ESPC24 Keynote Recap and Highlights You DON'T Want to Miss

Want to know what Jeff Teper covered in the #ESPC24 keynote in Stockholm? Listen to my recap and highlights video for ALL the details you NEED TO KNOW coming out of ESPC 2024!

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Video Summary

• Exciting Kickoff: The keynote started with an energetic show featuring dancers to wake everyone up, followed by Jeff Keeper celebrating the Microsoft 365 community and promoting the Community Days website.
• Copilot Innovations: Microsoft highlighted over 300 new features for Copilot, including improvements in speed and quality. They also showcased new agents like the facilitator and interpreter in Microsoft Teams.
• Copilot Studio Demo: Kendra Springer demonstrated how easy it is to build agents with Copilot Studio, showing how easy it is to create amazing agents.
• IT Controls and Security: Jeff discussed the Copilot Control System, including SharePoint advanced management and Copilot analytics. Security features like requiring a PIN to join meetings were also highlighted.
• SharePoint Enhancements: Denise Trabona showcased new SharePoint features like autofill columns, custom fonts, and flexible sections, making SharePoint more attractive for companies considering other tools.

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

Video Transcript

We are live at ESPC in Stockholm and the keynote just finished. As I try to do at every big Microsoft 365 and Power Platform conference, I’m here to bring you the top highlights. ESPC always does an amazing job of waking people up before the keynote because, let’s be honest, sometimes waking up at 9:00 AM for the keynote leaves you still a bit sleepy. They have this amazing show with dancers and lights to really set the mood and excitement for the keynote.

The keynote was, of course, kicked off by the one and only Jeff Keeper, who ran on stage. As usual, the first thing he talked about was the amazing Microsoft 365 community, the best community in tech. He also promoted the CommunityDays.org website, which, if you haven’t checked it out yet, is the one single place where you’ll find all the community events near you. So go and check it out.

As you probably guessed by now, a lot of the keynote was about Copilot and the AI revolution. Even though I was at Ignite just two weeks ago where Microsoft made a ton of different announcements, I managed to see some brand new things that I had missed at Ignite. So it was still great to be at the keynote.

The keynote was split into three main sections: Copilot, Teams, and the one closest to my heart, SharePoint. For Copilot, Microsoft talked about the over 300 new features they brought to Copilot in the past year. It feels like we’ve been talking about Copilot forever, but it’s only been one year since it has been out. Something that I really enjoyed was that Microsoft also talked about some foundational improvements in Copilot, from doubling the speed to actually tripling the quality of the prompt results, which is something that Copilot definitely needed.

We also talked about some other hot topics such as agents. Michael Boom from Microsoft demoed some of the new agents like the facilitator and the interpreter in Microsoft Teams, which were really awesome to see live. Kendra Springer then came on stage and showed us how easy it is to build an agent with Copilot Studio. We know it was a real demo because Copilot did not want to cooperate on this one. It did what tech sometimes does and failed. It happens. Even Copilot can get shy when 2000 people are looking at it. But the demos were amazing and really showed us how everyone, whatever their skill level, can build amazing agents with Copilot Studio.

We then talked about IT controls, a very important topic today as everybody talks about oversharing and securing your tenant. Jeff covered the Copilot Control System, which includes SharePoint advanced management, now included with your Microsoft 365 Copilot license. If you have any questions or you’re not sure about that announcement, I recently did a video with Dave Minassian from Microsoft to answer all of your questions. You’ll find it linked in the description below. The Copilot Control Center also includes Copilot analytics from Viva Engage and Copilot in the admin centers.

We then switched over to Microsoft Teams, where some of the main topics were the new UI updates to merge chats and Teams together. Let me take a break and ask you, what do you actually think about that change? Are you a fan of it? Personally, I turned it off because I’m so used to the old interface, but I want to know how you feel. So please let me know in the comments.

We recapped some of the latest announcements from Ignite, such as Microsoft Places and digital signage in Teams Room being generally available. The one I’m most excited about is speaker recognition and how Copilot can know who said what in a meeting, even if you’re all in the same room. We also covered security features that I’m a big fan of, such as requiring a PIN to join meetings or email verification. We also saw a really cool slide with all the upcoming capabilities in Microsoft Teams for the next quarter, which was really interesting.

We then finished with SharePoint, which is the center of Microsoft 365. Denise Trabona showed us some of the latest cool features in SharePoint, such as autofill columns and new design features like using Copilot to create pages and the new flexible sections. This was announced at Ignite, but I had actually missed it. I knew it was coming, but I didn’t know they announced it publicly. You can now have so much flexibility to make SharePoint look amazing with the new addition of custom fonts and flexible sections. This will take SharePoint to the next level. I hope many companies that maybe went to WordPress or other tools because SharePoint did not meet their design requirements are going to come back and take advantage of everything in SharePoint.

So that’s it for the keynote. It’s really exciting to see how Microsoft is working towards their mission to have a Copilot for every employee and an agent for every business process. If you enjoyed this and want to get the latest highlights from all the Microsoft events, make sure you like the video and subscribe to the channel on VladTalksTech. Thank you so much and I’ll see you at the next conference.