports a wide range of scenarios, from internal communications and knowledge sharing to employee engagement across distributed teams. Features such as multilingual publishing, onboarding journeys, mobile experiences and digital signage are designed to help organizations communicate effectively and keep employees informed and connected.

In the following video, you’ll see how these capabilities come together in practice and how Involv Intranet extends SharePoint to deliver a modern intranet experience on Microsoft 365.

Find out more about Involv Intranet from following resources:

Microsoft 365 and SharePoint include great out-of-the-box features that you can extend and tailor to your user experience goals using no-code, low-code, or pro-code approaches. This flexibility enables customers to configure and build unique and powerful experiences at Microsoft 365 for corporate communications, employee experiences, and business processes.

Microsoft SharePoint
SharePoint 25th anniversary announcements - new AI features and more
SharePoint help & learning
Intelligent intranet overview
SharePoint Framework provides a secure, modern way to build custom and AI-enhanced experiences in SharePoint and Microsoft 365.
SharePoint Embedded enables building solutions outside of Microsoft 365 with a custom user interface, but continues storing files in SharePoint.
Microsoft Community Learning YouTube channel for videos and guidance

Do you have offering(s) for the SharePoint which end users can use and you would be interested in sharing your story with the ecosystem? Let us highlight your solution(s). We welcome all kinds of solutions which highlight the art of possible with SharePoint. Please fill in the following form to get us connected with you and we will get back to you on planning the right model together - https://aka.ms/sharepoint/partner/showcase.

Microsoft named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Document Management

Matt-Taylor — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:23:14 GMT

AI is raising the bar for document management. It’s no longer enough to store and share files— content needs to be governed, structured, and connected to the way teams actually work so AI can reason over it responsibly and help people move from information to action.

That’s why we’re excited to share that Microsoft has been named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Document Management, positioned highest for Ability to Execute.

We believe this recognition reflects the investments we’ve made in making SharePoint and OneDrive the unified knowledge platform at the heart of Microsoft 365, keeping content trusted and compliant, while making it more discoverable, more actionable, and more valuable as AI adoption accelerates.

In our view, this recognition is also a reflection of the customers and partners who build with us. Every day, users create 2 million new SharePoint sites, add 2 billion files, and run 3 billion automated workflows on SharePoint content each week, a scale that reflects how deeply document management is embedded in daily work. We’re excited to keep building what’s next with you.

Grounding Copilot in governed content

SharePoint and OneDrive serve as the trusted content layer for Microsoft 365 Copilot, giving AI a single, governed foundation to reason over. Over the past year we’ve deepened that connection across sites, files, and even encrypted content.

Reasoning over sites: Copilot reasons across SharePoint sites and libraries, understanding pages, files, and metadata together to answer questions with full site context and governance.
Reasoning over files (including encrypted content): Copilot can reason over individual SharePoint files — including image-level understanding in PowerPoint — and it can do so even when content is encrypted, while honoring permissions, sensitivity labels, and security policies.
Connect Copilot Studio and Foundry to SharePoint: Use SharePoint and OneDrive as a trusted knowledge source for agents built in Copilot Studio and Foundry, so they can retrieve grounded answers from governed content while respecting the same permissions and compliance controls.
AI-powered document insights: Every SharePoint site has an agent that can answer questions about site and library contents. Users can do scoped Q&A over one or many files, summarize, compare, and generate FAQs in one click, or listen to an Audio Overview of a file on the go.

AI-assisted work in SharePoint

AI in SharePoint is available now in public preview, so you can go beyond answering questions to getting real content work done right where your files live.

Turn ideas into execution: Describe the outcome you want and SharePoint proposes a structured plan — spanning sites, pages, libraries, lists, and starter content — so you can review and iterate before anything is created. With a single prompt, you can also kick off multi-step content work across SharePoint assets, staying in control to review, adjust, or interrupt as SharePoint executes.
Teach AI how your team works: Capture shared skills and context at the site level so one person can encode standards and everyone benefits. Skills help ensure consistent outputs, applying the same rules regardless of who asks or when.
From content chaos to Copilot ready: SharePoint keeps content structured, current, and governed with automated metadata tagging and proactive site health monitoring, so Copilot and agent experiences across Microsoft 365 are more relevant and reliable.

