And with the introduction of agents, Copilot can now also act on your behalf—agents extend the capabilities of Microsoft 365 Copilot beyond conversation, giving you the power to elevate how you work, create, and make decisions.

“Copilot agents free you from the manual work, so you can concentrate on big-picture thinking.”

Eva Etchells, senior content program manager, Microsoft Digital

The challenge today isn’t whether to use an agent or Copilot module to help you accomplish more—it’s knowing which one to use, and when to use it. Making the smart choice can help you produce amazing work while streamlining workflows and reducing friction.

“Copilot agents free you from the manual work, so you can concentrate on big-picture thinking,” says Eva Etchells, a senior content program manager in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization.

Copilot thinks; agents ‘do’

Agents, simply explained, are purpose-built tools designed to automate tasks, handle repeatable work, and save time by improving efficiency. You can even create your own agents to match the way you work.

“I use several agents to simplify repetitive daily tasks. They help me stay organized, quickly research what I need, and analyze information so I can focus my energy on the work that requires the most strategic thinking.”

Opeoluwa Burnett, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

If Copilot and its modules help us think, create, and explore, then think of its agents as entities that execute and automate tasks.

Choosing the right agent or module is like selecting the right tool for a job: You want the one that fits the task at hand and helps you get your work done more quickly with less effort.

“Now I can quickly ask an agent to create a one page vision document in Word because the agent does the heavy lifting,” says Opeoluwa Burnett, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital. “I use several agents to simplify repetitive daily tasks. They help me stay organized, quickly research what I need, and analyze information so I can focus my energy on the work that requires the most strategic thinking.”

Read about how Opeoluwa Burnett uses Copilot

A day in the life of a Microsoft employee using Copilot

Facing agent adoption challenges

At Microsoft, we’re still navigating a few common challenges related to agent adoption:

• They have access to agents and the ability to create them but often feel overwhelmed or unsure where to begin.
• For those still learning Copilot, agents can feel like an additional hurdle.
• Others who’ve embraced “regular” Copilot may not realize that agents exist or know how to find them.

Our use of Copilot and AI agents continues to evolve. As Customer Zero within Microsoft Digital, we want to share how we’re using agents today, as well as what we’ve learned along the way.

Here’s a rundown of how our employees are using Copilot tools and agents to accomplish tasks faster and more efficiently:

Where to begin: Copilot Chat

Chat is often the starting point—the launchpad where you provide a prompt and kick off your interaction with Copilot.

Here you can search for general answers, explore complex queries, get quick results, or discover a Copilot agent that can help you complete your task.

“Copilot is a productivity booster. I can ask it to help me brainstorm and structure a use case and the results are pleasantly surprising, especially as the Copilot ecosystem continues to evolve and we fast-track new capacities.”

Swapna Malekar, principal product manager, Microsoft Digital

When Swapna Malekar needed to create a presentation with a short turnaround time, she turned to Copilot. So Malekar, a principal product manager in Microsoft Digital, shared a screenshot of the slide she was planning to present with Copilot. The tool generated a presentation-ready script she could then read aloud in her meeting later that day.

Now, she incorporates Copilot into her everyday workflows.

“Copilot is a productivity booster,” Malekar says. “I can ask it to help me brainstorm and structure a use case and the results are pleasantly surprising, especially as the Copilot ecosystem continues to evolve and we fast-track new capacities.”

Seamless workflows with Copilot applications

Because Copilot is built into Microsoft 365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, OneDrive, and Teams, you can navigate seamlessly between tools without losing context. Your Copilot Chat history follows you, no matter where you start.

That flexibility means you can work the way you naturally do. You might start a Copilot Chat in Word while drafting a document, then switch to Excel or Teams and continue the same conversation without needing to reset or start over.

There’s no single “right” way to use Copilot. Everyone approaches work differently, but Copilot meets you where you are, whether in the browser or in your go-to app, while helping you reach the same solution.

“Choosing the right Copilot for the job is like being in one of those ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books,” Etchells says. “You pick the path you want to go, and you set off on your journey.”

Speed and efficiency: Copilot search

Copilot search shares the same underlying technology as chat. The purpose of the search function in Copilot is to process requests and retrieve results. The difference between the two lies in how the results are delivered.

