IT Pros NEED TO KNOW These 7 NEW SharePoint, Teams, and Copilot Announcements

By Microsoft MVP and MCT · Pluralsight Author

Published May 23, 2024 · Updated January 15, 2026 · Microsoft 365, Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Teams, SharePoint

While Microsoft Build is all about Devs, there are 7 SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Copilot announcements you NEED to have on your radar as an IT Pro! As always, if there’s something important happening in the world of certifications or IT Pros, I have your back!

Watch my 80+ courses on Pluralsight

Video Summary

Here are the key points from the transcript:

  • Microsoft Build Announcements: Although primarily for developers, Microsoft Build had several important updates for IT professionals, especially with the absence of the Inspire conference.
  • SharePoint Updates: SharePoint Embedded is now generally available, allowing custom applications to use SharePoint’s backend without its UI. Enhanced version controls are also in public preview, helping manage storage by limiting file versions.
  • Microsoft 365 Features: Microsoft 365 Archive is now generally available, and Microsoft 365 Backup is in public preview. Backup storage for developers is in private preview but will soon be public.
  • Microsoft Teams Enhancements: New features include custom emojis, admin controls to prevent content sharing in externally hosted meetings, and the ability to configure default file services for uploads. Teams Premium users can also manage who can record and transcribe meetings.
  • Co-pilot Innovations: New capabilities include creating co-pilots directly from SharePoint sites and introducing a team co-pilot for collaborative tasks. There are also new ways to extend co-pilot functionalities through connectors and plugins.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Video Transcript

Hello everyone! If you’re a Microsoft 365 administrator, you need to know about those seven new announcements that Microsoft made at Microsoft Build. Now, Microsoft Build is usually a conference for developers, and as an IT Pro myself, I usually don’t pay too much attention to it. But now that we do not have Inspire anymore, Microsoft only has two big conferences: Build and Ignite. I started digging deep and trying to see what are the announcements that might impact IT professionals. And don’t get me wrong, Microsoft made over 100 different announcements at Microsoft Build this year. Here on the screen, you will see the blog posts that have been posted in the past two days on the Microsoft Tech Community. Each one of them contains one or more announcements, so we are talking hundreds of announcements here. And while most of the announcements are for developers, of course, because it’s Build, there are some very important ones for IT professionals as well that you absolutely need to know about.

Those announcements are split into three different products: we, of course, have Copilot (I’m sure that nobody’s surprised that Copilot had a few announcements at Build), SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams. I’ll really try and focus on the announcements that are important for IT professionals. Let’s start with my first love of IT, which is SharePoint. From a SharePoint perspective, before Build, I looked at the session catalog, I searched for SharePoint, and I was a bit disappointed to see that there was only one session at Build that had to do with SharePoint. I was really, really disappointed actually because I was really hoping that we would get new stuff for SharePoint. You know, it’s such an important part of Microsoft 365 that I was really hoping that we wouldn’t have to wait until Ignite for any big announcements. So, at first, I was disappointed, but as I started looking through the different blog posts that Microsoft did, I found quite a few important announcements.

First of all, SharePoint Embedded is now in general availability. For those of you who don’t know SharePoint Embedded, I’ll try to explain it here in 10 seconds. Think of it as a SharePoint site without any user interface. You still have all of the functionality of libraries, lists, and everything available via API. So, if you want to build a custom application that stores documents and manages lists, you don’t have to rebuild everything. You can have your own UI hosted in Azure or wherever you want it, and then you can still keep your files inside SharePoint and have all the benefits of SharePoint, such as versioning and all your compliance features. But you can build 100% of your own UI. Think of it really as a light SharePoint with no UI that you can build on top of. When I was working in the intranet space, I really wished we had this option. It would have been amazing. Well, now it’s in general availability, so if you were waiting for it to be GA before you could run production apps on it, now you can.

Moving on, the next features that we will talk about are Microsoft 365 Archive and Microsoft 365 Backup. First of all, Microsoft 365 Archive is now generally available, which is awesome, and Microsoft 365 Backup is now in public preview. So, if you want to test it out, you can now go ahead and test it out. Another new feature is Microsoft 365 Backup Storage, which is now in private preview but will be in public preview soon. What is M365 Backup Storage? This gives developers a way to provide customers with the same benefits as the native backup solution through their own integrated applications. So, think of it again as using all the backends of Microsoft 365 Backup but having your own custom solution and your own custom UI, which again is amazing.