A modern, intuitive experience

We continue to invest in the fundamentals — fresh, clean, consumer-grade experiences that make content easier to find, author, and act on.

New SharePoint experience (rolling out now): A visual refresh and simpler navigation oriented around three core jobs: discovering what’s new, publishing content, and building solutions. Includes new front doors like Discover, Publish, and Build plus a new app bar that makes it faster to move across SharePoint and get back to the content you need.
Refreshed document libraries: A modernized UX with built-in AI actions and forms for file intake, bringing insights, actions, and collection into the library experience.
Page authoring and news publication: Best-in-class web authoring with flex sections, editorial cards, design ideas, motion, fine-grained image controls, and hero carousels. Viva Connections dashboards are now available on all SharePoint sites, with a new news feed that’s both user-personalized and tenant-programmable.

Strengthened governance and trust

Scaling AI on content only works if the content layer is governed and secure. This past year we delivered significant advances across governance, lifecycle, and data protection.

Copilot-ready content governance: SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM) delivers permission state reports to detect overshared sites and content, and Restricted Content Discovery lets admins exclude sites that aren’t ready for Copilot.
Content lifecycle management: SAM’s Inactive Sites Policy and Ownership Policy identify stale or unmanaged sites and drive remediation at scale.
Unified data protection with Microsoft Purview: Dynamic watermarking and broader label support extend protection across content types.
Records management in Purview: Multi-stage disposition through retention labels (up to five stages) enables multiphase review, relabeling, extension, and defensible deletion across Microsoft 365.

Content management and industry solutions at scale

As content management needs grow, customers want a single solution that blends secure collaboration with records, compliance, and line-of-business content, built for how specific industries and roles operate. SharePoint and OneDrive provide a flexible, governed foundation for regulated and high-volume content processes.

Governance by default: Metadata, retention, sensitivity labels, and permissions stay with content, supporting audit-ready control for regulated industries like financial services, healthcare, and the public sector.
Role-based experiences: Build repeatable journeys for HR, legal, and operations, from onboarding and case files to contract review, approvals, and publishing.
Secure internal and external collaboration: Enable controlled sharing for customer onboarding, vendor management, and partner workflows while maintaining policy enforcement and admin visibility.
AI-ready content: Keep information organized and trusted so Copilot and agents can deliver more relevant, permission-aware answers and next actions, especially for high-stakes roles working with sensitive content.
Connected with Microsoft 365 apps: Enter and update SharePoint metadata directly from Word; request and sign documents with eSignature from Word and PDFs in SharePoint; use AI-powered document assembly to generate compliant Word documents from approved templates; and rely on a single “hero link” per file that controls all access — no more juggling multiple sharing links.

Learn more about SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft 365 Copilot

We remain committed to making content governed, intelligent, and AI-ready — so every document in your organization can become knowledge that moves work forward.

Start using Microsoft 365 Copilot today. Visit Microsoft365.com/copilot or download the Microsoft 365 Copilot app.
Learn about Microsoft SharePoint: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/sharepoint/
Learn about SharePoint’s latest AI capabilities: https://aka.ms/SharePointAI
Read more about 2026 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Document Management: https://aka.ms/2026GartnerDocMgmtMQReport

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Document Management, Tim Nelms, Jed Cawthorne, Rachel O’Farrel, Marko Sillanpaa, Stephen Emmott, April 28, 2026.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s Research & Advisory organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Gartner and Magic Quadrant are trademarks of Gartner, Inc., and/or its affiliates.

*This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request here.

SharePoint Showcase: AI-Forward Content Creation & Curation for the Modern Intranet

sophiapeng — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 15:00:00 GMT

More than 2,700 Microsoft 365 customers joined us at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference in Orlando to learn what’s new across Microsoft 365.