Chat is designed for more explorational interactions, while search prioritizes fast, targeted access to content and links.

“The value prop for Copilot search is simple: Get what you’re looking for faster.”

Vasanthi Vangipurapu, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

Search administrators also have access to the admin portal, where they can customize features such as bookmarks that know what employees are usually looking for when they search common terms.

“The value prop for Copilot search is simple: Get what you’re looking for faster,” says Vasanthi Vangipurapu, senior product manager in Microsoft Digital. “When I need specific answers quickly, I use Copilot search. If I want to explore further, I love that it redirects me to Copilot Chat to continue my conversation there.”

Visuals at your fingertips

Copilot Create is a design generator that helps you produce visual assets such as images, posters, infographics, banners, branding, and video. It’s an especially useful tool for people who aren’t professional designers, but who need to create visuals quickly as part of their workflow.

The Create module also supports rapid iteration, making it easy to refine results without starting from scratch. You can adjust layout, tone, or visual direction through simple prompts. This lets you explore multiple approaches and keep creative momentum without getting bogged down in detail.

You can give Create a prompt, even a rough one. It often results in unexpected visual directions you may have not considered on your own—a bit like having an enthusiastic creative partner who’s tossing new issues and helping you discover fresh variations.

While you can also use Copilot Chat to generate visual assets, Copilot Create offers a consolidated experience specifically built for visual design.

Here are prompts you can try in the Copilot Create module:

Analysis and insights: Copilot Researcher agent

The Copilot Researcher agent acts as your supercharged research partner, providing deep analysis and generating detailed reports. You can use Researcher to quantify the expected impact of a new feature, gather usage data, analyze audience insights, and project outcomes based on target user logistics.

Here are some prompts you can use to get started with Copilot Researcher:

Streamlined operations: Employee Self-Service Agent

The Employee Self-Service Agent helps employees quickly find answers to their questions relating to human resources, IT support, and campus services topics.

This tool now serves as a centralized entry point for HR, IT, and facilities support at Microsoft. The agent removes the guesswork, delays, and frustration that our employees used to experience when searching across multiple systems, websites, and knowledge bases for answers to their employment-related queries.

“Our employees rely on AI tools like Copilot to help get their work done,” says Becky West, a principal group product manager for Microsoft Digital. “And the same is now true for resolving an issue related to facilities and other high-prio employee self-service topics.”

Here are some prompts that you can use to get help from your Employee Self-Service Agent:

Intelligent collections: Copilot Notebooks module

The Copilot Notebooks module is an interactive workspace that combines the flexibility of a notebook with the intelligence of an AI notepad. Copilot makes it easy to add your chats to a Copilot Notebook, where it can review all included content, summarize information, and answer questions about it—making it easier to navigate large collections of files, presentations, and notes. Notebooks can also be shared, making them useful for teams collaborating on a common goal.

For perspective, Copilot Notebooks is designed for project-based work where you can gather files, references, notes and have Copilot collectively reason over them, while Copilot in OneNote enhances notetaking, content creation and not project-specific reference modeling.

Some of our employees use Copilot Notebooks to prepare for their performance reviews. Instead of scrambling to gather six months of their work, feedback, and other documentation, they easily can assemble everything in one place using the Notebooks module.

“I can take all the campaigns I’ve worked on, the metrics, and any praise I’ve received, drop it all into a Word doc and add it to my Review notebook,” Etchells says. “Then I ask Copilot to tell me how I contributed to each campaign. It saves me a ton of time.”

Here are prompts you can use in the Copilot Notebooks module to do something analyze the impact you have had as a seller over a certain window of time: 

SharePoint agents

SharePoint offers two types of Copilot agents: the built-in Knowledge agent and a custom agent.

“You ask the question and the agent provides the answer, so you can focus on the work, not the search.”

Sunitha Bodhanampati, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

The Knowledge agent acts like a SharePoint content steward, analyzing and organizing content across your sites. It tags and structures information in ways that allow Copilot to deliver more accurate answers to site-related queries.

You can also create custom agents to manage specialized workflows, connectors, or administrative tasks. You define the agent’s rules and scenarios, and it can operate across other apps and external systems, not just SharePoint.

“Instead of navigating countless folders, files, and links, agents remove the need to remember where information lives,” says Sunitha Bodhanampati, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital. “You ask the question and the agent provides the answer, so you can focus on the work, not the search.”

