It won’t come as a surprise to find that this month’s Horizon is all about Ignite.
Our CEO and MVP Pat McGown hosted a Microsoft Ignite 2024 Watch Party at the Microsoft Innovation Hub in Arlington, Virginia, to share the experience with like-minded folks and to make sure he didn’t miss a thing.
Here are our top picks from the many exciting announcements made.
Security and governance
As you’d expect Copilot featured heavily in this year’s Ignite, with security and governance being big themes at the event.
As big advocates of SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM), we were super excited at the news that, from early 2025, SAM will be included in your Copilot license.
Here’s what you can expect:
- Built-in Content Governance: New controls and insights to accelerate Copilot deployments and automate oversight.
- Restricted Content Discovery: Policies to prevent certain data from being surfaced by Copilot or organization-wide search.
- Restricted Access Control (RAC): Enhances security by restricting access to specific sites and content.
- Enterprise Application Insights: Reports on third-party applications accessing SharePoint sites.
- Data Access Governance: Identifies OneDrive sites with potentially overshared content.
- Copilot Agent Insights: Monitors how Copilot agents interact with SharePoint content.
Microsoft also announced enhancements to Purview, developed to improve data security, compliance, and governance for organizations that want to reap the rewards of AI without losing control over their sensitive information.
Headlines include:
- Oversharing Assessment: to identify data at risk of oversharing and recommends ways to mitigate these.
- Data Loss Prevention (DLP): to prevent Copilot from processing sensitive content based on sensitivity labels.
- Insider Risk Management: to correlate signals to identify potential insider risks like data leakage and IP theft.
Copilot agents in SharePoint
We first highlighted the imminent arrival of Copilot agents back in September and now, as announced at Ignite, they’re generally available in SharePoint.
Remember that Copilot agents work alongside or on behalf of a person, team, or organization. They handle simple tasks, as well as more complex, business processes and are sure to be a game-changer.
Here’s what you can expect from SharePoint agents:
- Enhanced Productivity: These agents help users quickly surface insights and make informed decisions by leveraging the vast amount of content stored in SharePoint.
- Streamlined Workflows: By acting as subject matter experts, these agents can accelerate tasks like customer support, onboarding new team members, and budget planning.
- Easy Creation and Use: Users can create agents from the Copilot icon in the top ribbon, document libraries, or the Home tab. These agents support various file formats and will soon include metadata, lists, and video files.
- Collaboration and Security: Agents can be shared via email or Teams, maintaining data security and adhering to existing SharePoint permissions.
Agents in Microsoft 365
In addition to Copilot in SharePoint, in preview are Copilot agents in Microsoft 365. These out-of-the-box agents are designed to automate specific tasks across different functions.
For example, the ‘Facilitator’ agent can take meeting notes and share summaries in real-time, and the Employee Self-Service agent can deal with common policy questions.
Copilot Pages
If you’re already a Copilot Pages user you’ll love these new additions and if you’re not, we recommend you give it a go.
Copilot Pages, first announced in September, is described by Microsoft as a ‘dynamic, persistent canvas designed for multiplayer AI collaboration’. Simply, it’s a tool for enhancing productivity and teamwork.
New features include expanded content types, such as code, interactive charts and diagrams. Users can create multiple Pages in a session or combine content from several sessions into one Page. Copilot chat prompts can use updated Page content for more accurate responses, plus Pages can be edited and shared via mobile, for on-the-go collaboration.
These features aren’t available just yet but expect to see them roll-out in early 2025.
In addition to Copilot Pages, Microsoft has also introduced Copilot to some of its most commonly-used apps, including Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.
These are just a few of the Microsoft Ignite 2024 announcements that we think will make an impact on your daily work life.
Of course, there’s so many announcements, so little time, so if you want to take a deeper dive into Microsoft’s latest innovations, take a look at the Microsoft Ignite 2024 Book of News.
And if you could use some support implementing any of these updates, don’t hesitate to reach out to the Cloudwell team.