In one of our sessions, AI‑Forward Content Creation & Curation for the Modern Intranet, we shared how SharePoint is evolving from a place where employees find information, to a platform that helps teams create and keep it current. New AI capabilities now in public preview can generate and edit pages from natural language, helping you move from an idea to structured, publish-ready content faster.

Because SharePoint content helps ground Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents, quality and consistency matter. Below, we’ll walk through the AI features across two areas: creation (drafting and visual storytelling) and curation (keeping your intranet accurate, relevant, and trustworthy over time).

AI in SharePoint: An overview - Microsoft Support

Create and edit pages with AI

First up: creating and refining pages directly in SharePoint.

You can engage with SharePoint’s AI capabilities from multiple entry points: select the floating action button in the lower right corner of a site, start from the template gallery, create new pages directly from a site, or navigate to the Publish tab to update recently created pages.

Once in Edit mode, AI becomes your coauthor—you can use chat to make page edits like adding, moving, updating, and formatting your content for you. Describe what the page should include, and SharePoint can generate a structured first draft.

This experience is intentionally iterative: you can switch back and forth between traditional page building (choosing layouts, adding web parts, and fine-tuning design) and AI-assisted authoring (drafting, rewriting, summarizing, or restructuring) until the page looks and reads exactly the way you want.

Visual storytelling with charts

Communicating clearly often means communicating visually. With AI‑generated charts in SharePoint, authors can describe what they need in plain language and add rich, interactive charts directly to a page.

Charts can be grounded in existing documents and refined through multi‑turn interaction, helping teams turn complex information into content that’s easier to understand and act on, without requiring design expertise.

Improve your site

Creation is only half the story. AI in SharePoint goes further—delivering intelligent, automated content curation that helps site owners continuously maintain intranet quality at scale with minimal manual effort. Embedded directly into the SharePoint experience, “Improve your site” leverages user behavior, search insights, and page analytics to surface targeted, action‑oriented recommendations—with one‑click actions, bulk updates, and the ability to learn from user decisions over time.

Capabilities include:

Retiring low‑activity or outdated pages (individually or in bulk) to reduce clutter and improve content relevance and search quality
Identifying content gaps based on employee search intent and unresolved queries, with AI‑assisted content creation to fill them
Fixing broken links and navigation issues to remove friction and improve user experience
Enhancing content quality through recommendations to update, rewrite, or restructure pages for clarity, engagement, and accessibility
Improving site discoverability with suggestions for keywords, metadata, navigation, and featured content (e.g., search pinning and best bets)

With these insights available on demand, SharePoint helps ensure the content Copilot and agents reason over remains up to date, relevant, and aligned with how employees actually search and work—without introducing additional governance processes or tools.

Improve your SharePoint site with AI in SharePoint - Microsoft Support

Content Readiness Is the Foundation for Better AI Outcomes

AI capabilities in SharePoint will continue to advance, but content quality, structure, freshness, and governance remain the foundation of effective AI experiences. By making it easier to both create and curate content, SharePoint helps organizations strengthen content trust today while enriching AI experiences and Work IQ across Microsoft 365.

The result is higher quality answers, better decision making, and greater productivity, for both people and the AI systems that rely on SharePoint content.

Learn More

Content creation with AI in SharePoint

Solutions for document-centric business processes - Portal Systems - SharePoint Partner Spotlight

VesaJuvonen — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 16:30:42 GMT

We are excited to share a new episode on our partner showcase series focused on SharePoint in Microsoft 365. In this brief discussion Patrick Carl from Portal Systems AG join Vesa Juvonen from Microsoft to showcase different features and capabilities they've built for Microsoft 365 and SharePoint using SharePoint Framework (SPFx).

Portal Systems AG is an independent software manufacturer specializing in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and software solutions based on Microsoft 365 and SharePoint. With many years of experience in the ECM environment, the company offers its 350-plus customers innovative, standardized solutions for document, contract and quality management, as well as incoming invoice processing, under the Shareflex brand.

Portal Systems is fully focused on the cloud and Microsoft 365, leveraging the advantages of the modern platform to provide efficient and secure information management. Its customer base ranges from start-ups and medium-sized companies to international corporations operating in various industries, including manufacturing, services, finance, and healthcare.