Here are some SharePoint agent prompts you can try, depending on your role:

Create your own agent

If you don’t find a Copilot agent that meets your needs, you can create your own. Getting started is as easy as telling Copilot what your ultimate objective is, even if you don’t have all the specifics.

“Just ask Copilot, ‘How do I get started with an agent?’” Etchells says. “Copilot will walk you through it, step-by-step.”

One of our teams in Microsoft Digital built an internal agent we dubbed the Copilot Agent Ideation Partner. This is useful for employees who are just exploring or ready to build, as it helps employees brainstorm agent ideas by spotting repetitive tasks, uncovering work patterns, and turning everyday challenges into actionable concepts they can build into an agent.

“Every employee should build at least one agent,” Burnett says. “When you turn your daily patterns into an agent, you reclaim your time and free yourself up to focus on the work that matters most.

The future of agents

Each agent and module has its own unique strengths. Together, they are part of a broader, AI-powered shift toward helping our employees be more productive and efficient every day.

As the number and variety of agents grows, we’re continuing to raise awareness among employees and our customers about what agents are available and how they can start putting these game-changing capabilities to work.

“We’re still focused on helping people understand what agents can do and how they fit into our everyday work,” Etchells says. “As agents evolve, the goal is to make them easier to discover, try out, and apply within the workflows our employees are already used to.”

Key takeaways

Here are some things to keep in mind as you move along in your journey with Copilot agents and modules:

• Copilot is more than one tool. You can choose from multiple Copilot modules and agents designed for different tasks, roles, and scenarios.
• Selecting the right Copilot unlocks targeted results. Matching the right Copilot to the job reduces friction and helps create seamless workflows.
• Copilot agents enhance productivity and creativity. Whether through Copilot Chat, search, research, notebooks, or other specialized agents, each Copilot agent unlocks efficiency while sparking innovative ideas.
• Copilot agents are evolving into collaborators. These agents are reshaping how people learn, work, and innovate every day.

Try it out

Learn how you can experience Microsoft 365 Copilot, your AI assistant.

Related links

• Read our companion story on a day-in-the-life with Copilot.
• Jump into action with the Copilot Prompt Gallery (sign in required).
• Browse the Microsoft AI agent hub.
• Decide which Copilot is right for your organization.
• Find out how we’re powering AI value at Microsoft with Copilot extensibility.
• See an overview of Copilot and AI agents.
• Get started with Researcher in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Learn more about how Copilot and agents are built to power the Frontier Firm.

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• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Picking the right Copilot for the job: Tips from our experience at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

At Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, we’ve been using the latest AI-enabled features in SharePoint to unlock more flexible, branded, and enjoyable experiences for employees while making SharePoint page creators’ jobs easier.

The modern vision for AI-enabled enterprise knowledge sharing

Since the widespread emergence and adoption of generative AI, new ways of approaching everyday work are springing up across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. SharePoint is no exception, and AI-powered features are already enabling innovative enterprise content sharing experiences.

It’s all part of our vision for a modern SharePoint.

“We’re investing in making SharePoint the best place to publish stories and pages, the fastest way to build compelling content,” says Sam Crewdson, a principal program manager within Microsoft Digital. “New AI features are making those goals even more attainable.”

The goal is to deliver simplicity, speed, and savings for site owners and page creators while enhancing engagement and discovery for employees.

“SharePoint is the number one source for authoritative content in the enterprise, which is critical for getting high-trust, attributable and verifiable answers from Copilot and agents,” says Kripal Kavi, a principal GPM for SharePoint and OneDrive. “We are investing in making it easier than ever to create this authoritative content that also looks great for human consumption with AI. Our goal is to take the drudgery and toil out of creating awesome high-value content on SharePoint.”

AI-driven SharePoint features in action

The latest AI-powered enhancements in SharePoint provide opportunities for advanced site management and page creation. They deliver intelligent support for maintaining organizational knowledge, automating workflows, and building engaging pages. The result is that site owners, content managers, and content creators can offer more dynamic experiences while offloading manual effort onto agents and AI features.

Knowledge Agent in SharePoint

Knowledge Agent, currently available in public preview, streamlines content management and boosts Copilot capabilities. These new features appear as a persistent, floating button to keep them top-of-mind and accessible in one place.

