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Microsoft made it clear from its first announcement of Copilot that it planned to add the AI assistant to every corner of its ecosystem. For the workplace, this primarily meant Copilot in Microsoft 365.
But one unintended result of the introduction of Copilot was it surfaced poor content management practices. At the Microsoft 365 Community Conference in Orlando this week, Microsoft revealed a number of updates aimed at helping companies get their content in order.
SharePoint to Undergo a 'Significant Transformation'
Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 collaborative apps and platforms, delivered a keynote that focused on three fundamental areas: AI, collaboration and content management, and featured one of the longest-running tools in the Microsoft portfolio, namely SharePoint. The overall thrust of the talk came down to better management of digital content through the different apps in Microsoft 365, all of which have been turbo-charged with AI.
Microsoft Viva director of product management Naomi Moneypenny said SharePoint is set to undergo its most significant transformation in 24 years with upgrades to content creation and content management made possible through Copilot.
“These new features will allow users to create natural language prompts as a column to automatically summarize each document’s content, streamlining workflows and enhancing productivity,” she said.
Ultimately, as Microsoft's Sesha Mani noted in a blog, this is all about managing the growing amount of content entering Microsoft 365 every workday.
"Organizations are seeing massive growth in their digital estate as they continue their digitization journey,” he wrote. "Businesses run on content — proposals, contracts, invoices, designs, plans, training videos and more. Every workday, customers add over two billion new documents to Microsoft 365.”
Related Article: Viva Topics Is Dead. Long Live Topics
Copilot Brings Underlying Content Management Issues to Light
Mani notes the introduction of Copilot has surfaced existing issues with content management caused by content oversharing, permissions and content sprawl. Content oversharing is when content is shared beyond the audience it was originally intended for. Content sprawl, in the SharePoint context, is when sites are created in an ungoverned way across the organization, which can create issues with content oversight and compliance. This can happen either though Teams or though one of the many third-party applications that are integrated with Teams.
The problem is clear. The uncontrolled creation of SharePoint sites means sensitive content like work proposals, non-disclosure agreements or work plans can end up in the hands of workers inside and at times outside an organization who should not have access to it.
Much of what was announced at the conference are designed to limit these exact issues. The solutions fall into four broad categories:
1. Content Oversharing Controls
One of the most important things an organization can do to prepare for a Copilot launch is to ensure content permissions are up to date. To assist here, SharePoint admins can now use the data access governance (DAG) insights dashboard to discover and prevent identified content from being shared which, in turn, will stop Copilot exposing it. As extra back-up, the Restricted Access Control (RAC) policy is being extended to SharePoint and OneDrive sites with security groups.
2. Advanced Sites Lifecycle Management
A number of new additions are designed to prevent inactive sites from providing content to Copilots that can results in “stale results.” Inactive SharePoint sites, especially by external vendors and third-party applications, are one of the sources of data leakage and security incidents, Mani wrote. To counter that, SharePoint inactive sites policy is being made generally available. With it, admins can target inactive sites and notify users about the state of the site, offering them a range of options from deletion to archiving.
3. Content Sprawl Controls
To keep content sprawl under wraps, the company announced the private preview of a Restricted Site Creation feature. With this, admins can provide specific site creation rights to specific groups within the organization. It can be controlled granularly for Team sites, communication sites or all sites.
It also introduced a new report, Enterprise Application Insights, which shows the status of third-party applications registered in a SharePoint tenant, including details on permissions and requests.
4. Organization Lifecycle Management
The main focus here is making it easier and faster to change a SharePoint domain name across sites. Now generally available, the tenant rename offering means organizations with up to 100,000 sites can rename domains, as well as prioritize up to 4000 sites for renaming. The aim is to reduce the impact of renaming on business operations, explained Mani. This is now available through SharePoint Advanced Management.
Related Article: EU Commission's Use of Microsoft 365 Breached Data Privacy Rules
Delivering Internal Comms in the Flow of Work
A few other noteworthy items will support internal communications. Microsoft announced it is pushing organizational messages in the Microsoft admin center into public preview.
Organizational messages, according to blog by Samer Baroudi, enables workers communicate with people across the organizations with short-form customized messages. It sounds a bit like an intranet, but delivered through pop-ups.
According to Baroudi, the messages will be delivered in the flow of the recipient's work — be it in a Microsoft 365 app or Windows 11. The messages can “amplify important leadership communications, drive product adoption and training, facilitate employee onboarding, deliver service health notices, encourage sustainability best practices, and more,” he wrote.
Management of organizational messages happens in the Microsoft 365 admin centers, wher message creators can configure a message’s objective, location, custom, audience and timeframe.
While a small feature, anything that better supports internal communications in the workplace is always a step forward. Some might argue that email or the intranet should be the vehicle for this kind of communication, but the fact that they are delivered in the flow of work (read: not having to switch applications) is a selling point in its favor.
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Related Article: Internal Comms' Number One Channel? Email
Other Copilot Updates
A few other noteworthy announcements related to Copilot updates are worth covering. In fact, the new Microsoft blog called What’s New in Copilot was one of the new releases, a one-stop-shop for all Copilot updates.
1. Copilot in Outlook
The new Copilot with Graph-grounded chat will soon be available through Outlook. Starting this month, Copilot in Outlook users can connect and reason with data in the enterprise including data contained in chats, documents, meetings and emails. The Copilot app will be accessible in the left-hand bar in the classic Outlook, the new Outlook for Windows and Outlook on the web.
2. Copilot in Word
While Microsoft pushed Copilot into Word at an early stage, it is receiving an upgrade. Now when you ask a question through Word chat, the answer will be generated through the data and insights in the Microsoft cloud and Microsoft Graph. The advantage, Microsoft stated, is those users will have the benefits of Copilot without having to leave the document.
3. Multilingual Copilot
Finally, Microsoft is also enabling Copilot in 16 new languages including Arabic, Dutch, Russian, Turkish and Ukrainian. These join existing languages that include Chinese (Simplified), English French, German and Spanish. It is also making Chinese (Traditional) available on Copilot for Microsoft 365.
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