Microsoft is making major enhancements to both SharePoint and OneDrive, including leveraging its GPT-4-powered Copilot solution to help with web design in SharePoint.
Microsoft, which made the announcements during its Microsoft 365 Conference this week, says it wants to simplify the SharePoint experience for content authors with AI to cut down on manual steps and unleash “millions of site owners, news authors, page creators, and portal administrators to write, brand, publish and share content with ease.”
Bringing Copilot to SharePoint, other new features
To that end, Microsoft is expanding its Copilot system to include it in SharePoint to help users create and edit SharePoint sites and pages. Doing so gives users the combined power of large language models with their data in Microsoft Graph, along with the company’s existing enterprise data security and privacy controls.
According to Microsoft, Copilot in SharePoint takes existing documents or presentations and turns it into a page that uses the best web design visuals of SharePoint. It can also help rewrite key passages of text on the page and help users adjust the tone of the text.
“If you can describe the site or page, Copilot in SharePoint will begin to create it for you, and then work with you to edit and refine it,” the company says in a Tech Community blog on the new capabilities. “And all within our existing commitments to data security and privacy in the enterprise.”
The company says its investments in SharePoint and AI focus on the “full-spectrum of solid web design,” which includes branding and theming, typography and fonts, grid and layout, video and imagery, and animations and motion.
For example, users can prompt Copilot to create an employee onboarding site for product managers based on a PowerPoint presentation, and the user can then continue prompting Copilot to make changes until it looks right.
The Copilot tool in SharePoint can also help turn existing content into SharePoint pages that leverages new design visuals that were also announced.
In addition to Copilot, Microsoft is introducing a new start page experience for SharePoint, the ability to create video pages from Stream, page coauthoring capabilities, new branding tools and many more new features.
Faster, updated OneDrive
Microsoft is also launching a “refreshed” OneDrive experience for work and school that spans file experiences across Microsoft 365, with the goal of helping users access their files quickly and be more productive.
According to Microsoft, the new OneDrive start experience infuses AI to help users work more efficiently with the ability to see recent and recommended files from the home screen or navigate to a view of files based on who shared them.
A new “For you” area uses AI-powered file recommendations to surface personalized files and bring users the most relevant and time-sensitive content to top of OneDrive. In addition to recent files, OneDrive will suggest content from meetings.
The new OneDrive experience also features other personalization changes designed to make navigation easier, such as colored folders.
The new OneDrive features will also be available in the Files app in Teams so users get a consistent experience.
IT and security administrative features
Microsoft is also rolling out new management and security features for OneDrive and SharePoint, including the general availability of SharePoint data access governance insights and restricted access control policy for SharePoint sites to help limit oversharing and restrict access to content.
Microsoft also announced the preview of SharePoint cross-tenant content migration for scenarios like mergers and acquisitions, enabling SharePoint admins to move sites across two tenants easily without impacting user experience.
Learn more about the new IT management and security features of SharePoint and OneDrive in this Tech Community blog.
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