Knowledge Agent blends curated organizational knowledge with advanced AI to accomplish three goals:

• Improve AI answers: Knowledge Agent gives AI the context it needs with intelligent tagging, classification, and metadata automation and reasoning. It also helps maintain metadata hygiene and policy alignment through smart suggestions, labeling, and admin controls.
• Drive business processes: The agent suggests fields to autofill based on content and user input, creates AI-generated views grounded in metadata, and enables searches and workflows through natural language queries.
• Keep content fresh: The tool analyzes search behavior to detect gaps in content and unmet user needs, fix broken links across the site, and recommend inactive pages for retirement. It also boosts content creation for the web through natural language prompts, templates, and intelligent suggestions.

Curating content with Knowledge Agent

Jon Norris is the 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. For him, the benefits of Knowledge Agent start with taking the manual effort out of existing processes.

He’s built Knowledge Agent into his regular maintenance workflows. For example, he now uses the tool to scan through sites every six months and identify sites and pages in need of retirement or a refresh.

“As site owners at Microsoft, we can now do almost everything we need in terms of content health without a third-party tool,” Norris says. “Of course, we’ve always had workflows in place to ensure the health of our sites, but the agent puts all of those key capabilities in one place while adding AI assistance into the equation.”

Create page from meeting

Anyone who’s tried to coordinate projects after a team meeting understands the grind of taking notes, assembling resources, and sending follow-up communications. The ability to create a SharePoint page from a Microsoft Teams meeting helps people capture next steps and takeaways.

This feature follows a similar process for creating a SharePoint page from a file. When meeting recordings and transcripts are enabled, users can access SharePoint’s “Create a page from AI” feature and select a meeting as their content source. The tool then reviews the transcript and generates a news page based on the meeting.

“Having key takeaways and next steps captured in a central durable place that you can point new and existing team members to is extremely valuable. It serves not just as a record of decisions made, but also as a great tool for onboarding new team members.”

Kripal Kavi, principal GPM, OneDrive and SharePoint

This feature uses any relevant materials from the meeting for context, including links to content shared in the meeting itself. Page owners can also prompt the tool to include material from other sources and augment the page as the team’s needs evolve.

Finally, this feature integrates with SharePoint News, so page creators can publish these resources through any vector that will engage their colleagues, like email, a Teams channel, or a Viva Amplify post.

“Having key takeaways and next steps captured in a central durable place that you can point new and existing team members to is extremely valuable,” Kavi says. “It serves not just as a record of decisions made, but also as a great tool for onboarding new team members.”

Different personas will find different aspects of Knowledge Agent helpful. For example, site managers will primarily be concerned with outdated content, while content managers often feel overburdened by creating AI-ready metadata. And content creators are always looking for inspiration on tight timelines.

Wrapping a layer of agentic support around these back-end SharePoint tasks helps make a variety of scenarios easier to tackle, ultimately with better results for content consumers.

Sections with AI

Sections with AI is a new SharePoint authoring tool that allows users to create full-fidelity SharePoint sections with just a prompt. It looks at the context of your page to offer suggested prompts to surface the content the page creator needs.

From there, they can write their own sections and ground them in relevant files to give the AI more context. When the creator clicks “Generate,” Sections with AI uses those sources, the knowledge and material already within the organization, and content already on the page to create rich sections. Creating content with Sections with AI

Creating content with Sections with AI

Within Microsoft, Norris has seen program managers and other professionals whose roles aren’t explicitly based around communications using this feature extensively. Their professional expertise isn’t necessarily in creating beautiful sites or effective text, so the AI provides a much-needed boost.

And for communications managers, it’s a way to accelerate and supplement their work.

“Page creation is great, but the majority of users spend their time updating and curating their content,” Norris says. “This feature doesn’t just help with page creation—it makes your existing content better and updating it easier.”

Sections with AI generates recommendations and prompts for the user and takes wider content into account, so it’s grounded and contextually aware. As a result, crafting a site with this tool represents collaborative iteration with an AI helper.

“This is enabling our program managers to spend more time creating the kind of content that that they want to work on and that our users want to consume. It’s having a real impact across the board.”  

Jon Norris, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

It’s a step forward into the agentic future in service of enterprise knowledge management and sharing.

