Missed the Microsoft 365 Community Conference? We’ve got the keynote recap you need. Join me and MVP Gokan Ozcifci as we break down the biggest updates from the event:
👥1B+ SharePoint users & 2B weekly Power Automate flows
🤖New Copilot Notebooks, Researcher Agents & audio recaps
📄SharePoint gets flexible layouts, AI-powered FAQs & smarter autofill
📆Big leaps in Teams meeting recaps and agent governance in SharePoint Advanced Management
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Video Summary
- Impressive User Numbers: The keynote highlighted significant user statistics, including over 1 billion active SharePoint users and 320 million monthly active Teams users. Additionally, there are 2 billion Power Automate flows running through SharePoint weekly.
- New Features and Enhancements: The keynote introduced several new features, such as the ability to create sections with Copilot in SharePoint, a new FAQ web part, and the integration of OneDrive data with SharePoint agents.
- Teams Updates: Microsoft Teams focuses on becoming more secure, simple, and smart. New features include a combined view for chats and teams, meeting recap updates, and the introduction of facilitator agents for AI notes and translation.
- SharePoint Innovations: SharePoint is becoming more flexible with new design capabilities, such as drag-and-drop elements and creating context-aware sections. The platform also introduced a new FAQ web part powered by AI.
- Governance and Security: The keynote emphasized the importance of governance and security, with new tools for admins to manage permissions, govern agents, and apply policies across sites using semantic matching.
For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!
Transcript
Hello everyone. We are live from the Microsoft 365 community conference in Las Vegas, the biggest Microsoft 365 community event across the globe. I’m joined today by my good friend Gokan Ozcifci. Gokan, how are you doing?
Fantastic! Amazing! Very, very happy to be here this year with you again. So very proud to be with you here on that video about the keynote. I know I missed you on the last two, so I’m so happy you’re back. And both of us, not even 30 minutes ago, came out of the keynote of the Microsoft 365 conference, where we had some of the biggest names in Microsoft 365 show us what’s new and what’s next.
Let me get started with the numbers. I marked them down because if not, I will forget. I know you all love to get an update on the numbers. The first one is quite impressive. We have over 1 billion active users in SharePoint, and Jeff was really proud of that number. He did preface it on what that 1 billion includes because the cool thing is SharePoint powers a lot of M365, but now it also powers SharePoint embedded custom apps and OneDrive personal, which runs on SharePoint in the back as well. So, for all of you who have been saying SharePoint is dying, I have bad news for you. SharePoint is alive, well, and over 1 billion people use it, which is an amazing number.
It is. It feels like 1 billion users. Another even bigger number—I didn’t think we were going to get bigger than 1 billion—but there are 2 billion Power Automate flows that go through SharePoint every single week. Not every month, every single week. That’s an impressive number. I was surprised when I heard that. That’s impressive.
Now let’s switch over to millions. I feel like we have to get back a bit to reality. Talking about Teams a bit, we have 320 million monthly active users in Teams, which is a huge number. But you know what surprises me, Gokan? In the last earnings report, Microsoft said it had 430 million paid Office 365 and Microsoft 365 users. So that means there are 100 million people licensed for Teams that are not using it every month. So much growth opportunity.
It is. And finally, let’s talk about something brand new: Agents. As you all know, Microsoft has been all about agents lately. Microsoft has 1 million agents that are grounded on SharePoint. That includes SharePoint agents and Copilot Studio agents grounded in SharePoint. Those were the highlights for the numbers. Now that they’re out of my head, we can talk about new stuff. So, Gokan, what happened at the keynotes?
Yeah, I have some notes on my phone. Basically, Jeff Teper, super energetic, came in running as usual to the stage, and then he just explained to us about the four pillars he wanted to explain. The first one was about M365 Copilot and agents, then Teams, then SharePoint, and finally Power Platform, which is basically Copilot Studio. He started his keynote by thanking us, thanking the community, thanking the partners, and emphasizing that we leave our family home and bring that excitement here in Las Vegas for their tools and products. SharePoint is going to become 25 years old next year, right? He said there would be a big anniversary for next year. So if you plan to come, if you’ve never been here, next year is the spot to be here.
There you go. Well, I prefer Las Vegas, but if it’s Orlando, it’s Orlando. If it’s San Francisco, San Francisco. I’m happy with anywhere in the US. Just be at the conference. They started the keynote with the Frontier program first. Vlad, do you want to mention something about the program?
Sure. The Frontier program includes all of the latest innovations that Microsoft is bringing, such as the researcher agent, for example. They even shared some statistics around companies that they consider at the frontier and how successful they are compared to organizations that have not embraced the latest technology. It was quite eye-opening to see those work trend indexes and the statistics from that, and how it can impact the company in the end.
Talking about the researcher agent, I know you really like that one.
