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.