The impact is that it’s taking toil off the plate our program managers who own our SharePoint sites, which is freeing them up to do more of what matters to them.

“This is enabling our program managers to spend more time creating the kind of content that that they want to work on and that our users want to consume,” Norris says. “It’s having a real impact across the board.”   

Driving better experiences and greater engagement

SharePoint site owners and page creators are already experiencing the benefits of a more modern, AI-enabled experience. Within Microsoft Digital, they’ve shared that they’re already saving budget and time and creating more engaging sites.

There’s also a bigger picture than individual AI-powered features. Part of SharePoint’s modernization is about making knowledge and content accessible not just through pages themselves, but across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, especially by publishing them to Microsoft Teams.

“By making SharePoint pages first-class experiences in Teams, site owners no longer have to push users to load a webpage,” Crewdson says. “Instead, they can reach their colleagues without interrupting the flow of work.”

“The initial feedback we are seeing from internal and external customers is super exciting. Our users clearly see the value in how these capabilities help reduce the painful manual work needed today while still maintaining human control of the final output and decision.” 

Kripal Kavi, principal GPM, OneDrive and SharePoint

These AI-driven innovations are transforming SharePoint and empowering organizations to manage and share knowledge more efficiently and effectively than ever. At Microsoft Digital, we’ve already experienced their benefits. As AI-powered features in SharePoint continue to evolve, employees and site owners alike can look forward to even more engaging, productive, and streamlined experiences across Microsoft 365.

“The initial feedback we are seeing from internal and external customers is super exciting,” Kavi says. “Our users clearly see the value in how these capabilities help reduce the painful manual work needed today while still maintaining human control of the final output and decision.

Key takeaways

Try out these tips based on our experience at Microsoft Digital to start using SharePoint’s AI-driven features effectively.

• Rethink knowledge management: Discover how AI agents can leverage your organization’s knowledge as context to deliver engaging experiences using sources ranging from legacy content to yesterday’s team meeting.
• Promote peer-to-peer support: Enable your site owners to build a consistent community of practice through tools like Microsoft Viva Engage and Microsoft Teams channels.
• Encourage experimentation: Provide these features to your SharePoint site owners and page creators, and deliver concerted change management efforts so they can build experience and start to see their effects.
• Consider your users: Think about the business personas and scenarios where these features will be most useful, and highlight them in your change management efforts.

Try it out

Want to explore AI-powered features in SharePoint? Get started with a free trial of Microsoft 365.

Related links

• See how we’re supercharging our SharePoint sites at Microsoft with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Learn how we’re unlocking knowledge through intelligence: Lessons learned using SharePoint agents at Microsoft.
• Discover ways we’re boosting efficiency with SharePoint agents: How our Microsoft legal team is helping clients find answers faster.
• Explore how we’re reimagining content management at Microsoft with SharePoint.
• Find out how the modern SharePoint experience is making Microsoft’s HR portal more personal.
• Learn how we’re becoming an AI-first frontier firm at Microsoft.
• See how our employees are extending enterprise AI with custom retrieval agents.

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• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Keeping our content fresh, findable, and governed at Microsoft with AI-powered SharePoint appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

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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.”

Key takeaways

Here are some important principles to keep in mind if you are thinking of using Microsoft Copilot in SharePoint and related AI-driven features to help power collaboration and content sharing at your organization:

• Promote peer-to-peer support: Enable your site owners to build a consistent community of practice through tools like Microsoft Viva Engage and Microsoft Teams channels.
• Learn as you go: Dive in. Play with the tools. We designed these features to be intuitive, so the best way to build your skills is by trying them out.
• Apply these AI-driven tools where they’ll have the most impact: Some pages are fine with minimal design, especially information-heavy pages. For more advanced design and authoring, choose high-profile pages that will benefit from enhanced navigation. You can even choose to enhance just a few sections in specific pages.

Try it out

Get started with Microsoft SharePoint today.

Related links

• Find out how to create pages using Copilot in SharePoint.
• Learn more about using flexible sections in your SharePoint pages.
• Read about how to use SharePoint in the age of AI.
• Explore lessons learned in using SharePoint agents at Microsoft.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Supercharging our SharePoint sites at Microsoft with Microsoft 365 Copilot appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

With the launch of Microsoft 365 Copilot and the ability to extend its impact through agents, we saw an opportunity to roll the value of AI-powered assistants into the information-rich ecosystem of SharePoint. By infusing SharePoint with Copilot features, we’re making the search for authoritative content more accurate and more streamlined for users while giving site administrators, site editors, and content owners greater control and more opportunities to enable their colleagues.

