How to Enable SharePoint Skills in Public Preview

By Apr 30, 2026 Skills 0 Comments

SharePoint Skills sit inside AI in SharePoint. Right now, both are public preview, so nothing shows up by accident. You only see them when your tenant (or specific sites) have been opted in and the right prerequisites are in place.

If you missed the “what are Skills and why should I care” piece, start here first: SharePoint Skills Was the Biggest Announcement at M365 Community Conference

This post is the practical one. What needs to be enabled, and how to avoid doing it the slow way.

Enable SharePoint Skills

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SharePoint Skills Was the Biggest Announcement at M365 Community Conference

By Apr 29, 2026 Skills 0 Comments

Last week I was seated in the first row at the M365 Community Conference keynote when Jeff Tepper announced the SharePoint Skills public preview, and for me that was the highlight of the event.

SharePoint Skills are not about writing better prompts. It’s a way to turn a repeatable, multi-step workflow into a reusable asset that others can run on the same site. They’re created in chat, reviewed before saving, and then reused later when the same kind of work comes back again. The system can automatically load a relevant skill based on the request, or you can call it explicitly by name.

SharePoint Skills

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What’s new for SharePoint – March 2026

By Apr 5, 2026 What's new 0 Comments

March 2026 might be the most exciting month I’ve had with SharePoint in years. It started with a new visual experience with cleaner structure, redesigned app bar and new Copilot-assisted capabilities for those licensed for it.

That set the tone for everything that followed. Two announcements stood out to me: AI in SharePoint entering public preview (including AI-powered site creation), and Microsoft Lists becoming a first-class knowledge source for custom agents in SharePoint and OneDrive. Worth noting too, what many of us called the SharePoint Knowledge Agent is now simply AI in SharePoint, a small rename that reflects a bigger consolidation of the story.

And then there’s the SharePoint Hackathon. This year my wife and I were finalists in two categories and won Best Mobile Experience Design. A great way to close out the month.

What is new for SharePoint as a platform

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What’s new for SharePoint – February 2026

By Mar 2, 2026 SharePoint 0 Comments

I’m publishing this What’s New in SharePoint for February 2026 on a symbolic day. Today, SharePoint turns 25. There’s a big celebration happening, and by the time you read this, chances are new announcements are already landing. But what’s interesting is that February quietly gave us a glimpse of where SharePoint is heading—before the lights went on.

While many are waiting for what will be unveiled later today, Microsoft has already been laying the groundwork through small but meaningful updates in the roadmap and the Message Center. This month, I want to highlight two of them. The first is grounded chat for SharePoint Lists, where Context IQ in Microsoft 365 Copilot can now pull list data directly into prompts, improving accuracy and relevance. The second is the reimagined SharePoint home experience, a single, intuitive page that brings together what actually matters across the platform.

If this is what surfaced quietly in February, it sets an interesting tone for what comes next. SharePoint is clearly still evolving.

What is new for SharePoint as a platform

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Microsoft Forms Data Sync: Bringing Responses Directly into SharePoint

By Feb 28, 2026 Documents 0 Comments

Most Microsoft 365 improvements don’t arrive loudly. They settle in quietly, change behavior, and then disappear into the background. When they work, nobody notices. When they don’t, everyone does.

The Microsoft Forms data sync experience for Excel in is one of those changes. On paper, it looks modest. Forms responses sync more reliably to Excel. The file lives in the same library where the form was created. No new app, no new surface, no feature tour. In practice, it removes a long‑standing tension in how people actually use Forms.

Microsoft Forms Data Sync

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The End of SharePoint Alerts and the Shift to Smarter Notifications

By Feb 27, 2026 Documents, Microsoft Lists 0 Comments

For a long time, SharePoint alerts were one of those features nobody talked about, but almost everyone relied on. You set them once, usually on a document library or a list, and then forgot they existed. An email would show up when a file changed, when an item was added, when someone touched something that mattered. Simple, predictable, and deeply ingrained in how teams kept an eye on their content.

They were never glamorous. Alerts didn’t scale particularly well, the emails were noisy, and governance was always a bit of a grey area. But they solved a very real problem: awareness. In a platform built around shared content, alerts were how many people stayed informed without constantly checking a site.

That chapter is now closing. SharePoint alerts are being retired, and Microsoft is nudging customers toward more modern, more intentional ways of achieving the same outcome.

SharePoint Alerts

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What 25 Years of SharePoint Meant for My Career

By Feb 26, 2026 SharePoint 0 Comments

My story with SharePoint didn’t start at the beginning. It started in 2012, at a moment when the platform was already well established but still surprisingly open to experimentation.

In those early years, my work was largely about SharePoint branding. The thing I heard the most back then was: “don’t make SharePoint look like SharePoint.” So I didn’t. I worked with all versions since SharePoint 2007, stripping away default visuals, rebuilding layouts, and reshaping the experience through custom master pages and heavy customization!!!

SharePoint at 25

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How to Rename a SharePoint Site and Change Its URL Without Breaking Everything

By Feb 24, 2026 Administration, PowerShell 0 Comments

For a long time, renaming a SharePoint site was treated as a mistake you paid for forever. Pick the wrong name, live with it. URLs were fragile, links broke, and the safest advice was simple: don’t touch it.

That advice is outdated! SharePoint supports renaming sites and changing their URLs in a controlled, supported way. The risk today is not the platform. It’s the assumption that nothing has changed.

This article explains why renaming a SharePoint site matters, what actually happens when you do it, and how to do it safely.

Rename a SharePoint Site Collection

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How to Block File Downloads in SharePoint and OneDrive (What’s Possible, What Isn’t, and What Actually Works)

By Feb 20, 2026 Documents 2 Comments

Blocking file downloads in SharePoint is one of those requests that sounds simple and turns complex very quickly.

It usually starts with a reasonable concern. Sensitive documents. External users. Unmanaged devices. A clear instruction from security or legal: ‘People should be able to read this, but they shouldn’t be able to download it.’

For years, the honest answer was uncomfortable. You could make downloads harder, but you couldn’t truly block them without workarounds, custom permission levels, or conditional access gymnastics. And even then, the guarantees were weak.

That changed with the introduction of the Block download policy for SharePoint and OneDrive, part of SharePoint Advanced Management. This is the first supported, platform‑level way to enforce browser‑only access to files, without redesigning your permission model or relying on unsupported UI tricks.

Block Files Download SharePoint

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How to Build a SharePoint Contact List with Internal and External Users

By Feb 15, 2026 Microsoft Lists, Solutions 0 Comments

When I wrote about building a project index in SharePoint, I intentionally focused on structure and discoverability. A single place to see all consulting projects, understand what they are about, and navigate to the right site without friction. In practice, though, every time I implement that pattern, I end up adding one more list almost immediately: a contact list built specifically to store the contact information of everyone involved in the project.

Projects are defined as much by people as they are by sites and documents, and in consulting those people are rarely all internal. Customers, partners, and external stakeholders need to be visible in the context of a project, even when they are not and should not be part of the tenant.

Contact List SharePoint

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Joao Ferreira

I've been working with Microsoft Technologies over the last ten years, mainly focused on creating collaboration and productivity solutions that drive the adoption of Microsoft Modern Workplace.

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