What replaces the Copilot in SharePoint site exclusion list after 1 November 2026
Disclosure: I work on M365 Scouts, a vendor that makes read-only audit scripts for Microsoft 365. This post is about Microsoft's own controls and doesn't need our tools. If you excluded SharePoint sites from Copilot using the preview cmdlets (KnowledgeAgentScope, KnowledgeAgentSelectedSitesList, KnowledgeAgentSelectedSitesListOperation), those settings are only honoured until 1 November 2026. The cmdlets are retired. Microsoft says general availability of Copilot in SharePoint begins rolling out on 30 September 2026. What replaces them: Site AI settings. Set by the site owner (Settings > Site AI). They hide the Copilot button on that site for visitors. Restricted Content Discovery. Set by a SharePoint admin, for example Set-SPOSite -Identity <site-url> -RestrictContentOrgWideSearch $true. It limits discovery of the site in organization-wide search and Copilot responses, and removes the AI entry points on that site. It needs a Copilot licence and SharePoint Advanced Management, and it covers SharePoint sites only, not OneDrive. On sites over 500,000 items an update can take more than a week. Neither control changes permissions. People who already have access can still open the files, and Microsoft describes Restricted Content Discovery as a temporary control to use selectively. Restricted SharePoint Search is also retiring, and new enablement has been blocked since 31 July 2026. So the real work before 1 November is knowing which sites are overshared: Anyone links, Everyone except external users, broken inheritance, ownerless sites and missing sensitivity labels. Copilot in SharePoint also needs a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence for each user. Sources: Microsoft Learn pages on Copilot in SharePoint, Restricted Content Discovery and Restricted SharePoint Search. Please check them against your tenant, because the GA page is still changing.
SharePoint Chatbot Sources & Search Functionality
Quick question: Does anyone know how to connect all SharePoint site pages as sources for a SharePoint chatbot? When I paste page URLs, they can't be found. Also, has anyone implemented a SharePoint search box that returns results from site pages/content? Any guidance would be appreciated. Thanks!
Issues with SharePoint File Viewer
Earlier this month, we started noticing the paging arrows within the SharePoint File Viewer are randomly disappearing either when paging through documents and/or after adding / updating the metadata for that document. We are reaching out to see if anyone else had experienced this issue. Below are the steps of what we've been able to reproduce the issue. The reproducibility of the issue hasn't been consistent -- sometime the arrows disappear while other times it works as expected. 1. Go to the SharePoint Library / Folder containing multiple files (PDF, Word, Excel etc) 2. Click on a document 3. Click 'View File Details' (if not open) 4. Modify the document metadata in the details pane 5. Hit Enter* * Paging arrow may disappear although there are more documents to page / view to. What we should we expect to see What we shouldn't expect to see after updating the metadata.
Applying Search Schema fails
Hi everyone, We've been fighting a SharePoint Online search issue at one of our customers since early July 2026. We've had a Microsoft Support case open for a few months, but it has hit a dead end. I'm posting here to find out whether others are seeing the same thing and whether anyone has found a workaround. Our setup An in-house ERP system syncs customers and projects to a SharePoint list, which serves as the provisioning master list. A provisioning engine (PnP PowerShell / PnP provisioning templates) creates a site for each item, using one of two templates: Customer site or Project site. During provisioning we apply: Property bag values at site level (for example, the account manager for a customer) Custom columns in the document libraries for document metadata SearchSettings in the XML template that map both the property bags and the columns to the default RefinableStringXX managed properties Some values link to managed metadata, and some are free text. This approach was designed together with the customer, and Microsoft Support confirmed that it is a supported implementation. The issue Applying the SearchSettings fails. Running Invoke-PnPSiteTemplate with the SearchSettings section returns one of these: Service unavailable now, please try again later. The request was canceled due to the configured HttpClient.Timeout of 100 seconds elapsing. Without SearchSettings, the template applies without problems. Even applying only the first line of the SearchSettings on a brand-new site causes the timeout. The Search Schema pages are extremely slow at both site collection and tenant level, much slower than in any other tenant we work in. The issue has now gotten worse. We can't create, modify or delete any managed property mapping, at either site collection or tenant level. Opening _layouts/15/selectcrawledproperty.aspx (for example, to edit RefinableString01) now always returns "Sorry, something went wrong. An unexpected error has occurred." What Microsoft Support told us At first, the case was pushed back as out of scope because we use PnP. After escalation, engineering confirmed that the behaviour matches a known issue: Search Schema pages load slowly when a large number of implicit properties and mappings exist. They confirmed it's not caused by misconfiguration on our side. However, there is no public documentation, no workaround, no fix and no ETA, and no further escalation path. They suggested we give feedback through the community, so here we are. Questions for the community Has anyone else run into this Search Schema latency or the "Service unavailable" error when applying SearchSettings, especially in tenants with many sites and mappings? Has anyone been able to reduce the number of implicit or crawled properties in a tenant, or "reset" the site-level search configuration, and did that help? Could this be related to the recent search migration issues reported in service health SP1393483 and in this thread? Are there any best practices or (unofficial) limits for the number of property bag values or library columns mapped to RefinableStrings across many sites? For example, does linking to managed metadata make it better or worse? Has anyone tried splitting the SearchSettings into smaller increments and applying them one by one? We're also looking at reducing the number of mappings and the number of sites that need search support. Still, it would be very helpful to understand the actual limit we're hitting, since this affects how we design future solutions as well. Thanks in advance for any insights!
