If variety is the spice of life, we have a tastebud-busting Horizon for you this month, with news on SharePoint Premium updates, Microsoft Copilot Dashboard, LlamaIndex releases and Teams Toolkit enhancements.
So, here’s what’s on the horizon. No artificial colors or flavoring (but there is some artificial intelligence).
SharePoint content pane feature
First up. It just got easier to create compelling content in SharePoint pages and news.
With the new content pane, authors can build dynamic pages with a user-friendly toolbox for exploring and inserting content.
If you’re using it within Viva Amplify, the content pane includes handy tools like distribution channel selection, writing guidance, and audience selection.
And there’s more. With the introduction of the content pane, the section tools are now in the section toolbar, making it easier to add and manage sections.
Coming soon to Targeted Release customers, with rollout continuing through to September 6.
Microsoft Copilot Dashboard news
Great news for organizations that use Copilot for Microsoft 365. You’ll no longer require a Viva Insights premium licence to take advantage of the Microsoft Copilot Dashboard.
The Copilot Dashboard provides actionable insights to help organizations deploy Copilot, drive adoption based on workplace patterns, and measure impact, providing metrics related to Readiness, Adoption, Impact, and Sentiment.
Those with a Viva Insights premium licence can access additional advanced features
Microsoft Copilot Dashboard will be rolled out to Copilot for Microsoft 365 licencees in phases, see the link for full details.
Build smarter apps with AI
What is LlamaIndex and why should you care? That’s the question being posed in this blog post outlining how you can use the tool to connect your data to large language models (LLMs).
The focus is on the recently released Llama-Index-Python samples, available on Azure, designed to streamline your LLM application development journey, allowing you to create smarter, more robust, apps.
Teams Toolkit updates
Calling all Visual Studio Code users! Microsoft has updated its Teams Toolkit with a whole host of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes to improve your development experience.
Here’s what you can expect:
- Faster, more reliable debugging.
- Enhanced security with user-assigned managed identity for Bot and message extension application templates.
- Safe clean up of resources created after application development.
- Microsoft 365 app template in Teams Toolkit now includes interactive CodeTour instructions.
See the link for full details on the updates, including enhancements and bug fixes.
SharePoint Premium update highlights
There are more updates coming your way, this time for SharePoint Premium.
Microsoft recently announced an extension of its free trial of SharePoint Premium services through to June 2025 so there’s no better time to get started with these new features.
Here are the highlights:
- The new SharePoint autofill columns feature for document libraries uses AI to extract, summarize, generate, or evaluate content from the files you upload to a SharePoint library.
- The new sensitive information prebuilt model allows you to detect and optionally extract email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses from countless documents, saving time and resource.
- Page Range Extraction allows you to specify the page range for structured, freeform, and prebuilt document processing models, reducing processing costs and time.
- SharePoint Content AI Model Graph APIs allow you to list existing models on a library, apply or un-apply a model, and create processing jobs for document metadata extraction from, and labeling of, your content.
Get more detail by following the link.