Microsoft brings Copilot, an AI-powered productivity tool, to SharePoint.
The innovation that Copilot for SharePoint implements involves 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 allows users to rewrite important text passages on the page to better match the tone and angle of their target audience.
Jeff Teper, President of Collaborative Apps and Platforms at Microsoft, said:I have written:
The future of SharePoint is one of fewer manual steps and AI-assisted experiences that are powerful, intuitive, and expressive. This vision is to make it easier for millions of site owners, news creators, page creators, and portal administrators to create, brand, publish, and share content. ”
The Copilot system combines large-scale language model technology with user data in Microsoft Graph. With SharePoint, users can create prompts to parse information from across the user’s organization as needed to create a starter site that automatically aligns with the brand of the business.
The new SharePoint start page includes templates that connect your intranet to your business’ communication needs, covering newsletters, event announcements, project tracking sites, travel reports, and brochure sites.
Copilot also helps users configure site details precisely after the first draft. For example, it includes tweaks such as iterative navigation and look and feel settings.
Copilot’s modern design and branding capabilities cover “the whole spectrum of robust web design,” writes Teper. This tool helps users with web page branding and themes, typography and fonts, grids and layouts, videos and images, animations and motion.
SharePoint also added a brand center that allows users to specify fonts and colors, among other design elements essential to their business and products. SharePoint can now provide guardrails for site owners to ensure they are aligned with their users’ branding guidelines, and branding is now consistent across different pages.
Microsoft Stream enhancements
Video design capabilities in SharePoint are also powered by Microsoft Stream. New features include transcripts, captions, chapters, sharing, background noise suppression, variable speed playback, and analytics.
Two of the most significant additions are updates to the Microsoft Stream web part, which allows users to view single or multiple videos on a SharePoint page using folders and playlists, and video page templates. Video page templates let you create high-quality video content, such as highlighting recordings and content produced from town hall meetings. Video pages can be created from both SharePoint and Microsoft Stream.
“Our goal is to deliver two video innovations that help you get the most out of your video content and accelerate your time to market,” added Teper.
“Refreshed” OneDrive
In addition to integrating Copilot AI with other Microsoft solutions such as SharePoint and Viva, OneDrive has been “updated” as well.
The new OneDrive aims to adapt to the specific work practices you adhere to and infuse it with AI to help you work more efficiently. With OneDrive, users can find the right files, resume work, and know what happened while they were away. On the home page, users can view recent files, recommended files, and navigate to views of files based on who has shared them. And with a unique view of the content associated with a user’s meetings, OneDrive is more personalized and time efficient.
OneDrive has been updated to simplify file sharing across Microsoft 365 Apps. The goal is to streamline file organization, speed up file sharing, and improve user productivity. The “copy link” process has also changed, allowing users to temporarily see a clear confirmation on screen.
