SharePoint Showcase: How Microsoft uses Copilot in SharePoint, and how you can get started
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!SharePoint Showcase: Automation updates for smarter workflows & business processes
The way work gets done continues to evolve. Across organizations, everyday tasks are moving beyond manual handoffs toward intelligent, connected workflows where AI helps coordinate activity and people focus on outcomes.Foundry IQ: Give Your AI Agents a Knowledge Upgrade
If you’re learning to build AI agents, you’ve probably hit a familiar wall: your agent can generate text, but it doesn’t actually know anything about your data. It can’t look up your documents, search across your files, or pull facts from multiple sources to answer a real question. That’s the gap Foundry IQ fills. It gives your AI agents structured access to knowledge, so they can retrieve, reason over, and synthesize information from real data sources instead of relying on what’s baked into the model. Why Should You Care? As a student or early-career developer, understanding how AI systems work with external knowledge is one of the most valuable skills you can build right now. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), knowledge bases, and multi-source querying are at the core of every production AI application, from customer support bots to research assistants to enterprise copilots. Foundry IQ gives you a hands-on way to learn these patterns without having to build all the plumbing yourself. You define knowledge bases, connect data sources, and let your agents query them. The concepts you learn here transfer directly to real-world AI engineering roles. What is Foundry IQ? Foundry IQ is a service within Azure AI Foundry that lets you create knowledge bases, collections of connected data sources that your AI agents can query through a single endpoint. Instead of writing custom retrieval logic for every app you build, you: Define knowledge sources — connect documents, data stores, or web content (SharePoint, Azure Blob Storage, Azure AI Search, Fabric OneLake, and more). Organize them into a knowledge base — group multiple sources behind one queryable endpoint. Query from your agent — your AI agent calls the knowledge base to get the context it needs before generating a response. This approach means the knowledge layer is reusable. Build it once, and any agent or app in your project can tap into it. The IQ Series: A Three-Part Learning Path The IQ Series is a set of three weekly episodes that walk you through Foundry IQ from concept to code. Each episode includes a tech talk, visual doodle summaries, and a companion cookbook with sample code you can run yourself. 👉 Get started: https://aka.ms/iq-series Episode 1: Unlocking Knowledge for Your Agents (March 18, 2026) Start here. This episode introduces the core architecture of Foundry IQ and explains how AI agents interact with knowledge. You’ll learn what knowledge bases are, why they matter, and how the key components fit together. What you’ll learn: The difference between model knowledge and retrieved knowledge How Foundry IQ structures the retrieval layer The building blocks: knowledge sources, knowledge bases, and agent queries Episode 2: Building the Data Pipeline with Knowledge Sources (March 25, 2026) This episode goes deeper into knowledge sources, the connectors that bring data into Foundry IQ. You’ll see how different content types flow into the system and how to wire up sources from services you may already be using. What you’ll learn: How to connect sources like Azure Blob Storage, Azure AI Search, SharePoint, Fabric OneLake, and the web How content is ingested and indexed for retrieval Patterns for combining multiple source types Episode 3: Querying Multi-Source Knowledge Bases (April 1, 2026) The final episode shows you how to bring it all together. You’ll learn how agents query across multiple knowledge sources through a single knowledge base endpoint and how to synthesize answers from diverse data. What you’ll learn: How to query a knowledge base from your agent code How retrieval works across multiple connected sources Techniques for synthesizing information to answer complex questions Get Hands-On with the Cookbooks Every episode comes with a companion cookbook in the GitHub repo, complete with sample code you can clone, run, and modify. This is the fastest way to go from watching to building. 👉 Explore the repo: https://aka.ms/iq-series Inside you’ll find: Episode links — watch the tech talks and doodle recaps Cookbooks — step-by-step code samples for each episode Documentation links — official Foundry IQ docs and additional learning resources What to Build Next Once you’ve worked through the series, try applying what you’ve learned: Study assistant — connect your course materials as knowledge sources and build an agent that can answer questions across all your notes and readings. Project documentation bot — index your team’s project docs and READMEs into a knowledge base so everyone can query them naturally. Research synthesizer — connect multiple data sources (papers, web content, datasets) and build an agent that can cross-reference and summarize findings. Start Learning The IQ Series is designed to take you from zero to building knowledge-driven AI agents. Watch the episodes, run the cookbooks, and start experimenting with your own knowledge bases. 👉 https://aka.ms/iq-seriesSharePoint: Using agents, AI-powered authoring, and automation, for high impact content management
With over 2 billion files added and 2 million sites created per day, SharePoint is the world’s most powerful and flexible content management platform. SharePoint allows you to create stunning intranets, orchestrate powerful workflows and develop business-critical applications, while also powering a breadth of innovations across Microsoft 365 in Teams, OneDrive, and Copilot. The SharePoint event today showcased an exciting breadth of innovations across SharePoint. With these innovations, we believe SharePoint is the best platform for managing content for AI, and the best application for using AI to achieve high impact business outcomes. The innovations shown today span three key areas – Agents built in SharePoint: create and manage AI experts for your SharePoint content with just a few clicks. AI-powered authoring for stunning intranets: use AI to easily create beautiful looking intranet sites using the best of what the web has to offer. Automation for streamlining business workflows: automate critical content-based business processes with AI. Visit the new event microsite on adoption.microsoft.com | Access all new videos, adoption resources, hackathon details, and more: https://aka.ms/SharePointEvent/Adoption https://aka.ms/SharePointEvent/Adoption. Agents built in SharePoint: AI experts for every user At Microsoft Ignite 2024, we announced the general availability of agents built in SharePoint. These agents are tailored assistants scoped to specific SharePoint sites and content, becoming your subject matter experts working on behalf of a person, team, or organization to handle simple tasks or more complex business processes. Every SharePoint site now includes