TOP Microsoft 365 Conference 2024 Keynote Highlights | Copilot, Teams, and More

The Microsoft 365 Conference 2024 Keynote focused on what’s possible today, and teased the future. Get all the top M365 Community Conference keynote highlights from two Microsoft MVPs, Vlad Catrinescu and Gokan Ozcifci!

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Video Summary

Here are the key points from the video:

• Conference Highlights: The Microsoft 365 Community Conference in Orlando featured over 3,000 attendees and 300 Microsoft representatives, focusing heavily on co-pilot, Teams, and SharePoint.
• Keynote Recap: Jeff Teper’s keynote emphasized current features and updates rather than future releases, with a strong focus on security and responsible AI.
• Teams and SharePoint Updates: Teams now boasts 320 million monthly active users, and SharePoint sees 2.5 billion documents uploaded daily. New features include voice isolation in Teams and co-pilot integration in OneDrive and SharePoint.
• Stream Enhancements: A new feature in Stream allows users to edit video transcripts directly, simplifying video editing without needing expensive software.
• Upcoming Events: The speakers hinted at more detailed sessions on SharePoint Premium and announced their next appearance at the European Power Platform Conference in Brussels.

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

Video Transcript

Hello everybody, we’re in sunny Orlando at the Microsoft 365 Community Conference. Goen, this is day one. What do you think so far?

Absolutely amazed by the quality, the venue, the weather, and literally everything. I’m pretty happy to be here, Lance. Especially the weather; it snowed not even a week ago in Canada, so I’m super happy to be here for the weather. But also, 3,000 people this week at the 365 Community Conference. I think this is the biggest one since the SharePoint Conference back then. Something we learned during the keynote today was that we have over 300 people from Microsoft here, from all different levels—from executives to product groups to marketing, and a lot of customer-focused and partner-focused people as well. So, over 300 people to connect with and ask questions, which is amazing. It’s all about co-pilots, the age of co-pilots.

Let’s get into the topic of the keynote, Goen. The keynote just finished not even an hour ago. Do you want to get started? What do you think was one of the big topics of the keynote? And you’re not allowed to use the word “co-pilot.”

Oh, that’s going to be very difficult, but let me try. So, Jeff Teper, a big classic, just ran to the main stage and started his show. It was pretty amazing because we got the three main pillars: the forbidden words—you can’t say co-pilot, Teams, and SharePoint. He gave all the exciting features they’re working on, stuff they have been releasing and have released. It was more a recap of all they have done in the last year, and at the end, a few exciting to-be-announced features.

I think we also have to be aware that this conference is happening right now. We are recording this on April 30th, but there’s a big Microsoft conference happening at the end of May, which is Microsoft Build. When you have a conference that is close to one of the two big Microsoft events of the year, you never know how many announcements you are going to get. But something that was very different for me compared to the usual Jeff keynotes is that it was a lot more about what we have today. It was not about stuff coming in six months or twelve months; it was about the stuff we have today. Jeff actually compared the transition we are going through right now—from not using AI to having co-pilot and using AI—to what we went through in about 2014 when companies were like, “Am I really going to move to the cloud? Is the cloud really worth it?” So, we’re in that sort of transition again.

There was a big focus on something at the beginning, a big word that starts with “S.” Goen, which one is it?

Security? No, no, security. I’m just joking. You dirty mind, Goen has a dirty mind. I’m talking about security.

Okay, my bad, my apologies.

No, that’s okay, Goen. Responsible AI and responsible IT. There is a lot of focus on the fact that the co-pilot is safe, co-pilot is secure, and on all the compliance parts of the co-pilot. Jeff made a solid statement about that: the prompts and data belong to us, and Microsoft will never use them to train their models. The data that we get or the generative AI responses that we get are secured. We will only see stuff that we are able to see, and there is no leak or something like that. Those two solid statements were made by Jeff to reassure people if they still had questions about whether co-pilot is safe and secure, and whether they can see data from their manager, and so on. That’s one of the big advantages of co-pilot versus using ChatGPT-3 or Gemini or Claude. If you don’t have the enterprise subscription, which is as expensive as co-pilot and has fewer features, you’re sharing that data on those free services. Whereas with co-pilot, part of that money you pay is for commercial-grade data protection.

