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Microsoft SharePoint Blog
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SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop: September 2024

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Mark-Kashman
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Oct 03, 2024

If you’re into the whole fiscal thing, know that the SharePoint and partner teams are kicking off FY25-Q2 with feature enhancements, AI milestones, and roadmap announcements. That’s what is called, “Being tech-fiscally responsible.” 

 

September 2024 brought a few nice updates and some key disclosures—SharePoint: Brand center, Copilot in OneDrive (GA), Copilot in SharePoint: Text web part, Microsoft 365 Copilot: Wave 2 news, Bing Generative Search news, Microsoft Delve retirement, Microsoft AI Tour Live updates, completion of the Microsoft Loop Learning Series, and more. Details and screenshots below, including our audible companion: The Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop: Month 2024 podcast episode – all to help answer, "What's rolling out now for SharePoint and related technologies into Microsoft 365?" 

 

All features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Microsoft 365 as of September 2024 (possibly early October 2024).  

 

Inform and engage with dynamic employee experiences 

Build your intelligent intranet on SharePoint in Microsoft 365 and get the benefits of investing in business outcomes – reducing IT and development costs, increasing business speed and agility, and up-leveling the dynamic, personalized, and welcoming nature of your intranet.  

 

SharePoint: Manage your organization’s brand in the new Brand center 

The SharePoint brand center introduces a central location for your organization to manage and create brand assets for Microsoft 365. The new Brand center brings together the power of your organization asset libraries and your organization's brand assets to create and manage product application of your brand into Microsoft 365 products. And it happens in one location while also providing a location to create product specific brand application scenarios.  

 

 

Our goal is to empower brand managers or designated users to create and manage the brand assets needed to customize SharePoint and Viva Connections starting with custom fonts, colors & themes, and brand images. Once you have completed the setup of your SharePoint Brand center, you can manage access to the Brand center app by customizing the site permissions of the Brand center site. Site owners will have access to the Brand center app.   

 

 

Teamwork updates across SharePoint team sites, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams 

Microsoft 365 is designed to be a universal toolkit for teamwork – to give you the right tools for the right task, along with common services to help you seamlessly work across applications. SharePoint is the intelligent content service that powers teamwork – to better collaborate on proposals, projects, and campaigns throughout your organization – with integration across Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Yammer, Stream, Planner and much more. 

 

Copilot in OneDrive (GA)  

Copilot brings the power of AI right into OneDrive to help you work more efficiently and effectively. And it’s now available on OneDrive for the web to all our Copilot licensed commercial users, marking a significant milestone in the way you work with files in OneDrive.  

 

A few use cases to discover what Copilot in OneDrive can do:  

  • Generate summaries for large documents  
  • Compare differences between multiple documents  
  • Answer complex questions using files you have access to  
  • Generate ideas for new documents  

Copilot brings the power of AI right into OneDrive to help you work more efficiently and effectively.

 

Rewrite SharePoint pages with Copilot in SharePoint Text v1 - rolling out now 

Why not get a little help when you're working on your next team newsletter or broader campaign. You will be able to use Copilot to quickly rewrite existing text on SharePoint pages or news posts, helping to ensure that their audience can engage with high quality content. Within seconds, users can easily change the tone of their text, review the content before replacing it, make the text concise or longer, and even auto rewrite the text.  

 

Using Copilot within the SharePoint Text web part to rewrite copy and adjust tone.

 

Related technology 

Microsoft 365 Copilot | Wave 2 

On Sept. 16, Microsoft hosted a special event with two Microsoft leaders, Satya Nadella and Jared Spataro, to focus on the next phase of Microsoft 365 Copilot innovation. Copilot is rapidly becoming an organizing layer for work, how work gets done, transforming the work, workflow, and work artifacts for more than 400 million people who use Microsoft 365.  

 

To quote Satya, "You can think of Copilot as the UI for AI. It helps you break down these silos between your work artifacts, your communications, and your business processes. And we are just getting started."  