an agent grounded to that site’s data ready for immediate use. With just a few clicks users can easily create their own custom agents with specialized skills scoped to their specific SharePoint files and folders. And of course, agents adhere to existing SharePoint content permissions and governance polices, ensuring your data and content are used in a safe and secure manner. We see our customers using agents today for a range of scenarios such as onboarding, product support, planning and more. Amey is just one such customer who is using agents built in SharePoint to get the most out of their content and knowledge real estate on SharePoint. AI-powered authoring: Create and communicate with AI. Today you saw a range of capabilities that allow you to build SharePoint sites that look better than ever. With improvements like flexible layouts, design ideas, co-authoring, and Copilot throughout the experience, this represents a huge step forward for SharePoint’s UX capabilities. Creating high quality, engaging content on SharePoint has never been easier. Creating with Copilot With the new "create with Copilot" feature you can either use a prompt or use a selection of templates to create an engaging page, grounded in the content of your choosing, in minutes. This allows you to spend less time on the mechanics of creating the page and instead focus on the core message and content to maximize engagement and impact. Using Microsoft 365 Copilot in SharePoint to help create and design the sites you want with ease, and assistance. Design ideas: Augment creativity with AI. Design Ideas leverages your content and provides several professionally designed suggestions, automatically taking your content-specific requirements into account. You can easily invoke Design Ideas with just the click of a single button and in seconds, transform your sections into user-ready content. You can even use Design Ideas starting with blank sections or plain blocks of text! Design Ideas in the right pane of a SharePoint page showcasing different suggestions. Flexible sections: Build unconstrained For the longest time ever, SharePoint restricted you to building within the three columns framework. We heard your feedback - with Flexible sections, you now have access to all 12 columns on the SharePoint canvas! Move images, text, and all your other favorite web parts around with fine control, and freely resize them in an easy, intuitive manner. And with AI-based authoring features like Design Ideas, it allows you to take full advantage of Flexible sections to provide the best possible layout recommendations for your content. 12 column canvas with Flexible Sections on a SharePoint page. These innovations and more have been rolling out to customers over the past several months. See how customers such as Avanade are using these capabilities to create engaging and beautiful content, and how Takeda sees a future with the latest innovations. AI and automation for streamlining your work Billions of pieces of content are added to SharePoint each day relevant to both, small team collaborations, and broad company-wide initiatives. This puts SharePoint in the middle of business processes both big and small. From out of the box simple approvals and automation, to site, doclib, and list templates and all the way to Power Platform integration – Automation in SharePoint spans the continuum of business processes to get work done faster and at higher quality. As just one example, over 3 billion Power Automate flows run against SharePoint every week. In this next phase of innovation, we are excited to share more about how automation and AI integrate together. Enhance business processes with AI Autofill is one feature that enriches content by extracting and generating structured metadata at scale – increasing the value of your content real estate. Using a natural language prompt you can describe the metadata you need, easily classifying, extracting, or generating new content as metadata. This will automate the process of new and modified files, saving you time and enhancing your business processes. Price change updates As part of our commitment to make advanced AI accessible to everyone, we are also excited to announce that SharePoint Autofill pricing has adjusted from $0.05 per page to $0.005 per page starting in March 2025! Learn more about SharePoint pay-as-you-go services. Next steps We are excited to announce the next SharePoint Hackathon - and invite you, our customers, partners, and MVPs, to craft experiences using AI and the latest SharePoint features. See more details and register here! SharePoint Hackathon - Share your designs and engage with likeminded makers: https://aka.ms/SharePointHackathon. And finally, I personally invite you all to attend the Microsoft 365 Community Conference (May 6-8, 2025) in Las Vegas. We’re showcasing the latest news and best practices for SharePoint and M365 with leaders, product makers, partners, and MVPs. We can’t wait to hear more about how you put Microsoft 365 to work in your organization. Thank you! Learn more and explore! To skill up your SharePoint IQ even further – review the full event + AMA, visit our new microsite, register for the hackathon, watch our new, in-depth SharePoint learning series videos from our incredible product team members: "SharePoint: From concept to creation to impact + Live AMA" New SharePoint Event microsite on adoption.microsoft.com SharePoint Hackathon + upcoming webinar series YouTube playlist of all 17 new video assets (Main event, learning series, customer voices, and upcoming hackathon webinars) 5-part SharePoint learning series SharePoint customer stories: Amey, Takeda, and Avanade The trust and feedback from you all, the SharePoint community, developers, customers and MVPs have helped us evolve SharePoint to be the best content cloud solution in the world. Thank you! Related resources Getting started with SharePoint is a breeze! Check out the latest tutorial on building a SharePoint site. NEW agents built in SharePoint adoption guide (adoption.microsoft.com) Agents built in SharePoint (adoption.microsoft.com) Subscribe to the SharePoint community blog Add and upvote feature request: SharePoint Feedback PortalSSharePoint and OneDrive at Microsoft Ignite 2025: What to Expect
Next week Microsoft Ignite 2025 lands in San Francisco’s Moscone Center for the first time! Bringing a wave of innovation that’s reshaping the industry for AI-driven content management, secure collaboration, and seamless digital experiences.AZ-500: Microsoft Azure Security Technologies Study Guide
The AZ-500 certification provides professionals with the skills and knowledge needed to secure Azure infrastructure, services, and data. The exam covers identity and access management, data protection, platform security, and governance in Azure. Learners can prepare for the exam with Microsoft's self-paced curriculum, instructor-led course, and documentation. The certification measures the learner’s knowledge of managing, monitoring, and implementing security for resources in Azure, multi-cloud, and hybrid environments. Azure Firewall, Key Vault, and Azure Active Directory are some of the topics covered in the exam.