Now, let’s talk about the pillars. The first pillar was a co-pilot. Goen, did we see anything new about the co-pilot?

To be honest, no. We have seen how you could use co-pilot, a few very nice prompts, the difference between the web and the work, as well as an introduction to a co-pilot studio where you could actually have connectors going to SAP, retrieving data, and responding to a co-pilot. New? I wouldn’t say yes, but exciting stuff that people who never seen it would find very good.

Awesome. Yeah, I agree with you. We didn’t really see anything new, but we saw all the stuff that was released. I think still, for a lot of people at the conference, co-pilot is still at that new stage where the fact that they had live demos on a keynote—yes, all the demos were live—this was something that you don’t see often in keynotes. We went from having co-pilot only as pre-recorded demos to now having them as live demos, which shows the maturity of the product.

Now, let’s switch over to the second pillar, which is Microsoft Teams. Four favorites?

Well, I’m not sure because SharePoint is in my heart.

Okay, yeah, but Teams—how many users? They said about 320 million monthly active users. That’s still a lot. I’m sure we’ll get to 700, but for now, only 320 million.

Why 700 million?

I don’t know why. That’s how much you owe me. I had that in mind for some reason.

You just got to write me the check because Jeff shared numbers with us, which he never did publicly. May I state them now?

Sure.

He told us that we had more than 2.5 billion files per day coming to the cloud to M365, as well as half a million SharePoint sites per day. Can you imagine those numbers? They’re pretty phenomenal.

That is crazy. That’s 2.5 billion documents per day to the cloud and 500 new SharePoint sites. I kind of learned a new word today, Goen: exabytes. Most people look at storage in gigabytes, or some people who use it a lot talk terabytes. Microsoft is now talking exabytes. How much storage is that? We have terabytes, petabytes, and then exabytes. That’s a lot of zeros at the end.

That’s a lot of zeros. How many zeros, Goen?

I would say nine is a billion, twelve is a trillion, so fifteen?

We’re going to have to fact-check that in post-editing. Please cut it if it’s not true.

We’re going to have to fact-check you in the post and see how much an actual exabyte is. But yes, 11 exabytes of content and the servers running SharePoint have, what is it, 64 million cores of CPU? Again, big numbers. I can’t even imagine what it looks like because those numbers are so big.

Okay, we talked a bit about SharePoint. Any closing thoughts for Teams before we switch over?

We had nice demos such as voice isolation. There was a real meeting going on with a lot of noise, and the keynote speaker joined the meeting. There were people outside of the room, so it was really cool to have that real demo effect that shows the maturity of the features. But nothing really new for Teams, right? Did I miss anything?

No, mesh, Teams recap, co-pilot prompts, and so on. All classic stuff that we already knew. But again, if you have 3,000 people, I’m pretty sure 20% have never heard about that, so it’s always good to refresh the memories and show existing stuff. It was pretty good.

Okay, now SharePoint. We actually had some really cool stuff. Let’s start with OneDrive co-pilot. When are we getting it?

Now, in summer. This year, summer. Co-pilot will be GA.

That’s what she said.

That’s what she said. Michelle said it. I don’t think everyone really understood that. There was no big applause or something like that, but we’re letting you know.

I’ll be honest, I was a bit disappointed by that because if you look at the roadmap, initially it was supposed to go GA in May. I was honestly expecting that Jeff would come up on stage and say, “OneDrive co-pilot, by the way, log in and you have it.” For, for you, for you, for you, for thinking co-pilot again on the M365 roadmap, it should go GA in May, and yet we didn’t really hear when.

For OneDrive, we know it’s coming to GA in the summer. For SharePoint, no ETA has been delivered or said to us. We have seen, however, one image or one little demo video about the SharePoint co-pilot where you can build beautiful and flexible sites. It was really beautiful, the way the prompt was structured and the way they created the site. I did not know co-pilot in SharePoint would be that good. It was really good to see it, but I can’t wait to get my hands on it, especially since I’m paying for my own M365 co-pilot subscription. I can’t wait to have it and play with it.