Ability to schedule email of SharePoint post
We've started using SharePoint to create and send mass emails in our organization, but its a huge pain that I can't schedule them ahead of time to send at a specific time/date. Could you work on creating a way to schedule not just the publishing of a SharePoint news post, but when it is shared via email? That would be amazing.
Workflow for importing Excel to List
I'm a novice developing a workflow for importing an Excel spreadsheet to a SharePoint list. Have I missed anything? Workflow: Thoroughly clean up the data in Excel before importing to a list. Caution: Excel filters (and list filters) are case-insensitive and ignore superfluous spaces, etc. So we can't rely solely on filter functionality to find messy values. Instead, consider using the EXACT function in Excel like this: =OR(EXACT(A2,"PRIMARY"),EXACT(A2,"SECONDARY")). See this Stack Exchange post for more options: https://sharepoint.stackexchange.com/questions/317576/find-list-values-that-arent-in-the-picklist-choices Or, as a last resort, we could consider importing to an Oracle table and use a GROUP BY query (SQL) to find incorrect values, since that's dead easy in databases. I don't use Access for this because it has the same filtering limitations that Excel and lists have. Manually create an empty list. Or import a blank list from Excel and modify it. Caution: When importing from Excel to a list, the list won't honor the Excel column names for the internal list names, even if the Excel names are clean. The list will generate column names like "field_0" through to "field_30" (or whatever applies). Google suggests importing from Access is an alternative -- the column names should be honored. https://i.sstatic.net/3KoAsrMl.png Caution: The time zone for my SharePoint sites and personal MS list environment is wrong. It's set to Pacific Time, when it should be Eastern Time. Keep an eye on any list date values to ensure they are correct and haven't been automatically changed to a different day. Import the Excel rows/data using Power Automate. For what it's worth, any dates that get imported via PA will be correct, despite the time zone, unlike when importing data from Excel using the list UI. Inspect the imported data, correct the list columns/settings, correct the Excel data, and repeat #3. Do this multiple times -- as many times as it takes.SharePoint HTML Page Links Not Working? Heres How to Fix Them!
Suppose you create or upload an HTML page to the SharePoint Site Pages However, you may notice that some links work while others don't. When this happens, you might see the following error message: "This link can't be opened because your organization doesn't allow access to this site. " Microsoft supports only the following types of links when rendering HTML pages in SharePoint. 🔗Links within the same site 🔗Links within the same tenant 🔗Links that support navigation between pages And the follow type are not supported by Default 🔗Links to another Microsoft 365 tenant 🔗Links outside of SharePoint So How can we fix it? If a link doesn't open on your page, the destination may not be from an approved domain. This is expected behavior and is part of how SharePoint securely renders HTML pages. To allow the link, a site administrator must add the domain to the site's allow list. Go to Site Setting Gear Icon and Choose Site Information Choose "View all Site Settings" Select HTML Field Security. Add the relevant domain to the allow list - Remove Prefix like Https:// Save your changes and refresh the page. Once the domain is allowed, the link should open correctly. 📺In this video, I'll explain why hyperlinks can behave differently when HTML files are hosted in SharePoint and show you how to troubleshoot the most common issues. https://lnkd.in/dm86ir6i For offical article check this is https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/create-edit-publish-html-pages 💬 Have you experienced a SharePoint link issue? Let me know in the comments! 👍 If you found this helpful, please Like, Subscribe, and turn on notifications for more SharePoint, Microsoft 365, and Copilot tips.
👏👏👏Copilot in SharePoint - Split, merge, and reorder PDFs
Working with PDFs in SharePoint just got a lot easier This is one of those Copilot features that feels small until you realize how much time it can save. Copilot in SharePoint and OneDrive can now help you work with PDFs at the page and section level. You can: ✂️ Split a PDF into separate files 🔀 Reorder pages 📎 Insert attachments where you need them 📄 Extract a specific section into a new PDF Think about a large RFP response. Instead of downloading the PDF, opening another tool, extracting the pricing pages, saving a new version and uploading it again, you can simply ask: 💬 “Pull the pricing section out of the response packet into its own PDF.” Simple, practical, and all without leaving SharePoint /OneDrive 🎥 I’m sharing a short video showing the experience: Watch the video youtube.com/watch?v=QfOSCNUms2s&feature=youtu.be This is the kind of Copilot update I like: less switching between tools and more getting the job done where the document already lives.
Copilot in SharePoint : Send a Report via Email
One of the newest capabilities in Copilot for SharePoint is the ability to generate insights from documents and SharePoint libraries and share them directly with multiple people via email. What I really like about this experience is that the information isn't just sent as a link or attachment. The report, dashboard, or summary can be embedded directly in the email, allowing recipients to immediately see the key insights without having to open additional files or navigate through SharePoint. For managers, analysts, and data owners, this means less time collecting information and creating status updates, and more time focusing on decisions and actions. ✅ Generate insights from SharePoint content ✅ Create reports and dashboards with a simple prompt ✅ Send them to multiple stakeholders at once ✅ Deliver the insights directly in the email It's another great example of how AI is helping move information from storage to action, making it easier to keep the right people informed at the right time. 🎥 Want to see it in action? Watch the full recording and episode here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9RmHku3obc&t=5s
