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SharePoint is Getting a New Copilot Experience and Other Updates

Microsoft detailed yesterday several new updates coming to its SharePoint platform over the coming months, including a new AI-powered Copilot experience. Microsoft has an ambitious product roadmap for SharePoint sites and pages this year, and advanced image editing features and a new integration of Sharepoint pages into emails will roll out first in the next couple of months.

According to Adam Harmetz, Vice President of Product Management at Microsoft, the following SharePoint roadmap is “the biggest step we’ve ever taken in the 22-year history of the product to reimagine how sites, pages, and new types of content are created in SharePoint.”

Microsoft's SharePoint product roadmap for 2023 — Microsoft’s SharePoint product roadmap for 2023 (Image credit: Microsoft)

We’ll start with the new Copilot experience in SharePoint, which is expected to launch in preview by the end of 2023.

New Copilot in SharePoint

The new Copilot experience in SharePoint will simplify the creation of SharePoint sites with generative AI features. Users will be able to use Copilot when creating sites from scratch from the SharePoint Start page. “With only a brief prompt, Copilot in SharePoint creates a starter site for you, brings in information from across your organization as needed, and automatically aligns to your organization’s brand,” explained Harmetz.

Copilot will also be able to assist users looking to turn an existing document or presentation into a SharePoint page. Again, using a simple prompt such as “Create an employee onboarding site for Product Managers using this PowerPoint as a base” will be able to get the Copilot ball rolling.

If Copilot promises to greatly reduce the time spent on setting up SharePoint sites, the platform is also getting a major aesthetic update with advanced features for creating sophisticated sites and pages.

New aesthetic capabilities coming to SharePoint

A new SharePoint Start page is planned for the September/October timeframe, and it will provide design templates, a list of recent posts and drafts, as well as analytics data. If the new Start page will make it easier to start creating a SharePoint site or page, Microsoft is also upgrading the content creation experience in various ways:

Microsoft has redesigned the entire branding, theming, fonts, video, animations, and motion experiences with a touch of Fluent Design.
A new brand center will let users reuse branding elements across sites more seamlessly
A new content pane will provide relevant design suggestions when you’re working on a page.

The new content pane in SharePoint pages (Image credit: Microsoft)

The upgraded image editor will add support for shape cropping, color adjusting, adding filters, and overlaying text.
Co-authoring capabilities for SharePoint pages are coming by the end of the year.

To improve engagement with SharePoint content, Microsoft also announced new SharePoint integrations with other apps including Microsoft Stream and Microsoft Viva. Over the next few months, it will also be possible to share an entire SharePoint page via email.