Microsoft is introducing Copilot, its AI-powered productivity tool, to SharePoint.
The innovations Copilot in SharePoint will implement include taking a user’s existing document or presentation and developing it into a page that uses SharePoint’s high-quality design visuals. Another feature is that Copilot can help users rewrite essential text passages on the page better to suit the tone and angle of the intended audience.
Jeff Teper, President, Collaborative Apps and Platforms at Microsoft, wrote:
The future of SharePoint brings powerful, intuitive, and expressive experiences with fewer manual steps and the help of AI. The vision aims to unleash millions of site owners, news authors, page creators, and portal administrators to write, brand, publish, and share content with ease.”
The Copilot system combines the technology of large language models with users’ data in Microsoft Graph. With SharePoint, users can write a prompt to create a starter site that parses information from across the user’s organization as needed and automatically aligns with the business’s brand.
The new SharePoint start page includes templates that connect the intranet to a business’s communications needs, covering newsletters, event announcements, project tracking sites, trip reports, and brochure sites.
Copilot can also help users configure the precise details of the site after creating an initial draft, with tweaks including iterating on navigation and look & feel settings, for example.
Copilot’s contemporary design and branding capabilities encompass “the full spectrum of solid web design”, Teper wrote. The tool can help users with web page branding and theme, typography and fonts, grid and layout, video and imagery, and animations and motion.
SharePoint is also adding a brand centre, where users can specify fonts and colours, among other design elements essential to a user’s business and product. SharePoint can now provide guardrails to ensure site owners align with users’ branding guidelines so that branding is uniform across different pages.
Microsoft Stream Enhanced
SharePoint’s video design capabilities have also been enhanced via Microsoft Stream. New features include transcripts, captions, chapters, sharing, background noise suppression, variable speed playback, and analytics.
The two most significant additions are Microsoft Stream web part updates — users can see single and multiple videos on SharePoint pages with folders and playlists — and video page templates. Video page templates enable users to create high-quality video content, such as highlighting the recording and content produced from a town hall meeting. Video pages can be created from both SharePoint and Microsoft Stream.
“Our goal is to provide you with two video innovations that will help you make the most of your video content and reduce its time-to-market potential,” Teper added.
A ‘Refreshed’ OneDrive
As well as integrating Copilot AI with SharePoint and other Microsoft solutions such as Viva, OneDrive has been similarly “refreshed”.
The new OneDrive intends to adapt to the specific work practices a user abides by and infuses AI to help them work more efficiently. OneDrive allows users to find the correct file, resume their work, and catch up on what happened while they were away. The Home page will enable users to see recent and recommended files or navigate to a view of files based on who shared them. There is also a unique view of content tied to a user’s meetings so that OneDrive becomes more personalized and time-efficient.
OneDrive has been updated to simplify file-sharing across Microsoft 365 apps. The ambition is to streamline file organization and speed up file sharing so users can be more productive. The “copy link” process has also been modified so users see clear, temporary, on-screen confirmation.