Shareflex provides comprehensive business applications that are highly user-friendly and easy to use, with pre-built process logic. Built on SharePoint, these solutions are designed for document-centric business processes. Shareflex applications can be used within departments and/or across the entire organisation, and they can be adapted to individual business requirements at any time.

Shareflex and the Microsoft 365 tools work ‘hand in hand’. Shareflex product management takes great care to ensure that the functionalities of both systems complement each other seamlessly. This allows us to focus entirely on providing all the functions and tools required for comprehensive business applications via Shareflex. At the same time, all Shareflex users have immediate access to new Microsoft 365 features.

See a live demo and further details from the following video.

Find out more about Portal Systems from following resources:

Microsoft SharePoint
SharePoint 25th anniversary announcements - new AI features and more
SharePoint help & learning
Intelligent intranet overview
SharePoint Framework provides a secure, modern way to build custom and AI-enhanced experiences in SharePoint and Microsoft 365.
SharePoint Embedded enables building solutions outside of Microsoft 365 with a custom user interface, but continues storing files in SharePoint.
Microsoft Community Learning YouTube channel for videos and guidance

AI Skills Are Now in Public Preview: Teaching AI in SharePoint What to Know and How to Act

Zach_Rosenfield — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 14:30:00 GMT

In March, we shared our vision for AI in SharePoint: We’re transforming how teams build solutions, publish content, and organize information using AI. With AI in SharePoint, you start with intent, describe it in natural language, and move directly to working solutions that reflect how your business actually operates. It is a multi‑turn, collaborative experience that spans site, page, list, and library creation, configuration, and consumption.

Thousands of organizations have joined the public preview, and we are excited to co-develop with our customers as they use AI to transform every step of the content lifecycle. During this preview, customers have shared a clear feedback theme with us: They need AI in SharePoint to be even more aware of how their organizations operate – the norms, processes, and content preferences that are essential for how work gets done.

Today at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference, we’re announcing how we are addressing this customer feedback. Now you can teach AI in SharePoint about:

What to Know: Ask AI in SharePoint to remember something, and it will use a context file in the site to remember the norms and procedures for that site.
How to Act: Ask AI in SharePoint to store a repeatable process and it will create a skill that can be reused by team members.
What to Produce: Ask AI in SharePoint to create content and it will generate Word, PowerPoint, or Excel files and can also generate custom reports & dashboards aligned to the content preferences of your organization.

These capabilities roll out over the next couple of weeks for all opted-in public preview tenants and sites.

Teaching AI in SharePoint what to know about a site

Now, you can give SharePoint context it can remember across future sessions. Simply prompt it in chat to remember a shared rule or preference such as: "Remember that our team color is purple” or “avoid the use of aspirational language or marketing jargon.”

SharePoint saves context for preferences and rules, then applies it across the team

SharePoint saves that context at the site level, allowing it to operate with that information in mind for anyone who visits the site. When another team member uses SharePoint’s AI capabilities, such as generating content, it applies that shared context automatically, for instance by prioritizing purple in the color palette.

SharePoint’s ability to remember site context is rolling out over the next two weeks –to all AI in SharePoint public preview tenants. Learn more on how to get started.

Teaching AI in SharePoint how to act

Skills go beyond single pieces of context and enable you to define multi-step, repeatable shortcuts that reflect the processes of your team. They enable you to carry out work in the way your team expects. For example:

Generating quarterly reports from business data: A finance team can create skills to generate a quarterly report from data stored in the site.
Drafting proposals using past content: A sales team can create skills that define the structure of proposals and how it should be assembled from past proposals and product documentation. Sales team members can then generate the proposal as a Word document.
Creating a project tracker list based on team standards: A project team can create a skill to define how a project tracker should be organized, including required columns, column types, and allowed values for fields. Team members can then generate a list that follows those standards automatically.
Organizing content based on information architecture: A content management team can create a skill to apply corporate taxonomy when assigning metadata, renaming files, or organizing content into the appropriate structure.

