Microsoft 365 Conference | Day 1 Highlights

This week, the annual Microsoft 365 Conference in Las Vegas is taking place. It is one of the largest, in-person gatherings of Microsoft engineers and the community in the world. Benny and Yusuf from the BS&I team are at the conference representing the RedCloud team and sharing highlights and announcements with you all. Below is the recap from Day 1 of the conference. 

Keynote with Jeff Teper & Rajesh Jha

Today we found ourselves at the Microsoft M365 Conference to learn more about new developments in business tech and also connect with others in the industry. The 3-day event kicked off strong with a not so unsurprising trend, AI. 

Jeff Teper and Rajesh Jha led the Keynote speech with a clear message in mind, and that was displaying to the world that they are taking AI seriously, and exploring every possible way to integrate it into business applications, the cloud, and security.  

According to Jeff, of the users on GitHub who have had early access to Microsoft Copilot, 88% said that they benefited from using the Copilot AI features in code development. More impressively, of those 88% of users, 50% of their code came from Copilot! This is true productivity value! Instead of searching and digging through code repositories or documentation, Copilot automatically finds and adds it. That is huge! 

​On Microsoft Teams, Copilot is going to help those individuals who were running late to a meeting by being able to summarize the discussion that they had missed. This can even include the general sentiment and tone of the meeting. It doesn't take a genius to see the value, but we will admit that it brings up questions. How will those sentiment analyses be stored and used at manager or tenant level analytics? Who is to blame when there is a misunderstanding because the summary provided is inaccurate and leads to misunderstandings or wrong decisions? Going forward with AI, there is going to be a new tension between efficiency, human agency, and trust. If it will be important to strike a balance, because if not, there could be a drastic drop in conscious and unconscious confidence in content that you consume. 

 Following the keynote, we had some opportunities to choose a few break out sessions on different topics and services. ​

SharePoint Innovations + Copilot

Today's SharePoint announcements follow four main themes:

• Simpler authoring

• Compelling content.

• Deeper engagement

• Flexible platform 

Below are some of our favorite announcements. To see the full detailed announcements check out Microsoft's post here.

Introducing Copilot for SharePoint

AI and Copilot has been making waves in Microsoft apps, so it's no surprise it will be integrated with many products like SharePoint. With the Copilot feature for SharePoint, you can turn your words into SharePoint sites and pages. 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. And all within our existing commitments to data security and privacy in the enterprise. These new capabilities will enable you to spend less time setting up SharePoint sites and give you confidence that your site is using the best that SharePoint has to offer.

New start page for creating sites

From newsletters, event announcements, project tracking sites, and more, the updated SharePoint start page features templates that connect the intranet directly to your most common team and organizational communication needs. We're loving this announcement, because now getting started creating sites and pages will be easier than ever!​

Coauthoring with team members

SharePoint’s new page coauthoring capabilities make it easy for editors to come together into the same page canvas and craft their content in real time. These coauthoring capabilities are powered by the Fluid framework, the same technology that enables real-time collaboration in Microsoft Loop.

New brand center

The new brand center in SharePoint is the hub for your brand guidelines for colors, fonts, logos, etc. You can reuse these branding elements across sites, and SharePoint will provide the right guardrails so you can be confident that site owners are aligning with your branding guidelines.

OneDrive - All new user experience

The new OneDrive Home experience reduces the time to find your files so you can spend more time being productive. The new “For you” area uses AI-powered file recommendations to surface files personalized to you, bringing the most relevant, time-sensitive content to top of your OneDrive. We’ve also added rich, context-based organization, such as views that show you recent, shared, and favorite and files from meetings. These views help you get back to content quickly. And lastly, inline activity updates let you catch up on files at a glance or jump right to comments in files that you want to address.