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What is New for SharePoint and Related Technologies from Microsoft Ignite 2024
Welcome to my annual post with the updates for SharePoint and related technologies from Microsoft Ignite! For those new to the event, Microsoft Ignite is one of the premier conferences for IT professionals, showcasing the latest innovations and product updates from Microsoft. This year, the event was held from November 18-22, 2024, in Chicago, both in-person at the McCormick Place West and online.
In this post, I’ll explore the exciting new features and enhancements for SharePoint and related technologies unveiled at Ignite 2024. From AI-driven improvements to enhanced collaboration tools, there’s a lot to cover.
Agents in SharePoint
At Microsoft Ignite 2024, the major announcement for SharePoint was the global availability of agents in SharePoint, set to revolutionize the way you interact with the content stored in your tenant.
These agents are designed to act as subject matter experts, helping users quickly surface insights, scale expertise, and make informed decisions.
By leveraging AI, agents in SharePoint empower users to efficiently manage and utilize the vast amount of digital content created daily, enhancing productivity and streamlining workflows.
This innovative feature is expected to transform how organizations handle their SharePoint content, making it more accessible and actionable for everyone.
The sky is the limit when it comes to the scenarios you can build with agents in SharePoint. Whether you’re creating agents to streamline customer support, onboard new team members, or manage complex projects, these agents can be tailored to fit the specific needs of your SharePoint site.
You can easily share these agents with colleagues, enhancing collaboration and efficiency across your team. Additionally, these agents are not confined to SharePoint alone; they can be utilized across other Microsoft 365 applications where agents are available, providing a seamless and integrated experience throughout your workflow.
Content Creation in SharePoint
SharePoint is set to revolutionize content creation with three exciting new features: the Copilot content generator, design ideas, and flexible layouts. The Copilot content generator helps you effortlessly create and refine content, starting from existing Word documents or PowerPoint presentations.
Design ideas offer a variety of visually stunning templates to enhance your pages, while flexible layouts provide a full 12-column grid for unique and dynamic designs. These features make it easier than ever to create beautiful, engaging, and effective SharePoint sites.
Want to dive deeper into these new features? Check out the detailed post on how SharePoint is transforming content creation and see how you can start using these tools today!
Viva Connections Hero
In Viva Connections, you’ll be able to take your spotlight content to the next level with some exciting new features. You can pin specific content to boost its visibility, whether it’s from any URL or SharePoint News items, and as an admin, you’ll have the ability to easily reorder this pinned content. Plus, you can further customize your spotlight content with images and title text, and even spotlight content from multiple SharePoint sites as sources.
Viva Connections Branding
Branding is crucial for creating a unique and cohesive experience for different groups within your organization. With Viva Connections, you can now support up to 50 unique experiences in a tenant, allowing you to have differently branded versions for various groups of employees.
Until recently, you could only have one app icon for Connections in Teams. But now, you can have multiple app customizations for the Connections app in Teams. This means that for every experience of Connections, you can have a distinct app name and icon appear in the Teams App Bar.
Plus, like in SharePoint sites you will be able to brand you Viva Connections experiences with your custom corporate fonts.
Viva Connections Enterprise Reader
The Viva Connections feed is now deprecated, and Microsoft is replacing it with an immersive SharePoint news experience. This transformation brings you a best-in-class enterprise news reader, offering a uniform and customizable experience across both desktop and mobile. With features like notifications and enhanced user engagement, you’ll stay connected to what’s happening across your organization. Plus, the updated News experience will leverage Copilot to help you summarize top news and keep you informed effortlessly.
Adaptive Card Extensions in Copilot Experiences
Adaptive card extensions (ACEs) will now live outside of the Viva Connections dashboard. When a card is relevant to a specific topic, Microsoft 365 Copilot will recognize that a Connections card can address the request, and the card will surface within the M365 Copilot chat.
New Viva Connections Cards
Viva Connections is introducing new ACE cards that will bring even more value to your dashboard. Here’s a look at the exciting features of each new card type:
- Quick Links Card: This card provides a set of curated links for quick access and easy navigation to important items, making it simple to find what you need in no time.
- Stream Playlist Card: With this card, you can quickly view recently updated videos from the Stream app, all accessible directly from your dashboard, ensuring you stay up-to-date with the latest content.
- Files Card: Connected to your OneDrive, this card displays your recent, shared, and favorite files, keeping the most important documents just a click or tap away.
- Power Apps Card: This card allows you to surface content or directly interact with a Power App, enabling quick access to the tools you need to get your work done efficiently.
- Viva Engage Feed Card: This new card will bring personalized, recent, and relevant community discussions directly to your dashboard. From the card, you can quickly catch up on the latest posts, react, take actions, or navigate to the community itself for deeper engagement.
Viva Engage Integrations in Viva Connections
Viva Engage is set to have a deeper integration with Viva Connections, making it easier for employees to consume information from both applications in a single location. This enhanced integration will streamline access to important updates, community discussions, and personalized content, ensuring that employees stay informed and engaged without having to switch between different platforms.
- Engage feed card for dashboard – The card will surface recent, relevant community discussions with the ability for users to quickly catch up, take actions or link directly to the community for deeper engagement.
- Engage announcements will start to show up in the Connections announcements banner.
- Spotlight – Bringing Engage campaigns and event content into the Spotlight carousel
Viva Amplify Goals and Analytics
Campaign goals in Viva Amplify are now integrated into the campaign brief, helping you define and set the objectives of your campaign. These goals are also part of your reporting screen, making it easier to monitor your campaign’s performance and make data-driven decisions to achieve your desired outcomes.
Enhanced analytics in Viva Amplify help you explore and understand the reach and effectiveness of your communications. Recent updates include trend graphs, overall campaign impact, auto-generated PowerPoint reports, new reaction tracking, and the ability to filter using your organizational data like role and location. Click-through rates and dwell time are also being added to Amplify reports. Click-through rate measures how often links are clicked, while dwell time shows how long people engage with your content.
Viva Amplify Approval Workflow
To ensure proper sign-off before sending out communications, Amplify now allows you to require approval before publishing. This optional setting ensures that the right people have seen and verified the content before it goes live. You can find this option in the ‘campaign settings’ tab.
Publish from Viva Amplify to Viva Engage
The ability to publish to Viva Engage directly from Viva Amplify is now available. This feature allows you to choose the sender, post on behalf of someone, select communities or storylines, tag people, and even send announcements. Analytics from these posts are integrated into the Amplify reporting dashboard, helping you track multi-channel performance and engagement.
Copy a Viva Amplify Publication
The ability to copy and duplicate publications is now available. This feature pulls over all existing content, including text, images, and customizations, so you don’t have to start from scratch. You can then save a copy to a new publication and continue editing as needed. Pair this with the new Copilot capability in the Amplify editor to save even more time.
Publish From Viva Amplify Directly to Frontline Workers
Advanced targeting specifically for communicating with frontline and deskless workforces will be available later in 2025. This capability leverages identities set up in Microsoft Teams and can target individual employee sets, regions, and stores to land communications directly on mobile devices where employees can see them.
Copilot in Viva Amplify
Copilot is now integrated directly into the Amplify editing experience. With Copilot, you’ll never be stuck staring at the same sentence again. Simply click the Copilot icon, and it will suggest different ways to rewrite your content, providing options that vary in style, structure, and emphasis. Copilot will also help you adjust the length or tone of your content to ensure your message lands just the way you want it to. Copilot is available in all the authoring canvases in Viva Amplify, including the Campaign Brief and the Publication authoring canvas.
You can find a wealth of information on the latest updates and insights from Microsoft through their various blog posts. Here are some key sources:
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