March in M365
Table of Contents
March is coming to an end, for me March meant my first ever MVP summit, an experience like nothing I’ve ever tried before, I heard so much awesome stuff, unfortunately I can’t blog about that stuff just yet, what I can do is give you a summary of all the stuff that is publicly available, so here’s a summary of the stuff that’s happened in the world of M365 in March 2024.
Copilot rolling out for multiple languages
If, like me English is your secondary language, I guarantee you’ve had the same Copilot experience as me, This is cool, now it only it actually understood my content - well it looks like that’s all about to change!
The list of upcoming languages has officially been announced, over March and April, the following languages will be rolling out: Arabic, Chinese Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Swedish, Thai, Turkish and Ukrainian.
How cool is that I personally can’t wait to be able to actually use Copilot with my real content, and for more than 20% of my emails 🙌 - I’m super stoked for this one!
Section Backgrounds
All the way back at M365 Conf last year, we were promised a whole lot of changes to the SharePoint page layouts, this is one of those changes, being able to have more than 3 different background colors is awesome - unfortunately we won’t be able to change to just any color (yet), but there’s a nice preset of colors/gradients to choose from.
We’ve also been promised that we’ll be able to upload our own images sometime down the line, if that’s the case you could just upload a solid color image, and have any color you want, which just feels like a hack, but is a workaround, like we often end up doing with SharePoint pages.
Power Automate Version history
Have you ever been working on a Power Automate flow, and ended up breaking something that was working earlier that day? - I mean, I certainly have never ever done that 😅 - but hypothetically, if you were to do so, you’ll soon have the option to roll back with the upcoming version history for your flows, how awesome is that? 🎉
Changes to app launcher
A minor change, but none the less, it’s worth it to be aware of what’s coming, when you click the waffle menu in Microsoft 365, you’ll soon see a new look, with a wider panel, and a new layout, and easier access to create new content!
Office Scripts available to lower tier licenses
Basically since I was born people have been screaming about macros in Excel, and all the security issues that came with them, a few years back Microsoft launched Office Scripts, a great alternative to macros, one of my first blog posts was on this topic it’s an awesome feature, with the main issue being that it was only available to E3 and above, well that’s all about to change, Office Scripts is now available to E1 and F3 licenses and above, how cool is that?
Bringing automation to the frontline workers, it’s really nice to see Microsoft taking frontline workers seriously and giving them the tools they need to be more productive.
Custom list forms rolling out
A really really really cool feature that was announced all the way back in may last year is the ability to have custom forms in SharePoint, this is finally rolling out, right now! - It’s already hit my dev tenant, I’m really looking forward to seeing some of the awesome things people will use this for! - from gathering a list of attendees for the Christmas party, to a “hardware order form”.
Changes to user profile image sync
If you’ve ever struggled with SharePoint and user profile images, you might’ve gone down the rabbit hole that is user profile images - it looks like Microsoft is finally taking solving this issue seriously, instead of syncing the images around from Entra to Exchange, and then to SharePoint, syncing is no more, from now on all images will be fetched directly from Graph!
While this is really cool, it will affect some of the custom solutions that are out there, so be sure to check if your solution is affected by this change, are you fetching images from Graph, or the user profile service?
Another thing this affects is guest users - today guests don’t get a picture synced to SharePoint, but admins could upload one to the user profile service, this will no longer be possible, so if you’re using images with guest users, be sure to check if this affects you!
RSS (Restricted SharePoint Search) - Limit Copilot from accessing your data
In the era of Copilot, we’re seeing similar scenes to what (I’ve heard) happened in the days of delve - users are suddenly discovering that they have access to things they had no idea they had access to - security by obscurity is now starting to show its flaws, this has led to many organizations scrambling to figure out how to clean up their permissions.
Well Microsoft has given them a quick-fix, Restricted SharePoint Search - or as Microsoft has decided to call it RSS - this feature will allow you to make a “allow list” of sites that Copilot can access, you can select up to 100 sites.
While I appreciate that loads of orgs want Copilot, and don’t feel like taking up the effort that is cleaning up your data, from my personal point of view, this is like pissing your pants to stay warm, this should be a last resort, not your go-to approach to fixing your permissions.
Public Preview, new Planner
A little while back at ignite Microsoft announced plans to consolidate the Todo, Planner and Project for the Web into “the new planner”, and instead of you having to worry about different apps, the different features would be locked behind licenses, well the first step in this journey is now in public preview, the teams app “Planner” is now in public preview, I’ve played around with it a bit, and it looks to be working quite alright, it’ll be interesting to see what happens to the existing services over the coming months, are we going to see planner, todo and project for the web go away completely, or will they still be around for a while?
File viewer improvements
Microsoft are working hard on improving some of their core features in this era of Copilot, one of those is the file viewer, you know from SharePoint/OneDrive, while it already supports over 300 file types, Microsoft is still working to improve it, they’re adding things like Copilot integration, eSignatures if you’re a SharePoint Premium user, PDF editing, and a whole lot more! - a lot of these features are already available, and some are coming soon, but mostly this blog post is a roundup of all the changes that have happened over the last few months, or is coming soon, so take a look and get caught up.
Create from templates in OneDrive
In word when you create a new document, you’re presented with an option to choose from a list of templates, this is a feature that I’ve really been missing when creating documents in SharePoint, and something I’ve often had to create solutions to work around, and while we’re able to add them using content types, what about OneDrive? - well it looks like Microsoft is bringing the template feature you know and love from your office apps into OneDrive - how cool is that?
TL;DR
Microsoft’s focus is in no doubt on Copilot, but at the same time it’s really nice to see a focus on improving some of the just “everyday” things like the file viewer, and the app launcher.
So even in what felt like a “slow month” a lot of cool stuff has happened, and I can’t wait to see what April brings!