I really love the researcher agent. They even made a few demos around that. In a few clicks and a few seconds, they were able to create a whole marketing plan for the release of a new shoe. I really loved it. When we talk about shoes, you know, you were phenomenal with your shoes. They could really do that in a couple of seconds. That demo was really impressive. I know because of my background back in time with Valo when I worked for the marketing team, that plan could take us weeks to do, and now it takes a couple of seconds.
But not only that, they also talked about notebooks, like Copilot notebooks. That was impressive to me as well. She just created a notebook in Copilot and then just gave a name, and from that name, Copilot could just render a list of documents that she could use.
Right. Let’s recap what notebooks are for people, because I’m not sure I like the name notebooks. People who paid more than I have decided that. For those of you who have used ChatGPT projects in ChatGPT, it’s exactly the same functionality. Basically, you’re able to create a notebook, a project, have a starter prompt to kind of already tell your AI tool, whether ChatGPT or Copilot, what that notebook is about, how it should answer, all the basic things you should have in a prompt, what the goal is, how it should answer, and everything. You can even ground it in specific documents. I know that’s the part you mentioned. They just entered the name for that notebook, and it found the documents for you.
She just selected those documents,s and then she could just work on that and even create some data, publish them as a durable asset into Copilot pages.
You know what I really thought for a second? This looks like Viva Topics. The fact that she created a knowledge base, put some articles, had some data, I was like, “Oh my gosh, Viva Topics, I still love you. You left us too soon.” But that’s another story, right?
That’s another story. Something else in notebooks, we also had the audio recap.
Yeah. So now, for those of you who have something that Gemini had for a while, I forgot what the name is in Gemini, the name of the feature. I’m sure we’ll put it in the lower third below when I remember a bit later. But basically, you’re able to give it a piece of content, and then you can have the AI summarize it for you in the form of a podcast. So many people don’t learn when they just read stuff, but when they see two people having a conversation about that stuff, then they can relate to it.
Absolutely. Now, you know what I wonder? I tried to use the Google stuff, okay? The voices they gave me were like, you know, and I’m sorry for the stereotype, everybody, but it was like the California podcaster voice. It was like, “Oh my god, you won’t believe what they just did.” It was just so exciting, like an influencer podcast that I was not able to take seriously. That’s okay for a consumer tool, but I really wonder if, for an enterprise tool like Copilot, I can dial up or down the excitement level? Can I have it more professionally sounding, or can I have it all in influencer mode? It remains to be seen, I guess.
Yeah, probably. I don’t know. Do you like the influencer mode?
It was okay. I was not that shocked, but it’s okay. I get your point. That’s okay. Finally, they finished that first part, the first pillar, by showing the create option in Copilot, where they just created an image. They just added that image by adding text and adjusting the color—really important stuff for that image. It’s able to connect to your brand center in SharePoint. That’s the part I love the most. I want to continue on that. The good thing is that you can connect with your organization’s colors. That’s what the image showed us on the demo. I’m sneaking at your notes right now. But yes, you can have custom fonts. For Blackbox Tech, I use Cascadia Code, which is not a default font, but now I can have my AI image generator use that custom font. It’s amazing. Researcher notebooks, create, search, all those things we have seen. That’s the summary of everything new, the first thing that we have seen.
Then we moved to Microsoft Teams, where Jeff Teper started the second part by the 3S: secure, simple, and smart. I love that they use a 3S model. I don’t really agree with all that they’ve been showing me because Teams is getting slower and slower and slower. I get a lot of bugs, unfortunately, but hey, that’s another discussion. That’s why they want to aim to do that. They started the keynote with new core UX changes and announcements, like the fact that now Teams and chats are all in one pane. That’s how they started. I’m curious about everybody watching this. Please let me know in the comments: Do you prefer to have your chats and Teams separated? That’s how I prefer it, to be honest. Or do you like the new combined view? I’m curious to get that post from the community. So let me know in the comments below which one you prefer. I’m betting 99% will say separate, like you and like myself.
Well, I think it’s the people who come from a Slack background that don’t have Teams, only channels in a way. They prefer the combined, but you know…
You’re saying you prefer Slack more than Teams?
No, no, no. Let’s say no. Okay, then the most important part for me and the thing I really loved was the recap meeting updates they announced. Being able to ask for a meeting recap, and then you even get the shared screen as a response. That was pretty amazing, right? I’ve been doing that demo forever, showing up late at a meeting, and you would only get the recap, which, don’t get me wrong, was already amazing. But now you get that screenshot of the shared screen. Wow. And not only that, but even a whiteboard. They had somebody in front of a whiteboard write text by hand, so it was even able to detect that part. That was truly amazing. That’s something I wish we had a year ago, but I guess I’m happy we have it now. It’s just mind-blowing that we have it. It’s a game changer.