To create skills for SharePoint, you just prompt it in chat to define a specialized capability.

Create skills for detailed, multi-step tasks to get repeatable outcomes

Anyone working on the site can invoke the site’s skills, so outputs are repeatable across the whole team. You can learn more about generating skills in this detailed help article.

Skills are now available to all AI in SharePoint public preview tenants. No additional setup is required. Learn more on how to get started.

What to produce: Generating content aligned to your preferences

Most real content workflows don’t end with a chat session – they end when the deliverable is produced. Now, new content generation tools enable AI in SharePoint to complete content workflows.

You can prompt SharePoint directly to generate files – Word, Excel, PowerPoint – as well as structured artifacts — reports, visualizations, interactive summaries — without any code. Ask SharePoint to generate a quarterly report, turn results into a press release, or draft a proposal based on past content, and it produces a live, interactive output you can act on without leaving SharePoint.

Teammates can leverage skills others have previously saved to the site and build structured, interactive artifacts, like reports

And because you can save the creation of that output as a skill, you get consistency over time. Ask SharePoint to generate your weekly report once, save that process as a skill, and every time it produces the same structured output the same way that your whole team can rely on.

Ask SharePoint to create documents from files saved on your site

This is what context, skills, and content generation produce together: AI in SharePoint that applies your organization's standards consistently and generates useful outputs on demand. This foundation of trusted, well‑structured content also helps power better responses from Copilot and agents across Microsoft 365, enabling more effective end‑to‑end workflows through Work IQ.

AI-driven content generation starts rolling out to public preview in late April through May.

How it works: Using open markdown files

This approach to shared context, skills, and content generation reflects an emerging industry pattern for AI systems: separating what AI needs to know from how it should act and what it needs to produce and applying it all consistently across workflows.

Context and skills are saved as plain-text Markdown (.md) files in the all-new Agent Assets library in the site, so they are versioned, governed, and editable by the right people on the team. SharePoint and OneDrive now support native viewing and editing of Markdown files directly in document libraries, allowing teams to open, update, and refine these shared capabilities in the browser without relying on developer tools.

SharePoint and OneDrive’s native markdown file editor

Updates to context and skills can happen naturally through the chat experience as you work. Just prompt SharePoint to make a change, and it applies that update directly behind the scenes. While it’s never required for users to visit the markdown files directly, they are there as a simple way for anyone on the team to see the know-how that might otherwise live in one person’s head. Now, the whole team can share, review, and improve it over time.

Become an AI in SharePoint champion

Ever since SharePoint’s early days, people have been a hero to their coworkers by configuring SharePoint to best fit their team’s business needs. Today’s announcements are the next generation of this heritage – and it’s never been easier to become a SharePoint champion for your team.

AI in SharePoint is available now in opt‑in preview for users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. Try the preview today: https://aka.ms/SPAIoptin

Join us for more AI in SharePoint deep dives this week at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference in Orlando:

Meet AI in SharePoint (2:45-3:30 pm ET on Tuesday, April 21)
AI in SharePoint: From Content Chaos to Clarity and Impact. Get Copilot Ready! (11:15 am - noon ET on Wednesday, April 22)
Using SharePoint AI to Solve Business Processes (1:30-2:15 pm ET on Wednesday, April 22)
Microsoft Lists – Organize, Automate, and Act with AI (9-9:45 am ET on Thursday, April 23)
SharePoint: AI-Forward Content Creation & Curation for the Modern Intranet (10-10:45 am ET on Thursday, April 23)

Learn more about skills as part of AI in SharePoint

Building a modern digital workplace on Microsoft 365 - WebVine - SharePoint Partner Showcase

VesaJuvonen — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 20:58:20 GMT

We are excited to share a new episode on our partner showcase series focused on SharePoint in Microsoft 365. In this brief discussion Chloe Dervin and James Dellow from WebVine join Vesa Juvonen from Microsoft to showcase different features and capabilities they've built for Microsoft 365 and SharePoint using SharePoint Framework (SPFx).

