This year at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference we had the special opportunity to update our customers on our journey to making SharePoint the best platform for compelling and engaging intranet sites. The core themes of our journey are the same: simpler authoring, compelling content, deeper engagement, and a flexible platform. Following our last update in the Fall, you’ll find below some of the most exciting updates to our roadmap yet.
Simpler authoring
SharePoint has consistently made web content creation easier and simpler, with fewer barriers to producing professional looking content on the intranet. In the last year we released improvements to page sharing to help multiple editors to come together to produce beautiful pages. This May, we’re rolling out Copilot in SharePoint to help authors write their most compelling content. Also in May we’re introducing a new SharePoint start experience to make it easy for authors to create personal pages. And, in June, we’ll begin the rollout of real-time coauthoring in SharePoint pages to make authoring great content more collaborative than ever before. And later this year we’ll add section-level inline commenting so editors have the collaborative experience they need to produce their best content, and section design ideas will launch to give every page author beautiful layout and design suggestions that work with their content.
What’s coming soon:
- Page Coauthoring: Collaborate in real-time with others while creating and editing SharePoint pages.
- Copilot in SharePoint: Copilot combines the power of AI and your data in the Microsoft Graph to help you author sites and pages.
- New Start Experience: A place for your personal pages that’s filled with inspiration about what you can create.
Coming later this year:
- Author Inline commenting: Collaborators can make comments anchored in the page canvas for one another, providing feedback and tracking issues within a page or news post.
- Section design ideas: Get suggested visual layout options that works with your content to make it look great.
- Text formatting updates: Enhancements to text styling/formatting, table formatting and bulleted lists, as well as copy and paste enhancements.
Microsoft 365 Roadmap Links: SharePoint: New SharePoint Start experience, SharePoint: Collaborate on pages and news with co-authoring, SharePoint Pages - Design Ideas, SharePoint: Enhancements to Text web part, SharePoint: Pages – Author inline comments
Compelling content
Great looking sites are foundational to a modern intranet and employees expect the same high standards of design internally as they see across the web today. Today we’re continuing our journey to increase SharePoint’s visual design capabilities to help you make stunning web content in the intranet.
Rolling out now in public preview, the SharePoint Brand Center enables you to customize fonts within your sites and pages to match your organization’s identity. Coming later, the Brand Center will expand to support colors, logos, and other design elements to create a comprehensive brand experience within the intranet. Section backgrounds have recently launched bringing the ability for you to choose from a set of curated background visuals for your page sections, and later this summer we’re expanding that to allow you to upload your own images. Image shapes, also rolling out now, allows you to creatively crop your images easily. Coming in June, the content pane will help you find and layout great content for your pages, such as images, video, webparts and sections.
Microsoft Stream and Clipchamp are the best tools in Microsoft 365 for managing, editing, and viewing videos. Today we’re announcing the availability of Video Pages in SharePoint; a set of beautiful new templates that make it easier than ever for video content to shine. Rolling out now for Stream, Trim is a top requested feature for trimming the length of videos directly in the Stream app. Stream is also adding the ability to make your videos interactive with text and hyperlink callouts at specific video timestamps. And Microsoft Clipchamp, the video editor for Microsoft 365, recently brought subtitle generator and AI voiceover generator to enterprise and business premium plan customers.
What’s shipped:
- Brand Center in SharePoint (preview): This initial release includes the ability to upload fonts centrally and create font packages to be used in your sites.
- Section backgrounds: Bring life to sections by adding an image or gradient color to sections on a page from a new set of curated options, including settings to ensure readability.
- Image shapes: Enhance your pages with image shapes that add visual interest and complement your content seamlessly
- Video Pages: Create video centric page content, like highlighting meeting content or executive messages with the new video pages templates.
- Microsoft Clipchamp – subtitle generator: Create engaging and accessible videos with subtitles in any language.
- Microsoft Clipchamp - AI voiceover generator: Create lifelike voiceovers to suit any video with the AI text to speech generator
- Microsoft Stream – Trim: Stream’s trimming feature is instant, eliminating the need to render a new video. Plus, you have the flexibility to undo or adjust what's hidden anytime.
- Microsoft Stream – Interactivity: Add a Microsoft Form or callout with text and hyperlink at specific points in your videos.
