May in M365
Table of Contents
May is always busy time in the land of Microsoft, this year was no exception! - We started off with the M365 Community conference and ended the month with Microsoft Build, and in between there were a lot of cool announcements, smaller community conferences, including European Collaboration Summit, where I got to deliver my first session ever, talking about the value of community, but that’s enough fluff, let’s dig in! - here are some of the highlights from the month of may in M365!
SharePoint Shortcuts can be moved
A while back Microsoft introduced the concept of “add shortcut to OneDrive” in SharePoint, I did an entire blog post on that feature - the biggest problem was that these shortcuts kept piling up in the root of the users OneDrive, and there was no way to move them into folders (except for using code), well that’s changing now, you can now move these shortcuts into folders.
Copilot speaks multiple languages
As a bilingual user, Copilot hasn’t been worth a whole lot for the past months, but that however has all changed now! - Copilot now speaks a long list of languages, it being able to finally understand my Danish content is a game changer, and it’s finally creating real world value for me now!
Follow meetings in Outlook
Have you ever wanted to attend a meeting, but been double booked, or maybe had a meeting in a different time zone, and you just couldn’t make it?
Well this new feature in Outlook is for you! - instead of declining the meeting, you can now follow it, this will prompt the attendees to record the meeting, so Copilot can create a summary, and you can watch the meeting later - or just read the recap.
Windows 11 teams rename
Anyone who’s used windows 11 will know the frustration of having several teams clients, not just classic and new, but also that stupid “personal” client, which is just called teams, seemingly only to confuse users.
Well that changes now, the personal client will be renamed to “Teams personal” - so now you can easily distinguish between the clients.
Outlook Copilot will be Graph grounded
You might not know this yet, but not all Copilots are created equal, for instance Copilot chat in Outlook can’t access your organization data, while Copilot in Teams can, well that’s changing now, Copilot in Outlook will soon be able to access your organization data, and provide you with the same level of insights as Copilot in Teams.
Unfortunately it’s still not context aware of what’s on your screen, but it’s a start, I’m glad to see Microsoft starting to focus on aligning the different Copilot experiences to be more consistent.
Approvals on any list
Approvals are a great feature in Microsoft 365, and a critical part of any modern organization, Microsoft knows this and will soon be expanding the approvals feature, to quickly let you submit any list item for approvals, that will show up in teams of the approver, this is great, enabling end users to quickly get value from the product is awesome!
Block unmanaged solutions
If you’re using the Power Platform, and properly using environments, you no doubt know the struggle of people deploying unmanaged solutions to production, and suddenly your test, and dev environments are out of sync, and you’re stuck with an app that everyone is scared to update.
Well no more, you can now on an environment level block unmanaged solutions!
Dataverse restore deleted records
As a SharePoint guy, this has always been one of my biggest issues with Dataverse, once you delete something, it’s gone, and you can’t get it back, well that’s changing now, you can now restore deleted records in Dataverse, this is a game changer, and will make it much easier and safer to work with Dataverse.
Microsoft Places Public Preview
Remember Places? - a product Microsoft announced like two years ago, and then promptly never talked about again? - well it’s now gone into public preview, powered by Teams Premium.
Places is a super cool AI powered tool that’ll allow you to see who’s working where, and better schedule meetings whenever it works for everyone.
This product seems really really cool, but I’m pretty bummed that it’s only available in Teams Premium, I’m sure it’s going to be a great feature, but I’m not sure it’s worth the price of Teams Premium alone - and with Copilot for Microsoft 365 also being in there with features like recap, I’m worried how adoption will look for places.
Domain Isolation retirement SPFx
This one is a minor thing but it caused a lot of commotion in the community, Microsoft is retiring the domain isolated web parts in SharePoint Framework.
This was a feature where your web parts could have permissions only tied to your specific web part, admittedly with a massive performance impact, but the way SPFx permissions work out of the box, is that if one app has say “mail.send” permission, all other SPFx apps in the same tenant have that permission.
While SPFx is only delegated permissions, and not application permissions, it’s still a bit of a security frustrations, and I’m sure this change will cause a lot of headaches for developers.
I’m hoping Microsoft will come up with a better solution for this, some time in the future, but for now, it looks pretty … sad.
Build
Microsofts build event took place this month, and there were a lot of cool announcements, here are some of the highlights, all taken from the Book of News
Create Copilots in SharePoint
One of the really cool things we saw at build was the ability to quickly create your own custom Copilot in SharePoint, simply select a few documents or folders, and with a click of a button you’ll have a Copliot that’s a specialist in those documents.
This Copilot is sharable with your colleagues as well, really really cool, but my governance heart is aching at the thought of Copilot sprawl.
Copilot Extensions
In Microsoft rebranding news, all extensibility features for Copilot (Graph Connectors, and plugins) will now be called “Copilot extensions” - I wonder what more is to come!
Team Copilot
This is the first real agent we see in Copilot, here you get an entire extra employee for your team, a Copilot you can invite to join your team, and as a new employee - focusing initially on the following roles: “Meeting facilitator”, Copilot takes real time notes, and aligns the agenda with what has been talked about, and what is being talked about. “Group collaborator”, helps bring focus to important information, and tasks that may have been lost. “Project manager”, Copilot ensures that tasks are created, maintained, and reminded across a project.
How cool is that? - AI agents in your team, not taking the place of a project manager, but certainly making their lives a lot easier.
Copilot Agents in Copilot studio
What exactly this will be, I’m intrigued to see, but it looks like Copilot studio will allow users to create their own Copilot agents, an agent is a Copilot that can act more on it’s own, and not just as a direct helper to the user when prompted to do so.
AI Flows
Coming to Power Automate, the option to have AI Flows, much like we know it today Power Automate can automatically generate a flow based upon a prompt, but instead of it being generated, and you just tweak it, the idea here is that every time based on the users request a flow is generated that runs, and every time a user asks, well the flow might look different.
Flows inside Microsoft Copilot
Copilot for Microsoft 365 will get the ability to call flows, as a sort of plugin, that’s cool! - I’m not 100% sure when or how exactly this will be implemented, but from the sound of it it’s a cool feature.
SharePoint embeded goes GA
Not a whole lot to add here, but SharePoint embeded that was announced in preview at ESPC in december, is now generally available, giving developers the option to use the headless SharePoint in their applications, without the UI of SharePoint.
Windows 11 on ARM and Copilot + PC
Microsoft announced their first line of ARM laptops, that they claim will perform better than the apple M3 Macbooks, and as someone who has switched to mac for the M series processors, I’m really excited to see where this goes, and if it can live up to the hype.
Along with the ARM laptops, Microsoft also announced the concept of Copilot + PC, a feature that using and NPU (Neural Processing Unit) allows you to run Copilot locally on your PC, and not in the cloud, this is a game changer, and I’m really excited to see where this goes, the first feature then announced to take advantage of this was “Windows Recall” a feature that will essentially monitor everything you do on your PC, and allow you to prompt Copilot to recall what you did, or saw! - this is a mega cool feature, and I’m really excited to play with it, but also very woried about the privacy implications.
TL;DR
Loads and loads of cool stuff coming in the coming months, and I’m really excited to see where it goes, especially when it comes to being able to build your own Copilots in no time! - and the implications of agents in the daily life of a user!