Then the keynote, well, the second part of the keynote, finished by introducing again the agents, like the facilitator agents for AI notes, the interpreter agent for translation. We had a real demo where the other lady in the meeting talked Spanish, if I’m not wrong, and then it translated automatically to English. Then, a planner premium P3 project manager agent. That was something new for me, but you told me why.
Yeah, I told you why. The unfortunate reason is that the project manager agent is not new, but it’s tough to get. Why? Because you need to have an M365 Copilot license, and then you need to have a planner P3 premium license. So it’s not the planner included, it’s not the P1 at $10 per user per month, it’s like $60 per user per month in addition to your M365 Copilot license. That’s why you don’t have it, because you need to start paying, Gokan. Come on.
I’ll ask my manager. I’m a Microsoft shareholder, so come on. I’ll ask my manager. Okay, so that was it for the Teams part. I guess we covered all that they said. Then, the most important of all, SharePoint. SharePoint, right? Jeff Teper started a bit nostalgic because I think he is aware that 25 years is a lot. He just showed the old wheel, the first wheel, I guess, created by Microsoft, and then he just showed the updated version of that wheel. I was like, I’m getting old. If I say that, I don’t imagine what Jeff Teper would say. Are you saying Jeff is old? Okay, next question.
Then they started with the flexible sections. I do a lot of site design for my customers, and I love the fact that we can now just drag and drop elements almost anywhere. You know what I love about that is the flexibility and beautiful design of WordPress, with the content management capabilities and enterprise readiness of SharePoint. SharePoint was always an amazing tool, but it was tough to make it pretty. When we worked at Valo, I know we were making SharePoint pretty in a way. Now you’re able to have that flexibility of WordPress and that kind of Wix drag and drop, wherever you want or Elementor, but in an enterprise tool. It’s amazing.
I remember when we talked like a month or two ago, when I said I have a dream to have one single web part which we could call the SharePoint universal web part, which is also something from Valo, right? Then I could talk to that web part and say, “Hey, I’d like to have a section which is divided into, on the left side, you just add a divider with a few texts and on the right side, the hero web part.” But that’s again something me asking way too much, I guess. Then we also saw the ability to add a section with Copilot, right?
Yes, that was also pretty cool because it’s grounded in the context. It’s able to understand the site, the rest of the page, so when you add a new section, you just tell it what you expect. It’s so much better at giving you something closer to what you expect. They also said that it was context-aware, meaning that it will check for your design, check for double, so pretty solid.
Then we went for the brand new, very new announcement, the FAQ web part based on AI. You explain what the FAQ web part is, and then I’ll tell you why I love it.
Okay, so FAQs, we all love them. Every information knowledge manager loves to have FAQs. Basically, now you have a web part where you can just upload a document and tell your web part, “Hey, could you just create an FAQ based on that document?” Then, in three steps, you just select your chapters, the questions and answers, and then you just publish that all based on Copilot.
You know what I loved about it is that too many AI tools; you just tell it, “I want an FAQ,” and then in one step, it gives you everything. With the FAQ web part, you mentioned it briefly, but I want to really emphasize that the first thing it will return to you is the categories. It’s not going to give you the questions and answers right away. Let’s agree on the categories, order them the way you want, and after that, generate questions. This way, you’re not overloaded as a user with, “Oh, it gave me this big thing. I don’t like the categories. I don’t like the questions.” You hate it. But if you go one step at a time, you manage to kind of say, “Hey, I don’t like these two things here,” rather than those ten things in the final result. Your result will be so much better, faster.
Love what’s next. And what’s next? The last part was OneDrive. OneDrive, remember that? I was like, “Wow, this is what we need,” because what we have seen is when you create an agent in SharePoint, now you get the chance to also upload data from your OneDrive as a source and also save this as a personal OneDrive. I was like, “Wow, this is something that we need.” That’s amazing. Imagine you create an agent; it’s not good for everybody, but you can have your agent in OneDrive.
There’s something that we’re not sure about, and we’re doing this 30 minutes after the keynote, so we’d rather not tell you a fake thing. We can place the image just here. But, in the UI, it said you can choose stuff from SharePoint or OneDrive. Now we’re not sure if you can mix and match them or not. Once you select OneDrive, is it OneDrive only, or is it still SharePoint and OneDrive? We’ll find that out. I guess we should do an updated SharePoint agents video soon, once that’s in production.
Then we had a very brief update about the new forms experience, but it was literally 10 seconds, right? It was very fast. Then we went into autofill, something that you and I really love because we are content AI lovers. We’ve been using autofill, and they also announced the new feature that whenever you have a document library and you add some data, it will suggest those brand new columns and fill in data into them. It’s not only using a prompt to extract that information, but it’s also telling you the columns that you need. It’s amazing.