What’s coming:
- Content pane: The content pane surfaces relevant authoring tools that help authors quickly browse and add content to SharePoint pages. With this new feature, authors can easily drag and drop web parts, media, and section templates for creating rich and engaging pages.
- Themes in Brand Center: We're bringing a new theme creation experience into the brand center, allowing you to easily create and manage themes for your sites and related experiences.
- Brand Center in sites: We're bringing font customization to your SharePoint and Viva Connections experiences with the brand center. Express your personality, style, and brand by adding custom fonts to your sites and related experiences.
- Flexible layout section: Empower authors to design more dynamic layouts with the ability to freely adjust and relocate web parts.
- Reimagined Hero webpart: Introduces a new carousel layout and a selection of new styles, creating an eye-catching and engaging experience at the top of the page.
- Title area updates with new Banner web part: Control the top of page experience by removing the title area or leveraging the banner web part with new layouts
- Copilot in Stream: Copilot in Microsoft Stream lets you quickly and effectively catch up on videos in your organization, whether it’s the latest Teams meeting recording, town hall, product demo, how-to, or onsite videos from front line workers. Copilot helps you get what you need from your videos in seconds.
Microsoft 365 Roadmap Links: SharePoint: Video Pages, SharePoint: Pages – Image shapes, SharePoint: Centrally manage branding for your organization, SharePoint: Content Pane for SharePoint Pages and News, SharePoint: Pages Custom image as Section Background, SharePoint Pages: Page design Ideas, SharePoint: New Banner web part (updated title area) in SharePoint Pages and News, SharePoint: Pages Flexible Layouts, SharePoint: Pages – Updated Hero web part with new layout & styles, SharePoint Pages: New section level content align, Microsoft Stream: Copilot in Stream
Deeper engagement
SharePoint has always been at the forefront of helping you reach your audience with your most important content. Last year’s launch of Viva Amplify further helps corporate communicators transform the way their organizations reach and engage their employees, and Viva Connections continues to be the destination for employee experiences in Microsoft 365.
News in Outlook helps your SharePoint news posts reach their audience in email and we’re expanding its capability by making email-ready news the default experience for all SharePoint news posts. We’re also integrating video page templates so that your video content can be played seamlessly in email. In early April, we released a Copilot deployment kit as a pre-built campaign for Viva Amplify that communicators can use to drive awareness and usage of AI and Copilot. This has also been an exciting year for Viva Connections with the rollout to support company branding and dark mode, as well as the capability for personalized views in the Viva Connections dashboard.
Publish messages to Outlook, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Viva Connections, and Viva Engage
What’s shipped:
- Refreshed Viva Connections Landing Experience: This updated look and feel that can be customized to your brand with a dedicated hero section to highlight organizational news. It also revamps the Dashboard and Resources sections and introduces a new place for announcements and curated and individually managed links that supports icons.
- Connections theming: Viva Connections will offer a new set of theming options to reflect brand colors consistently across desktop, tablet and mobile experiences. With this new functionality customers will have the choice of applying existing SharePoint themes or a custom theme to their Connections experience as well as the SharePoint home site hosting the Connections experience.
- Up to 50 Viva Connections Experiences: Customers with Viva suite or Viva Communications and Communities license can create up to 50 distinct Connections experiences for their audience groups.
- Viva Connections Teams Channel Announcements: If a Frontline worker (FLW) licensed user is @mentioned in a Teams channel announcement, the announcement will be displayed in Viva Connections so that the user can find all their important updates in a single place.
- Viva Connections mobile search: Adding a search entry point and a new tailored experience for Viva connections users on mobile in Android and iOS.
What’s coming:
- News in Outlook as the new default: Expanding news in Outlook capability by making it the default experience for all SharePoint news posts.
- Viva Amplify publish to Viva Engage: Corporate communicators can use Amplify to draft, preview, and publish messages to Viva Engage
Microsoft 365 Roadmap Links: Microsoft Viva: New landing experience for Viva Connections desktop, Microsoft Viva: Viva Amplify - Publish to Viva Engage, SharePoint: Updating News Posts to “Made for Email”
Flexible platform
Organizations need intranet solutions customized to their unique situations, and SharePoint’s UX extensibility and the SPFx framework represent best-in-class tooling to meet those needs.
