This week kicks off the start of Microsoft’s annual community event M365Conf, which sees experts from across the Microsoft 365 community come together to showcase the different MS products and announce what’s coming soon.
The conference this year takes place for the first time in Orlando, Florida at the world-famous Walt Disney Resort and is headlined by influential people at Microsoft such as Jeff Teper – President of Microsoft Collaborative Apps and Platforms.
As always, we at Content Formula keep a close eye on events like this and follow closely the announcements made by Microsoft. Here are 7 of the things we’re most excited for in 2024 for Microsoft 365:
1. A simpler authoring canvas for SharePoint page creators
Microsoft have made massive improvements to the editing experience in SharePoint over the last 5 years and we’re excited to now see even less barriers for people to create great content on SharePoint.
An interesting announcement is the ability to co-author SharePoint Pages. This is an interesting concept and we will watch this closely to see if this eliminates the age-old problem of leaving pages checked out and having to discard peoples changes!
2. Permission state reports in SharePoint
For as long as we can remember, oversharing / mismanagement of permissions in SharePoint has been an issue. It has been an IT administrator’s nightmare trying to understand who has access to what, and if people had access to things they shouldn’t. Well with the introduction of a Permission State Report coming soon to the SharePoint Data Access Governance dashboards, this will hopefully make all that a thing of the past.
Using the new permission state report, SharePoint admins can get details on sites that are permissioned for greater than X users, say >5000 users. This report includes files and folders that broke inheritance from site permission. This report can be run for OneDrive and SharePoint sites.
3. Microsoft Copilot, in general!
As announced back in February, Copilot is being made available in more and more places. Soon you will be able to create pages in SharePoint with it, create and summarise documents in OneDrive and even build your own Copilots in Copilot Studio.
All of that, tied in with the latest announcements of multilingual capabilities, integration with Viva Learning and access to Copilot on the go, you’re going to see AI in more and more places in Microsoft 365.
4. Calendar notifications inside of Teams
You’ve now got no reason at all to ever miss a meeting again! Notifications for events in your calendar now appear within Teams – whenever you receive an invite, a meeting is updated / cancelled or about to begin, Teams will let you know about it.
5. SharePoint eSignature integrates with DocuSign and Adobe Sign
Pretty much what the title says! You’ll soon (if you’re a US customer at least!) be able to integrate with SharePoint document signing workflows with DocuSign and Adobe Sign, allowing you to store signed documents in one location, use the extra security and compliance policies that SharePoint and Microsoft 365 offer, and minimise the chances of data breaches.
And here is how that will start to look for signature requests:
6. Custom group chat profile pictures
A simple one, but something long missing in the Teams app – the ability to set custom profile pictures on group chats.
7. The developer roadmap for SharePoint will allow for even more extensibility
The Microsoft developer ecosystem has been great over the past few years, with more and more endpoints being added to Microsoft Graph all the time, the SharePoint Framework becoming more mature and on top of that, the fantastic Microsoft 365 developer community. There has never been a better time to extend your Microsoft 365 environment.
A whole host more features have also been announced by the team at Microsoft including more SharePoint page extensibility options, Copilot integration with SPFx and even more Graph endpoints to take advantage of.
We hope you have found this article useful! If you have any questions, or would like to know more about anything else in Microsoft 365, reach out to us at [email protected]
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