To be honest, when I saw it for the first time, it was a quite different experience from the co-pilot that we knew from Outlook, Excel, Teams, and so on. It looks a bit different, but we have to see it. Let’s wait for summer, and we’ll have a preview of OneDrive and hopefully learn about SharePoint.

Another Copilot I wanted to talk about is Copilot in Stream and more. Copilot in Stream was on the roadmap for May 2024 GA, but we didn’t really hear anything about it. However, we got shown a really cool feature that I had no idea Microsoft was working on, which is transcript editing for your video. So, you create a nice video, upload it to Stream, and then instead of opening up Adobe Camtasia or any other tool and manually cutting, the AI will create a transcript for you. You can edit it as a Word document, which will edit the actual video, so you don’t need to pay for expensive video editors anymore because AI will just do it for you.

Even in the second keynote, after the main one, we saw a video about how you can edit real videos, change the rotation of people talking in a video, change the colors, and even change the way they smile. They just showed the video, and it was pretty amazing. I would say this is going to change the video world if we can do that well. The thing is, we can already do a lot of it. I pay for Camtasia, which has that transcript functionality, which is amazing. But I pay $20 a month for that. Now, with Copilot, I can save $20 a month because Microsoft will have it in M365, so I am super excited about that.

What else did we see in the keynote? We saw a lot of SharePoint premium features, e-signatures, and a lot of Viva demos, as well as a bunch of other stuff that we enjoyed. But there was really nothing new, nothing new as we knew about everything. E-signature has been there for a while. The feature was announced like six months ago, so we’re still waiting for it. But those features, for new people, are big news.

Right after the keynote, we had a second keynote, which was branded as a General Session, but it was still the only session at that time, so I’ll call it the second keynote. The second keynote was all about Copilot. There was nothing really new except one thing, which you liked. Most of the session was a recap of Copilot, educating people on what you can do with Copilot today. No real new features except one of them. Soon, we will get usage reports about Copilot, and you know what? It’s free. We’re not going to pay for it. We will be able to know which tool we are using Copilot and prompts, maybe Word, Excel, or PowerPoint, and we will get those reports and dashboards in the Compliance Center and Security. Those dashboards will help us understand how the usage is for Copilot, so that was pretty amazing.

He also said that we will get more admin features in the Admin Center soon, coming to Copilot. I love admin features. Lastly, there was a huge blog post dropped on the Tech Community about all the cool stuff that Microsoft started shipping in SharePoint Premium. It was not really covered in the keynotes, but I know there’s going to be a general session later today, so we should maybe go attend that and do another video where we can really deep dive into the SharePoint Premium stuff.

One thing I really want to say is thank you, Microsoft, because when they showed the recap in Teams or e-signatures and autofill, they didn’t mention the premium. They just made it as if it was part of the tool, which I think is a pretty strategic move because you’re not confusing people. The message was clear: we have a lot of those features, and if you want to use them, maybe the licensing is different, but some companies don’t care about the licensing; they just want to use the tool. That’s exactly what they did. No mention of Premium, no mention of Licensing, no mention of Enterprise licenses. This is the feature, this is the use case and go for it, use it, which I really like. So, thank you so much, Microsoft.

If they didn’t talk about it, it’s free, right? Or you paid for it? I never said that, but you may always hope for it. I’ll hope for it. That said, thank you very much, everyone. We really hope you enjoyed it. Gokan, what conference are we going to be at next? What big conference? We’ll be in Brussels for the European Power Platform Conference. Are we going to do a keynote recap over there as well? You know what, if you offer me a caramel macchiato, I would say yes. I’ll offer you all the caramel macchiatos you want. Deal. There we go. Thank you so much, everyone, for watching. If you enjoyed this video, make sure you like the video and subscribe to the channel for the latest Microsoft 365, Power Platform, and certification news. See you soon. Cheers.