But the SharePoint announcement I am the most excited about is enhanced version controls, which are finally in public preview. Why am I so excited and why do I say finally? Because this item was added to the roadmap in June 2023. That is almost one year ago, which, to be honest, at the speed that things are moving today, one year feels like forever ago. So, what is this feature? This feature allows you to limit the number of file versions kept in OneDrive accounts as well as SharePoint document libraries, which allows you to save on storage. Now, I’ve seen it with my own clients. I work with a CISIT, which helps organizations manage their storage as well. In the industry as a whole, we reached a point where organizations are reaching the top of their pooled storage and they’re starting to pay extra money to Microsoft for storage. Now that versioning is enabled by default and people have autosave on, we create so many versions, which just creates a lot of storage needs. Well, now as an admin, we can have settings that, for example, we can say that you know what, we go in manual and we say only keep the last 100 major versions or delete the versions after 180 days. This way, we don’t have a ton of files with 500 versions that are all two years old, taking up storage for nothing. So, we have a manual mode that we can configure by either the number of versions or how long ago the version was created and delete them after a certain period of time, or automatic. Now, I’m sure that a lot of you will ask me, “Vlad, what does automatic mean?” As I tried to go into the documentation, I realized that Microsoft is pointing to their private learn.microsoft.com. So, at the review.learn.microsoft.com, I’m not authorized to even see it. So, unfortunately, I don’t have all the details about what automatic means. I do have an idea because as a Microsoft MVP, they told us some of the magic behind it, but I’m not sure what got shipped with the product. So, what I will do is, as soon as that goes public and as soon as I’m able to test it out and test a few things, I will go in and do more of a deep dive video on how the automatic mode works and versioning. But because this is an admin video, before you see it in the user interface like I had over here, there are a few things that you need to do. Well, we have to do it with the SharePoint admin’s best friend, which is PowerShell. So, before we enable the public preview, you need to activate it via PowerShell. And don’t do as I did originally; make sure that you update your PowerShell module for SharePoint Online before. If you see the same error as I did here, it’s because you haven’t updated your module. Make sure to close PowerShell, reopen it, and update the module.

SharePoint Embedded and Microsoft 365 Archive are now GA. Microsoft 365 Backup is now in public preview, so we can all finally test it. After that, Backup Storage is more of a dev thing, so it doesn’t matter as much for us, but just so you know it exists in case you ever want to use it. For the enhanced version controls, make sure you go test it. There are reports you can do, there are so many things that you can do with it. Make sure you go check it out and see if you can save any storage inside your tenant.

Now, let’s move on to Microsoft Teams. First of all, for Teams, we will finally get custom emojis. So now, you’ll be able to add a custom emoji using whatever logo you want in there. This will become available in June. I know that not every admin feels the same about the fun settings inside Microsoft Teams, whether it’s GIFs, memes, or all of that. Admins will be able to decide who can upload emojis. So, make sure that you start thinking about that, and you’ll be able to configure it starting in June when the public preview of this feature will hit your tenant. So, start thinking about it. Nothing to do today, but June is only two weeks from now, so it’s something to start planning.

We then have new admin controls. First of all, we have a new setting that allows us to prevent users from sharing content in externally hosted meetings. This feature is only for Teams Premium, so you need Teams Premium to have this feature. In the setting, you can specify in which externally hosted meetings users are able to share content. It can be either no other organization, so if it’s not hosted by a user inside your company, if it’s somebody outside your company that sent a meeting invite, don’t allow them to share content, including the screen, or trusted organizations and guests, where you will have a setting where you can set up what are the trusted organizations and guests that you have, and then you’ll be able to share only in meetings organized either by your company or people from those trusted organizations and guests.

Now, for our next feature, this is a small one but can be valuable for many companies. You can now configure a different domain for the Teams email service. So, you know when we get notifications from Teams, “Hey, you missed a call, you missed some messages, here’s what happened in the past few days.” Well, now you can configure those notifications to come from your domain or from another domain than the Microsoft default one. That is great. Small feature again, but I know it can have a lot of impact, especially for phishing prevention.

To continue on new admin controls, we will now have the ability to select which file service will be used by default when users upload files from their local devices by using the drag-and-drop functionality, whether it’s in a chat or a channel. By default, I mean we could always add third-party services for file storage to Teams, but people had to use the upload button to go there. If they did drag and drop, it would always go to SharePoint or OneDrive. Well, now we can configure the default behavior even for drag and drop, so the drag and drop file can go into a third-party file management service. If this is useful for you, go configure it. I’m sure your users will love it.