The recently released Graph API for SharePoint Pages allows developers to programmatically interact with SharePoint Pages and News posts, offering capabilities such as listing, getting, creating, editing, publishing, and deleting pages. We also added Bot Framework powered Viva Connections extensibility to enable you to easily extend existing Microsoft Teams bot framework integrations into Viva Connections. And of course we continue to keep our platform up to date with updates to support Typescript 4.7 and Node.js 18.
Last year, we released the Figma SharePoint Web UI Kit to customers worldwide and have provided multiple updates since then. This kit delivers a set of web parts, style options, templates, and detailed guidance so you can quickly design engaging sites and pages in Figma, a subscription-based application that is the industry standard tool for web design. The Web UI Kit is a resource in your intranet life cycle with your design team or others familiar with Figma. You can access the Figma Community file at https://aka.ms/SPWebUIkit, and watch our demo here.
Screenshot of the new UI toolkit
Announced in November, SharePoint Embedded is a headless, API only way of building file and document centric applications that deliver great Microsoft 365 experiences as part of your app. SharePoint Embedded introduces a new concept, File Storage Containers, that are logically isolated from your main SharePoint Online content, but still include the SharePoint features you know and love in their own dedicated partition. Learn more https://aka.ms/start-spe
What’s shipped:
- Graph API for SharePoint Pages: The new API allows developers to programmatically interact with SharePoint Pages and News posts, offering capabilities such as listing, getting, creating, editing, publishing, and deleting pages.
- Bot Framework powered Viva Connections extensibility: Enables to extend easily existing Microsoft Teams bot framework implementations also to be used in Viva Connections.
- Viva Connections Card Designer with Microsoft Graph support: Powers end users to create Viva Connections card experiences which connect to Microsoft Graph APIs or even customer custom APIs.
- More flexibility with the Viva Connections extensibility: Enables more powerful and engaging experiences for the Viva Connections powered by SharePoint Framework.
- SharePoint Web UI Kit v2.2: Added support for new webparts and page components. Reorganized templates section and shared components.
What’s coming:
- SPFx and Copilot integration scenarios: SharePoint Framework and AI integrated scenarios.
- Aligning to Teams packaging model: Aligns the SharePoint Framework packaging model to the Microsoft Teams packaging model.
- Improved experience for blocked 3rd party cookies: Better handling of different browser settings for more secure experience.
- Tooling improvements: Continuous improvements on the tooling to streamline the onboarding and development experiences.
- Page Toolbar Extensibility Support: Enables embedding custom experiences on the SharePoint page toolbar.
Here’s the updated look at our developer and extensibility focused roadmap.
And here is an updated look at our product roadmap as we move halfway into 2024.
SharePoint Premium
Of course, SharePoint continues to be the world’s largest and most flexible cloud content management platform. Announced last November, SharePoint Premium delivers new ways to engage with your most critical content, managing and protecting it through its lifecycle. Check out the latest updates to our SharePoint Advanced Management and Agreements Solutions, as well as our updates to our eSignature 3P integrations.
SharePoint at M365 Community Conference
We’ll be in Orlando at M365 Community Conference showcasing all of this great innovation, and best of all meeting with customers and partners to learn about how their needs can be met with Microsoft 365 and SharePoint. It’s a great event to learn from experts and network with peers, and discover new technology to help you achieve more. You can find out more information about the conference here: Microsoft 365 Community Conference (m365conf.com)
The full list of sessions is available at the link above, and here are some highlights:
Keynote: The Age of Copilots with Jeff Teper
General Session: Content Management and Collaboration for the AI Era with Zach Rosenfield, Melissa Torres, Lincoln DeMaris, Ashu Rawat, Sesha Mani
General Session: What's new and next for Microsoft Viva and the Employee Experience with Kirk Gregersen, Kristi Kelly, Nick DeFalco
Branding SharePoint sites, Clipchamp videos, Teams meetings, and more with Cathy Dew
Getting started with Viva Amplify with Naomi Moneypenny, Michael Holste
Planning a corporate communications strategy with SharePoint News and Viva Amplify with Naomi Moneypenny, Maeneka Grewal, Dave Cohen
The Intranet of tomorrow: beautiful, flexible and AI ready with Denise Trabona, Dave Cohen
Thank you!
The SharePoint Product Team