Supercharging our SharePoint sites at Microsoft with Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft SharePoint is one of the most ubiquitous and highly trusted content storage and sharing solutions in modern business.

Around the world, organizations add over 2 billion pieces of content to SharePoint and create more than 2 million sites every day. It’s the place where people connect with each other and share their content, doing everything from creating files to hosting videos to managing processes to publishing organizational intranets.

Now, Microsoft Copilot in SharePoint and other AI-enabled features are making this foundational tool even more useful for sharing knowledge, powering collaboration, facilitating automation, and conducting communication. At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’re using these new features to enable enterprise content sharing in exciting ways.

A new era for enterprise content sharing

In the decades since its initial release, SharePoint has had an incredible journey. From its origins as a pure content-sharing platform with very little focus on UI, the software has gradually modernized to include easier authoring, more standardization, and simplified page construction elements.

Now, SharePoint has entered the era of AI. Far from just a content repository, SharePoint is a place to create and share beautiful and engaging pages, all with the intent of providing knowledge to employees and driving impact for organizations.

“With AI, we have a chance to reimagine our existing product surface,” says Melissa Torres, a principal product manager for SharePoint and OneDrive. “Our goal is to make workflows that used to be highly manual easier than ever before.”

AI-driven capabilities are the crucial enablers for this evolution. Thanks to Copilot and other AI-powered features, creating and curating SharePoint pages is faster, smarter, and easier than ever before.

The vision behind an AI-enabled Microsoft SharePoint

Microsoft SharePoint is the hub for knowledge, collaboration, automation, and communication for organizations of all sizes, and AI has the ability to enhance all its different functions. Most importantly, AI capabilities provide an assistive layer on top of recent features that deliver more aesthetic and engrossing user experiences.

“Through the combination of authoring improvements and the power of AI, we’re making it easier than ever to create a professional, compelling SharePoint page.”

 Sam Crewdson, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital

To boost SharePoint’s power to communicate, the product team prioritized three key pillars:

• Beautiful content: They’ve added more intuitive tools to make content creation quick, easy, and streamlined, allowing non-experts to produce visually compelling pages.
• Simple authoring: The team has transformed the process for creating and editing pages, featuring AI support for authoring content.
• Deeper engagement: They’ve reimagined how people discover and consume content to better connect with vital organizational knowledge.

“Through the combination of authoring improvements and the power of AI, we’re making it easier than ever to create a professional, compelling SharePoint page,” says Sam Crewdson, a principal program manager within Microsoft Digital.

In the business content space, aesthetics and easy authoring aren’t always top of mind, but they have important roles to play for helping people access and share vital knowledge.

“Making delightful spaces is something we see in the consumer market all the time. For organizational resources, it’s important to make beautiful content and get the brand and visual identity to surface in everything you do.

Melissa Torres, principal product manager, SharePoint and OneDrive

Three AI-powered features making waves in SharePoint

Copilot in SharePoint acts as an overarching authoring and design assistant. It can draft and create pages from scratch or by using templates through user prompts. Beyond the ability to generate whole pages, these new features are helping site owners get more creative and support their teams more effectively.

As we layer AI-enabled capabilities on top of Microsoft SharePoint, we’ve been testing and using three new features that really highlight the power of this breakthrough technology.

“Some features are available to customers already, and we’re trying others out internally before they release,” Crewdson says. “But they’re already helping our Microsoft Digital teams create more beautiful, engaging, and effective SharePoint pages.”

That’s what the improvements are all about.

“Making delightful spaces is something we see in the consumer market all the time,” says Melissa Torres, a principal product manager within SharePoint and OneDrive. “For organizational resources, it’s important to make beautiful content and get the brand and visual identity to surface in everything you do.”

Creating sections with Copilot in SharePoint

Although site owners can use Copilot in SharePoint to generate entire pages, they also want to add sections to their pages or fine-tune their work. Fortunately, Copilot can get more granular.

Users simply enter a prompt (we suggest prompts based on what’s on the page), and Copilot creates a section using relevant content. Context awareness is key, because this allows Copilot to suggest and pull content from SharePoint based on what’s already on the page. It also automatically adopts matching visuals and layouts to ease the design process.

Sam Crewdson, principal program manager in Microsoft Digital, works on different aspects of SharePoint, SharePoint Online, Viva Amplify, Viva Connections, and Microsoft 365. As a result, he often needs to create SharePoint pages to communicate with colleagues across a variety of topics.

As content evolves, Crewdson frequently needs to add sections to pages to account for new or changing information. He just pops into edit mode, hits the Copilot button, and provides a prompt. Copilot does the rest.

Crewdson often prompts Copilot to add content from Microsoft Loop, Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, and any other source that contains key knowledge.

“Thanks to the combination of the new Flexible Sections feature and Copilot-powered authoring, you are no longer constrained by this fixed, blocky framework,” Crewdson says. “You can make your content as interesting as your personality.”