Then the last pillar was all about Power Platform-ish, Copilot Studio-ish, where we just saw how you could edit basically an agent with Copilot Studio and then save that in Teams live. Something they said, which they didn’t click on it when they were building the SharePoint agent, they said you can now edit it in Copilot Studio. The button is there today, but it opens a pop-up that says “coming soon.” They didn’t click on it. They said it’s available, but I’ll believe it when I see it because it’s been there for a couple of months.
Then the keynote was done. Jeff Teper had done an amazing job. Thank you again, Jeff, for all that you’re doing for the community, for the product, and for our lives. Then we had a brief 50-minute break, and then we started the second keynote, which was all about security. Honestly, half of it was not even for me because it was not M365. It was really about Windows 365, Defender, things like that. But we still had some amazing features coming through SAM, which is your baby, right? Should I just list what we have seen, and you go for it, or do you just want to jump in because I already see you excited to talk about SAM?
Time is here, you know. I’ll try and cover everything, and you tell me if I miss anything. First thing new in SAM, we have a brand new report to check the permissions of a specific user. Let’s say that I want to see what Gokan has access to inside my tenant because I don’t trust that guy. I can go type in Gokan, I can type in a security group, and it will show me a list of all the places Gokan has access to. Maybe I look at them, and there are some of them I’m not sure if Gokan should have access to them, but I don’t know every site inside my tenant. So I can start an access review only on those sites. That was one of them.
After that, let’s talk agents. The biggest problem with agent adoption is governance. Admins want to be able to govern them, but we didn’t have the tools. This changes today, at least in the slides. At least in the slides. Two new SharePoint agent reports. The first one is all the agents that you have. You’re going to see the agents that you have per site, how many people have access to them, all of that. Another one in SharePoint, you’re able to see which sites are most accessed by SharePoint agents. They didn’t really go into the reports. They showed us they’re there, but we haven’t seen the results from those reports. Continuing with SAM, a feature that I actually have in my tenant now, I can talk about it is semantic matching. As admins, we don’t know the content on our sites, but let’s say I have a site with financial data. I can select it, and then I can tell SharePoint to find me all the other sites that have this type of data. It will go through all the sites in my tenant and find all of them that also have financial data. Then I can say apply the same policies because maybe I want to block downloads on all the sites with financial data. I can do that to all the sites. Something really interesting, I’m not sure if you knew that, Gokan, but it does not use Purview sensitive information types. It uses a semantic index. So it actually doesn’t need sensitivity labels or DLP for that to work. It just uses AI.
I think that’s it for SAM. Then we went to the M365 admin center, which also covers your Copilot Studio agents, your agent builder agents. What we have there are a bunch of new reports. First of all, we’re able to see all our agents, whether they are used or not. We’re also able to block who can create agents. For specific agents, we can say, “You know what, this is an HR agent. I don’t want Gokan to have access to it.” I’m sorry, so I can limit it to certain people.
They are doing a lot of work. I’ll say they’re doing a lot. Did I remember everything?
Everything was done, so I’m just taking it over because you’re too excited when it’s about SAM. They are just investing a lot in agents, and we can see it. Copilot and now its agents, and all the infrastructure is getting ready for agents. I know you have given that feedback like, “Hey Microsoft, please love us admins and give us some governance tools.” You’re getting them slowly but surely.
I know Adam made fun of me on LinkedIn for that comment, but you have to find the comment for you to understand. I think that’s about it. We covered all the highlights from the keynote. Of course, like Gokan said, the security keynote also had a whole other bunch of content about Windows 365, Defender, how to use AI security to secure AI, and things like that, like how to find jailbreaking prompts or things like that. There’s a lot of stuff there, but I feel like for M365 admins and the audience as well, while some of them found it really interesting, a lot of them were like, “This is amazing, but I don’t have the permissions to do it, so I’m not the one doing it.”
This is it, Gokan. Before we’re done, if you had to choose one feature or at least a set of features, what would it be?
Well, for Teams it would be the…
No, no, no. One. You’ve got to pick one.
Autofill for SharePoint.
Then autofill for SharePoint. Okay. Then, of course, my heart is on SAM, especially now that Microsoft is doing stuff for IT pros. Having those SAM features to govern agents is amazing. Second is Copilot notebooks.
You said only one. I could only choose one.
No, I could only choose one. You choose only one. It’s my channel, so I can just sort of get… But no, I said the first one is SAM and agents. That’s my favorite one on this.
Thank you so much, everyone. For those of you who missed the conference, I really hope that this takes some of that FOMO away because now you’ve seen everything that Microsoft announced. If you found this valuable, Gokan and I are going to record a bunch of other content at the conference. Make sure you follow Vlad Talk Tech on YouTube and subscribe to the channel to get the latest news.