WebVine is a Microsoft partner specializing in modern intranets, information management and digital workplace solutions built on Microsoft 365. With products like Injio Intranet and Injio Docs, WebVine helps organizations connect people, manage information effectively and enable practical AI experiences across the digital workplace.

Injio Intranet

Injio Intranet is WebVine’s modern intranet solution built on Microsoft 365, designed to help organizations connect people, communicate effectively, and find information with ease. Delivered on SharePoint Online, Injio provides a structured, branded digital workplace that supports consistent information architecture, strong governance, and ongoing adoption.

Injio Docs

Injio Docs is WebVine’s controlled document management solution built on Microsoft 365, designed to help organizations manage policies, procedures, and critical documents with confidence. Built on SharePoint Online, Injio Docs provides structured governance, version control, and automated workflows to support compliance and consistent information management across the organization.

See a live demo and further details from the following video.

Find out more about WebVine from following resources:

Microsoft SharePoint
SharePoint 25th anniversary announcements - new AI features and more
SharePoint help & learning
Intelligent intranet overview
SharePoint Framework provides a secure, modern way to build custom and AI-enhanced experiences in SharePoint and Microsoft 365.
SharePoint Embedded enables building solutions outside of Microsoft 365 with a custom user interface, but continues storing files in SharePoint.
Microsoft Community Learning YouTube channel for videos and guidance

Board and executive meeting management - Pervasent - SharePoint Partner Showcase

VesaJuvonen — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 20:59:23 GMT

We are excited to share a new episode on our partner showcase series focused on SharePoint in Microsoft 365. In this brief discussion Nicklas Pernblad (CTO) from Pervasent, join Vesa Juvonen from Microsoft to showcase how Pervasent has created really polished and advance solution for board and executive meeting management using SharePoint Framework (SPFx).

Founded in 2008, Pervasent offers Microsoft 365-based board solutions to secure and streamline the preparation and distribution of materials for board and executive meetings. Today, Pervasent's Board Papers and Team Papers solutions are used by organizations ranging from small nonprofits to some of the world's largest financial and healthcare institutions in over 35 countries. Leveraging the safety and reliability provided by Microsoft 365, Pervasent's solutions have been approved for use by government agencies requiring the strictest security for their sensitive meeting materials.

Pervasent's SharePoint-based Board Papers and Teams-based Team Papers board solutions are deployed in an organization’s Microsoft 365 tenancy and leverage all the security and user management tools provided by Microsoft 365. A simple browser interface lets meeting organizers quickly assemble meeting agendas and documents using a flexible set of drag and drop, form and datasheet features. Organizers can cut the time required to prepare for board and executive meetings in half.

Native Board Papers and Team Papers apps installed on board members and meeting participants' PCs, tablets and phones offer a friendly book-like interface for reviewing and marking up documents, online or offline, and are designed for users that may not be comfortable with technology. In the app, meeting participants add and share notes, electronically sign pages, and cast votes with one or two clicks. Copilot integration lets participants query meeting documents. Participants come to meetings prepared, and that means shorter and more effective meetings.

See a live demo and further details from the following video.

Find out more about Pervasent from following resources:

Microsoft 365 and SharePoint provide a great out of the box features, which can be extended and adjusted based on the user experience objectives using no-code, low-code, and pro-code options. This flexibility enables customers to configure and build unique and powerful experiences at Microsoft 365 for corporate communications, employee experiences and business processes.

Microsoft SharePoint
SharePoint 25th anniversary live stream - new AI features and more
SharePoint help & learning
Intelligent intranet overview
SharePoint Framework provides a secure, modern way to build custom and AI-enhanced experiences in SharePoint and Microsoft 365.
SharePoint Embedded enables building solutions outside of Microsoft 365 with a custom user interface, but continue storing files in SharePoint.
Microsoft Community Learning YouTube channel for videos and guidance

Do you have offering for the SharePoint which end users can use and you would be interested in sharing your story with the ecosystem? Let us highlight your solution(s). We welcome all kinds of solutions which highlight the art of possible with SharePoint. Please fill in the following form to get us connected with you and we’ll get back to you on planning the right model together – https://aka.ms/sharepoint/partner/showcase.