Next up, our next feature is managing who can record and transcribe meetings. This is not as much of an admin feature as it is a Teams owner feature, but if you have Teams Premium, you can now decide if only organizers, co-organizers, and presenters can record and transcribe, or anyone from the meeting. So again, a small feature but can add a lot of privacy value, something you should talk to your users about.

Okay, for our final topic, let’s go and talk about Copilot. If any of you ever wondered how many times did Microsoft say the word “Copilot” inside a keynote, you have it over there. I added the video to Microsoft Stream and created a transcript. Then I asked Copilot in Stream how many times did they mention the word “Copilot,” and it’s 139 times. So, wow, that is quite a lot.

Okay, so what did we get new for Copilot? First of all, let’s talk about Copilot and SharePoint. We will now have the ability to create a Copilot directly from a SharePoint site. Now, why is this super important for admins? This is a text directly from Microsoft. Beyond only the site owner or admins, anyone who has edit permissions on a site, such as a site member by default, can now create a Copilot for the site with only a few clicks, and no coding skills required. Now, don’t get me wrong, this is awesome in a way that anybody can create a Copilot without any technical skills, but I can’t wait to see the admin controls we will have around it. Because as much as, again, I’m all for low code and all of that, but I don’t want to have 15 different Copilots on the same site. I don’t want to have a “when to use what” Copilot. So they haven’t talked about any admin controls, but just be ready for it, and I’ll show you a bit of how it works.

So you have the “Create a Copilot” button here that I showed you before. Then you just give it a name, an image, you tell it what documents to be grounded in because that’s the benefit. You can ground it in only some documents on that SharePoint site. You can test it in there. You can even add some starter prompts, for example, as well as instructions. So if you wanted to have some instructions for the base without the user specifying it, you can add them in the instructions for the Copilot there. And then people can publish it in SharePoint as well as in Microsoft Teams. Again, awesome functionality. I can’t wait to test it, and I love the idea that we’re able to do this. But as an IT pro, I hope we’re going to get some admin controls on it, whether it’s having a security group that’s able to do them or only site owners and not site members.

Now, I really hope we’ll have those controls in place. They haven’t talked about any of that yet, so know about it. Go play with the preview as soon as it becomes available later this year. And once it’s available, I’ll create more content on how to control it as an admin.

Now, another Copilot news, and this one is pretty important. It’s a brand new Copilot that’s actually not really a brand new Copilot. It’s a new type of Copilot that we have available now, which is the Team Copilot. Let’s play the video here in the back. And instead of having a personal AI assistant, we will now have a Team Copilot. So it’s not my Copilot as a user; we have it in the team. We can add it to meetings. We can tell it what we want it to do, like, “Hey Team Copilot, take some notes,” or “Hey Team Copilot, schedule follow-ups.” So it’s kind of like having an executive assistant for a specific team. Now, is that team a project team, or a department team? I guess we will be able to decide how it works. We don’t have too many details now. We’ve only seen the video, and I can’t wait to see it in action. But it’s definitely something to start thinking about. If your organization doesn’t have a Copilot for each and every user, does having a Team Copilot help? Does that make sense for you?

Now, Team Copilot will be in preview later this year, and you will need to have a Microsoft 365 Copilot license in order to have access to the preview. Again, I can’t wait to try it as an admin. Start thinking about where it makes sense. Are there any users for that maybe we don’t want to have a Copilot for each one of them, but we want to have a Copilot per team, maybe? I can’t wait to see the licensing as well. Right now, Microsoft said that you need a Copilot for M365 license for the preview. I don’t know if that’s the final license for general availability yet. They haven’t talked about it, but I can’t wait to learn more about Team Copilot. So take a look at the links. I’ll add a bunch of links below in the description where you can learn more.

Now, as much as I did really want to cover anything for devs, it’s still important for us as IT professionals. Microsoft announced a bunch of new ways to extend Copilot for Microsoft 365, so from Copilot connectors to Copilot plugins and many different ways to build them, from no code with Copilot Studio to pro code with Visual Studio Code. Again, not necessarily an IT pro thing, but we still need to understand how can our company extend it and how can we make sure that our developers are using it the right way. So if you need to extend Copilot in your organization, make sure you take a look at the build sessions. I’ll put a link in the description that covers everything about Copilot extensibility.

This is it. Thank you so much for watching. I hope if you’re a Microsoft 365 administrator, you found this valuable, and I hope you’re going to go in and test some of those features as they become available. If you enjoyed this video, make sure you like it, and make sure you subscribe to the channel. This way, you get notified first when I post brand new videos, whether certification news or news from conferences like this one. Thank you so much for listening.