For Crewdson, Copilot makes it easy to keep SharePoint pages up to date and fresh, helping him maintain agile and flexible resources. He can simply add new sections in a matter of seconds, so his pages keep up with the pace of modern enterprise knowledge.

Flexible sections

While Copilot in SharePoint assists with authoring, flexible sections, now generally available to customers, provides easy-to-use design assistance as users create and modify pages. Using a simple drag-and-drop interface, it lets site owners freely place web parts anywhere within the section, drag them from one section to another, and resize, overlap, rearrange, group, and ungroup them on a 2-dimensional grid. The tool offers complete control over a page’s layout and look.

Eric Jaffe is the director of employee advocacy and US regional communications at the company. He’s responsible for overseeing Microsoft Web, the comprehensive internal platform our employees use to access a wide range of content, resources, and tools across the company.

It’s essential that the Microsoft brand permeates every part of our internal pages while maintaining excellent navigability and discoverability. Flexible sections enable this design ethos through easy-to-use drag-and-drop tools that help site owners experiment with placement, branding, and overall flow.

Jaffe and his team often look for design inspiration from the web, then apply those ideas to their internal pages. Frequently, they’ll lead with a header image to grab attention, then create a page that flows through cleanly spaced sections with plenty of imagery and dynamism.

It’s as simple as populating your sections, then experimenting and arranging them until they look just right.

“We live in a world where we’re competing against other highly engaging form factors, so having something that’s visual and draws the employee into the experience really enhances our impact. With these new tools, if you can dream it, you can build it.”

Eric Jaffe, director of employee advocacy and US regional communications

FAQ web part

Employees will always have questions, and SharePoint is often the authoritative source for the answers they need. Now, AI is making it easier than ever to anticipate, structure, and present that content from your existing knowledge base.

Page authors can now use a new FAQ web part to quickly generate accordion-style FAQ modules from relevant sources like policy documents or key meeting and event transcripts. They can use the tool to easily refine and reorder categories, questions, and answers to ensure accuracy and relevance, then publish them to their pages.

“We live in a world where we’re competing against other highly engaging form factors, so having something that’s visual and draws the employee into the experience really enhances our impact,” Jaffe says. “With these new tools, if you can dream it, you can build it.”

Jon Norris is a senior product manager responsible for the TechWeb Hub, our internal company resource for technical support and the primary vector for people to access our helpdesk organization. Within that hub, there are more than 50 individual SharePoint sub-hubs and sites.

FAQ modules are a big part of any technical support page. They give employees a chance to solve their own problems before escalating to the helpdesk, which saves time for everyone involved.

In the past, Norris’ team members had to search through content, anticipate user questions, and populate their FAQ modules manually. Now, they simply provide a prompt like, “Use this known issues document to create an FAQ,” and the FAQ web part takes it from there. The site authors just need to look over the output to verify that everything is accurate, add relevant links, or make any other needed tweaks.

Importantly, the new FAQ supports intelligent refresh behavior when grounding documents are updated. It keeps FAQ content fresh and accurate by monitoring changes in the source files. These are human-in-the-loop workflows, which means content authors can review, refine, and approve AI-generated updates before they are published. This means that while the refresh is not entirely automatic (to preserve editorial control), the system does intelligently detect changes and assist authors in updating the FAQ content accordingly.

The feature also has downstream benefits. The FAQ content it creates is consumable by Microsoft 365 Copilot or agents, making updates easy and increasing consistency across different pages and their FAQ modules.

“The FAQ web part saves us a lot of time on the initial page creation. Where we used to have to spend hours looking through documents to find the right answers, then copy them into an FAQ, now the tool does that for us. We can act in more of a supervisory role.”

Jon Norris, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

A powerful suite of authoring and design tools

Each of these features offers simplicity, speed, and creativity on its own. But it’s the combination of the three that makes for a fluid, intelligent authoring and design experience.

We’re currently experimenting with these features internally, and we’ve seen some powerful results already. Most importantly, internal SharePoint site owners report that these AI-enabled capabilities make their work much easier than before.

“The FAQ web part saves us a lot of time on the initial page creation,” Norris says. “Where we used to have to spend hours looking through documents to find the right answers, then copy them into an FAQ, now the tool does that for us. We can act in more of a supervisory role.”

It’s about easily making SharePoint what you want it to be.

“People have been craving this level of customization for a while,” Torres says. “Page authors who feel like they don’t have the design chops or the time to invest in endlessly tweaking their SharePoint pages can now get the speed and assistance they need.”

It isn’t just about time savings and design improvements. It’s about engaging teams with attractive, compelling content that promotes better knowledge sharing, communication, and collaboration.

“We’re excited to see how much time the average user saves—not just the SharePoint super-user,” Crewdson says. “Almost anyone can build a compelling, interesting, attractive SharePoint collection, and these new features mean they can save the 30, 60, even 90 minutes the task used to take and do it in 30 seconds instead.”