 

 

Read the full blog by Jared Spataro: Microsoft 365 Copilot Wave 2: Pages, Python in Excel, and agents 

 

Microsoft 365 Copilot, Wave 2 announcement highlights  

  • Copilot Pages | These are dynamic, persistent canvas designed for multiplayer AI collaboration. You and your team can work collaboratively in a page with Copilot, seeing everyone’s work in real time and iterating with Copilot like a partner, adding more content from your data, files, and the web to your Page. This is an entirely new work pattern—multiplayer, human-to-AI-to-human collaboration. Copilot Pages are .loop files. Copilot Pages are stored in a new user-owned SharePoint Embedded container, one per user. For a full IT perspective on Copilot Pages, I'll direct your attention to my peer, Dan Costenaro's in-depth blog: Copilot pages for IT Admins - Sep 2024 update 
  • Copilot in Excel | Now you can work with data that hasn’t been formatted as a table. We’ve added new skills to tap into the full power of Excel with support for more formulas like XLOOKUP and SUMIF; conditional formatting; and the ability to iterate with Copilot on visualizations like charts and PivotTables to fit your needs. And Copilot in Excel can now work with text, in addition to numerical, data. This, too, combines the power of Python—one of the world’s most popular programming languages for working with data—within the Copilot in Excel experience. Now, anyone can work with Copilot to conduct advanced analysis like forecasting, risk analysis, machine learning, and visualizing complex data—all using natural language, no coding required.  
  • Copilot in PowerPoint | Narrative builder in Microsoft PowerPoint helps you work with Copilot like a partner, iterating together to build a great first draft in minutes while keeping you in control of the creative process. There will be integration with what I highlighted earlier, with Brand manager; where Copilot can leverage your company’s branded template, so your presentations are enterprise-ready and on-brand. And soon, Copilot will pull in company-approved images from your SharePoint Organization Asset Library.  
  • Copilot agents in SharePoint | A new experience that enables any user to quickly create and share agents right from within SharePoint for specific purposes. With a few clicks, you can create and share a Copilot agent in SharePoint―no coding skills required, all while respecting the organization’s security policies. These agents can work on your behalf answering questions about source material, reasoning over that material, and acting like a well-informed teammate. 

  

Bing Generative Search (disclosure)  

Bing utilizes AI to deliver a truly unique experience by not only optimizing the search results but also how those results appear in a cohesive layout. You can explore the look, feel, and capabilities of generative search in Bing in the US by simply typing “Bing generative search” into the search bar. You’ll be met with a carousel of queries to select and demo, allowing you to experience how generative search can deliver more relevant and comprehensive answers for a wide range of topics. 

 

Bing generative search displays a carousel of queries to select and demo, allowing you to experience how generative search can deliver more relevant and comprehensive answers for a wide range of topics.

  

Microsoft Loop Learning Series | All six sessions now on demand, including the most recent addition: “Microsoft Loop IT governance and management controls"  

This webinar featured Dan Costenaro, Abi Suresh, and Akanksha Rakesh - Covering the latest admin capabilities for managing Microsoft Loop - sharing and showing more of what IT Pros need to know about Loop + SharePoint: That's clarity on where loops are stored, details about data lifecycle governance, auditing, eDiscovery, DLP, sensitivity labels, PowerShell commands, and more. 

 

 

Note: We've updated Ron Pessner's blog with all embedded, “NOW ON DEMAND | Microsoft Loop Learning Series [Six webinars]”; Ron is our Loop CVP and this blog post now represents a wealth of knowledge sharing from the whole Loop product team. 

 

Delve retirement | December 16, 2024 

On December 16, 2024, Delve will be retired. When we say we're retiring Delve, it's important to note that we're not changing or retiring anything on the services side. Both documents and people data that are surfaced in Delve will continue to be stored and managed as today. And much of the value carries forward in the broad People profile experience, aka, people cards, throughout Microsoft 365 - including upcoming people card updates to enable some of the specific profile editing that was previously done in Delve profiles.  

 

Microsoft has been working on new technologies like Microsoft Search, people cards, interacting with Copilot, favorites in OneDrive, and more - all live on beyond Delve, often closer to where you are working. Any Delve-specific data lists - such as list of users recently viewed in Delve, Delve favorite documents, Delve favorite tags - can be exported before December 16, 2024, in Delve by going to Select settings > Feature settings > Export data. 

 

So, after Dec. 16, 2024, Delve will no longer be included in Microsoft 365 and will no longer be supported. Until then, support for Delve will continue and users can expect the same experience as today.  

