SharePoint’s Latest Innovations: Copilot, a Brand-New Look, and More

How Does Microsoft Copilot Work in SharePoint?

Operating within the Microsoft 365 framework, Copilot, the generative AI assistant in SharePoint, enhances users’ content creation and management processes. Microsoft reveals that users contribute a staggering 200 petabytes of data to SharePoint every month, making Copilot’s assistance invaluable.

Maintaining the same data security and privacy standards as the broader Microsoft 365 ecosystem, SharePoint Copilot aids teams in boosting productivity and efficiency in the digital realm.

Microsoft Copilot allows SharePoint users to swiftly generate engaging content, transforming words and prompts into sites and pages within seconds.

Through a conversational interface, users can instruct Copilot to create an asset and collaboratively refine it. The new start page introduced this year facilitates the creation of SharePoint sites with Copilot through simple prompts, drawing information from various assets across the ecosystem.

Furthermore, Copilot ensures automatic alignment of each page and asset with your company’s brand. Should adjustments be necessary, Copilot seamlessly guides users through configuration with conversational prompts, refining navigation, settings, and more. 

The toolkit also facilitates the transformation of existing content into SharePoint pages, converting presentations and documents into visually rich pages while maintaining the brand’s tone of voice.

Introducing a Fresh Look for SharePoint Sites and Pages:

In the realm of aesthetics, from SharePoint design ideas, Microsoft has unveiled a more daring and sophisticated design approach. This provides users with the tools to craft compelling digital experiences within their SharePoint sites and pages.

This revamped appearance seamlessly integrates into the product, eliminating the need for a “classic to modern” upgrade.

The enhancements extend across various facets of web design, encompassing branding, theming, typography, fonts, layout, images, video, animations, and motion.

The novel visual elements of SharePoint draw inspiration from the Microsoft Fluent Design System. Crafted to ensure coherence with other Microsoft 365 experiences, these elements empower authors to fashion sites and pages that seamlessly blend into the digital landscape.

To enhance user convenience, SharePoint now features a dedicated Brand Center, a centralized hub facilitating the creation of consistent sites.

Within the Brand Center, authors can precisely define fonts, colors, logos, and other design components, deploying them consistently throughout SharePoint.

This imposition of design standards ensures uniformity across all sites and pages, reinforcing a cohesive brand identity.

With the Brand Center’s capabilities, site owners can authentically project their organization’s identity, fostering a stronger sense of connection among users.

Enhanced Image and Video Capabilities in SharePoint

The evolution of SharePoint’s visual elements is driven by the goal of empowering authors to leverage the captivating potential of images and videos. To fulfill this objective, the latest features provide users with seamless tools for editing and integrating multimedia content directly onto their pages. Here’s a breakdown of these new capabilities:

Advanced Image Editor: A new image editor comes with sophisticated features such as shape cropping, color adjustments, the addition of filters, and overlaying text, offering authors more control over their visual content.

Updated Stream Web Part: The Stream web part has been updated to support the streaming of various media types within pages. This includes the capability to showcase single and multiple videos with the added functionalities of folders and playlists.

Direct Creation of SharePoint Video Pages: Users can now create SharePoint video pages directly from Stream, streamlining the process by initiating it directly from the video content.

Renewed Video Page Templates: Video page templates have been revamped to better emphasize relevant video content, such as recordings of town hall meetings, ensuring a more engaging and focused presentation.

Content Panel for Quick Browsing and Embedding: The introduction of a new content panel facilitates swift browsing and embedding of content. Additionally, it offers automatic layout suggestions for redesigning SharePoint pages, enhancing the user experience and efficiency in content management.

Introducing a Fresh Panel for Content Embedding on Pages

SharePoint truly excels when presenting an array of documents, videos, and images within a unified canvas. In line with this, we are introducing a new content pane along with content suggestions to streamline and speed up creating pages rich in diverse content. 

The content pane facilitates the swift exploration and addition of content from your SharePoint sites, offering content suggestions that automatically propose pertinent materials based on your current focus.

Moreover, the content pane goes a step further by automatically recommending layouts, ensuring that your content not only appears visually striking but also instilling confidence that you’ve employed the most suitable arrangement. This enhancement aims to make the page creation experience more efficient and aesthetically pleasing for SharePoint users.

Microsoft 365 Roadmap Links: SharePoint: Content Pane for SharePoint Pages and News, SharePoint Pages: Page design Ideas

Fostering Engagement

Effective content is most impactful when seamlessly integrated into the daily workflow. SharePoint serves as a trusted platform not only for content creation but also as a facilitator in generating engagement and connecting with the right audiences.

This commitment is reflected in SharePoint news, which consistently generates over one billion impressions for SharePoint content each month. Furthermore, we ensure SharePoint is intricately linked with essential workflows where individuals naturally spend their workdays: email, Teams, and Viva.

SharePoint Pages in Email

Apart from SharePoint page design, the latest enhancement includes the integration of SharePoint pages directly into email.

This helps users to preview and dispatch complete news posts to their readers’ inboxes. To streamline this process, we’re introducing six templates specifically designed to enhance the visual appeal of content in both email and web contexts.

With the introduction of unified page analytics, users can track total page reads seamlessly across Outlook and SharePoint, providing a comprehensive view of engagement metrics.

This integration aims to simplify content dissemination and analysis, ensuring a more connected and informed user experience.

Integration of SharePoint in Teams

By linking your SharePoint page to a Teams channel, your content becomes easily accessible within the collaborative hub.

Over the past year, we have streamlined this process, allowing for page editing directly within Teams and enabling Connected Templates to incorporate SharePoint pages as channel tabs.

The utilization of SharePoint within Teams has experienced significant growth, more than doubling in the past year. Connecting pages has emerged as a widely adopted best practice to ensure broad content reach in this collaborative environment.

SharePoint Integration with Microsoft Viva

Microsoft Viva stands as the comprehensive employee experience and engagement platform seamlessly integrated within Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams.

This platform amalgamates essential tools and applications, covering communication, feedback, analytics, goals, and learning, fostering continual enhancement of employee engagement and business performance.

Furthermore, Microsoft Viva includes robust tools designed to amplify reach and engagement for your SharePoint content.

Deploying Microsoft Viva as your employee experience platform is recognized as a highly effective strategy to expedite the return on your SharePoint investment.

Here are some notable features:

• The Viva Connections feed seamlessly integrates SharePoint news into your customizable company app.
• The Resources tab and enhanced search functionality within Connections contribute to the increased discoverability of sites.
• Connections now offers tablet support, notifications, analytics, and more, reinforcing its status as the premier gateway to modern employee experiences.

Encouraging social interaction, share SharePoint content directly to Viva Engage communities and storylines. Engage displays a rich preview for shared pages.

Viva Amplify enhances communications with advanced analytics, cross-channel publishing, and campaign workflow management across Microsoft 365. Embrace SharePoint, Teams, Viva Engage, and more. Available later this year.

Adaptable Framework

Developers are crucial in seamlessly integrating SharePoint into organizational workflows. A third of SharePoint pages feature embedded elements for custom processes.

SharePoint remains relied upon for templating, UX parts via SharePoint Framework, and data access through Microsoft Graph. These developer models persist and improve alongside SharePoint’s evolving user experience.

Conclusion

SharePoint’s Copilot, enhanced page design and customization, mark a significant leap forward in the platform’s capabilities. SharePoint is poised to remain a cornerstone in the realm of collaborative tools.

This is possible by integrating intelligent assistance, refining its visual identity, and empowering users with creative expression. 

Leveraging these innovations can profoundly impact productivity, user satisfaction, and overall business success for organizations.

Happy Reading!