SharePoint Showcase: How SharePoint uses AI to strengthen Work IQ’s data layer

John_Mighell — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:00:00 GMT

A recently published whitepaper from Omdia, “Expanding Your Knowledge with Microsoft’s AI in SharePoint” highlights a consistent conclusion. AI performance depends on content readiness which underscores the importance of content quality, structure, freshness, and governance to shape the reliability of AI outputs.

As a load-bearing structural component of Work IQ’s data layer, SharePoint serves as a primary knowledge platform across many organizations. With over a billion users each year, SharePoint is also the number 1 grounding source for Microsoft 365 Copilot and agents.

Consequently, the AI capabilities currently available inside SharePoint –which support how content is created, structured, governed, and discovered –significantly influence the quality of the Data layer within Work IQ as the “brain” behind Copilot.

This month’s Showcase offers four AI capabilities in SharePoint that help strengthen how Copilot and agents reason over enterprise knowledge. Please note, there are some prerequisites that need to met which are summarized on MS Learn, HERE.

Now let’s dive into the four capabilities, including instructions on how to access and steps to optimize usage.

Content management practices that improve AI outcomes

AI performance reflects the quality of the information it uses; accurate, structured, and current content leads to reliable results.

Omdia’s whitepaper points to common patterns across enterprises which include:

Diffusion of content spreads across sites and libraries.
Multiple versions of documents exist.
Link degradation and diminished relevance of pages over time.

These conditions affect how AI surfaces answers because AI reasons over content as stored.

AI in SharePoint evaluates content quality across sites and libraries. It surfaces improvement recommendations for site owners and content managers with an emphasis on actions that raise content clarity and usability.

Examples may include identifying pages with low engagement, highlighting broken links, and surfacing gaps where users search for information. AI also prompts content refresh actions when guidance no longer reflects current needs.

This capability operates directly within SharePoint experiences that teams already use, and supports ongoing readiness without introducing separate review cycles or tooling.

Action to take

Select high impact sites such as HR, Legal, or IT guidance.
Within a site, choose the floating button and select Improve this site.
Review AI-driven recommendations for stale content, content gaps, and broken links.
Update, consolidate, and refresh content based on those signals.

Learn more: SharePoint Advanced Management overview - SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn

Metadata extraction that improves AI responses

Metadata provides essential signals for AI reasoning. In this scenario we define metadata as structured information that enables AI systems to understand meaning, relationships, and context.

While many SharePoint libraries contain valuable documents, in the past, tagging documents with metadata was a manual task resulting in inconsistent tagging across libraries. Furthermore, inconsistent structure across high-value content (e.g., contracts, policies, and technical documentation) can adversely affect precision for search, filtering, and AI responses.

AI in SharePoint helps address metadata gaps. It can suggest metadata columns based on document patterns, extract and populate values directly from file content, as well as infer additional details using context across the library. Once applied, metadata supports accurate filtering, grouping, and discovery – improving how Copilot and agents interpret relevance and scope.

As a result, manual effort for content owners is greatly reduced while simultaneously increasing consistency at scale. Over time, structured metadata strengthens confidence in AI-generated summaries and answers.

Action to take

Identify one library with high business value.
Within the library, choose the floating button and select Add autofill columns.
Ask SharePoint to create columns for the metadata you want AI to extract.
Review results and refine as needed.

Learn more about metadata and response quality in the October, SharePoint Showcase.

Admin agent support for content cleanup and governance

Governance plays an important role in AI outcomes; content lifecycle, storage usage, and permissions all influence what AI surfaces.

The SharePoint Admin Agent applies generative AI to SharePoint Advanced Management insights. It enables administrators to ask natural language questions about site lifecycle, storage patterns, and permissions exposure.

The agent analyzes reports regarding inactivity, storage usage, and permissions distribution and then summarizes findings along with sharing recommended actions. This approach helps administrators focus attention on sites that affect risk and efficiency.