 

AI Tour Live: Mexico City  

Our first stop on AI Tour Live, episode 1, was Mexico City Sept. 24, 2024. Go behind the scenes with interviews and an inside view at select Microsoft AI Tour city events - starting with Mexico City. Akosua Boadi-Agyemang and Karuana Gatimu bring you exclusive interviews and insights from speakers, partners, and MVPs gathered together to share what they know about AI, Copilot, and more. You'll hear interviews with Christian Vinay (COO and CMO of Microsoft Mexico), Hiram Monroy Rocha (Senior Manager - AMD), Victor Cabrera Creus (Sales Director - Adobe), and local MVP and CEO Fátima Blancas.  

 

 

 

We are planning two future episodes with Akosua and our guest host, Heather Cook - for both upcoming AI Tour stops in Paris and Berlin. So, keep an eye out for future episodes of AI Tour Live. If you can make it to one of the AI Tour stops in person, I highly recommend it.  

 

October 2024 teasers 

Psst, still here? Still scrolling the page looking for more roadmap goodness? If so, here is a few teasers of what’s to come to production next month… 

 

  • Teaser #1: Enhancements to Text web part [Message center ID: MC888883]  
  • Teaser #2: New Planner for the Web [Roadmap ID: 411777] 

 

… shhh, tell everyone. 

 

Upcoming events 

  • ESPC | European SharePoint Conference | Dec 2-5, 2024 in Stockholm, Sweden 

 

Discover and follow other Microsoft podcasts at aka.ms/microsoft/podcasts. 

 

Follow The Intrazone at aka.ms/TheIntrazone. 

 

Helpful, ongoing change management resources  

  • Install the Office 365 admin app; view Message Center posts and stay current with push notifications. 
  • Follow me to catch news and interesting SharePoint things: @mkashman; warning, occasional bad puns may fly in a tweet or two here and there.  

 

Thanks for tuning in and/or reading this episode/blog of the Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop – Month 2024. We are open to your feedback in comments below to hear how both the Roadmap Pitstop podcast episodes and blogs can be improved over time. 

 

Engage with us. Ask those questions that haunt you. Push us where you want and need to get the best information and insights. We are here to put both our and your best change management foot forward.  

 

Stay safe out there on the road’map ahead. And thanks for listening and reading.  

 

Thanks for your time,  

Mark Kashman – senior product manager (SharePoint/Lists) | Microsoft)  

 

The Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop – September 2024 graphic showing some of the highlighted release features.

Updated Oct 03, 2024
Version 1.0
the intrazone
  • grant_jenkins's avatar
    grant_jenkins
    Steel Contributor
    Oct 05, 2024

    Mark-Kashman 

     

    There are some amazing things coming through with Copilot - great work everyone.

     

    However, I just wanted to follow up on some feedback I posted in the original announcement for building Copilots from SharePoint back in May (Microsoft Build 2024: Create custom copilots from SharePoint - Microsoft Community Hub). Given most of your customers have had zero visibility on what's been happening in the private preview, I'm looking for confirmation on the below (none of these questions were answered when I originally posted them). 

     

    Copilot agents in SharePoint

    This will be very useful in some of our sites, but PLEASE tell us we can control this from the Admin Center (only make it available on certain sites). This will be a showstopper for us - if we can't control site by site then we will need to (unfortunately) disable across the entire tenant (assuming that's possible). If neither of these options are available, then that's a major concern from both a legal and compliance standpoint.

     

    We have over 100k SharePoint sites and more than 65k users. If we can't control this centrally, we will end up with way too many badly built or abandoned copilots and no governance (owners moving roles, leaving the company, etc.). We need to ensure all of our users that are building copilots would have some minimum level of training first (as we do with the Power Platform) and that we have governance in place before we enable for any of our sites.

     

    Also, if we enable copilot for a specific site (from the admin center) we need to allow the site owner(s) to determine who can create copilots on the site and not just ALL users with Edit rights. This is another showstopper for us. If this is not possible then we will need to disable across the entire tenant.

     

    In addition to the above, what are the costs associated with using these agents? When building with Copilot Studio there is a cost on messages, etc. I haven't seen anything posted about associated costs in any of the announcements regarding Copilot agents in SharePoint.