Examples include identifying inactive sites with large storage footprints, surfacing ownerless sites, and highlighting broad access patterns. These insights support informed cleanup and governance planning.

As such, cleaner and well- governed environments improve AI grounding. Permissions accuracy ensures responses align with access boundaries and reduced duplication improves signal quality for AI reasoning.

The Admin Agent supports a human review model. It’s recommended that administrators evaluate insights and determine next steps which is in keeping with common responsible AI practices.

Action to take

Use the SharePoint Admin Agent to review inactive and storage heavy sites.
Prioritize cleanup and ownership alignment.
Strengthen permissions governance for high visibility content.

Learn more: SharePoint Admin Agent overview - SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn

Practical improvements in document libraries and content organization

AI capabilities in SharePoint support everyday work inside document libraries with an emphasis on structure, clarity, and usability.

Within libraries, AI is ready to help organize files using metadata-driven views and groupings. In addition, new content is classified on a consistent basis as it arrives. And, it can enable automation tied to content changes.

Examples include triggering review workflows when documents update and surfacing grouped views based on inferred attributes. These features help reduce friction for users navigating large collections.

At the site level, AI surfaces improvement suggestions based on usage patterns and can identify areas where users search for information. These insights are then leveraged to recommend content updates or new pages that align with observed needs.

Continuous improvement of the knowledge platform in response to real usage signals helps evolve the content and improve the structure over time. As a result, not only are AI outcomes strengthened within familiar SharePoint experiences, but daily productivity is improved.

Action to take

Review frequently used document libraries.
Apply metadata-based views and groupings.
Use AI recommendations to refine site structure and content placement.

Learn more: Create document library with AI - SharePoint in Microsoft 365 | Microsoft Learn

In closing

Teams that invest in content readiness will see strategic advantage in the long run as they will have strengthened content trust, alongside improved AI accuracy, higher productivity, and decision quality across Microsoft 365.

Looking ahead, the Microsoft 365 Conference (April 21-23, Orlando, Florida) includes several sessions which dive into the latest innovations coming in SharePoint including latest AI capabilities and best practices around libraries and metadata management. You can find out more about the conference via this blog post or register for the conference HERE.

Recommended sessions:

From Chaos to AI-Ready in 30 Days: Meet the SharePoint Admin Agent, Grounded by SAM (Tuesday, 11:30 AM – 12:15 PM EST)
Meet AI in SharePoint (Tuesday, 2:45-3:30 PM EST)
AI in SharePoint: From Content Chaos to Clarity and Impact. Get Copilot Ready (Wednesday, 11:15 AM – 12:00 PM EST)
The Future of SharePoint: AI Ready to Discover, Publish and Build (Wednesday, 1:30 – 2:15 PM EST)
Using SharePoint AI to Solve Business Processes (Wednesday, 1:30 – 2:15 PM EST)
SharePoint: AI‑Forward Content Creation & Curation for the Modern Intranet (Thursday, 10:00 – 10:45 AM EST)

Announcing the winners of the SharePoint Hackathon 2026

VesaJuvonen — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 03:28:36 GMT

We are excited to announce the winners of the SharePoint Hackathon 2026. We had a total of 125 submissions on this hackathon by customers and partners. It was a great pleasure to review the submissions during the past week. Thanks you all for being part of the hackathon 🙏

SharePoint Hackathon was a two week long online event with 6 live streams. Attendee had an option to participate to submit video showcasing their creation built with SharePoint. We had six different official submission categories, and many submissions were valid for numerous categories. Judging was performed by the feature owners from Microsoft on the specific categories.

Award ceremony for the hackathon was live streamed in YouTube on Wednesday 26^th of March.

You can watch the recording of the award ceremony from the Microsoft Community Learning YouTube channel.

Nominees and winners in categories

Most beautiful Intranet home page

Recognizes a SharePoint site with outstanding visual design, branding, layout, and usability that delivers a polished and engaging user experience.

Winner in this category was "Digital for Future" for the best SharePoint design category by Carlo Bresolin & Matteo Tomasulo 🥇