As we’ve implemented this new kind of AI assistant internally at Microsoft, we in Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization, have gained first-hand knowledge of how to deploy, manage, and optimize the new capabilities—and learned key lessons that can help you use SharePoint agents to their full potential.

SharePoint in the age of AI extensibility

As a content management and collaboration platform, SharePoint is so deeply integrated into the fabric of business that it’s easy to take it for granted. Every day, people add almost two billion documents to Microsoft 365 Copilot apps (Outlook, Teams, Word, and so on). Searching through those vast quantities of content and information can be a challenge for users.

“SharePoint agents are a way for users to ask very specific, scoped questions in order to receive authoritative answers from that specific content source. We want to add value to the user’s workflow to ultimately improve their productivity.”

Sunitha Bodhanampati, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

One of extensibility’s core principles is using agents to bring AI capabilities into any canvas or endpoint. With the emergence of this new framework, connecting retrieval agents to the SharePoint experience was an instinctive move.

SharePoint is a natural place for agents to live—SharePoint makes enterprise content accessible to employees and agents simplify and enhance the workflows needed to that and because they make it easier to find that content.

Transforming enterprise content accessibility

At their core, SharePoint agents are about surfacing insights, scaling expertise, and powering more-informed decisions.

Every SharePoint site includes an agent scoped for the site’s content. They allow users to search a site using natural language queries like “Summarize last week’s files on benefits” or “Create an executive summary of last quarter’s sales reports.” That means people can find answers without combing through the site or wrestling with cumbersome search terms.

Here’s a rundown of the goals and benefits of SharePoint agents for different users:

“SharePoint agents are a way for users to ask very specific, scoped questions in order to receive authoritative answers from that specific content source,” says Sunitha Bodhanampati, senior product manager working on SharePoint agents with Microsoft Digital. “We want to add value to the user’s workflow to ultimately improve their productivity.”

Ready-made agents are a helpful starting point, but SharePoint agent builder introduces even more targeted capabilities. It gives site administrators, editors, and content owners the opportunity to create, customize, and control agents to provide greater assistance to their users.

“For human beings, the more content you give them, the less they engage, so agents are a way to narrow that field of inquiry to make your site more helpful.”

Siobhan Flanigan, senior marketing communications manager, Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions

In just a few clicks, anyone with SharePoint site editing permissions can create agents based on content that’s relevant to specific projects or tasks. They can customize their agent’s branding and purpose, specify the sites, pages, and files that it should access, and define customized prompts tailored to its objectives and scope.​​​​​​​ This flexibility ensures that the right people get the best possible access to content while ensuring security and adherence to governance guardrails.

Most importantly, it’s easy to create SharePoint agents. This technology isn’t just accessible to software developers. SharePoint agent builder’s inherent simplicity means that people in communications, HR, marketing, or any other role can create digital assistants in just a few minutes and a few clicks.

“We’re making knowledge accessible at a level it’s never been before,” says Siobhan Flanigan, senior marketing communications manager for Worldwide Learning in Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions. “For human beings, the more content you give them, the less they engage, so agents are a way to narrow that field of inquiry to make your site more helpful.”

“There’s a lot of intelligent creation and summarization with Copilot experiences, so naturally there are fears around organizational risk from overexposure, hallucinations, or misdirections that lead to user frustration.”

Swapna Malekar, principal product manager, Microsoft 365 Copilot

Beyond SharePoint sites, employees can easily share agents via email or within Microsoft Teams chats, granting colleagues access to the same accurate and relevant information through natural language queries. Not only are coworkers able to use each other’s agents, but @mentioning the agent in a group chat setting gives the team a digital subject matter expert, ready to assist and facilitate collaboration. 

Building these capabilities and implementing them securely required extensive collaboration between the SharePoint product group and Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. As the first business to implement this technology at scale, we had to be confident that it met our standards for trustworthy administration, governance, security, and responsible AI.

“With any AI-specific experience, there needs to be guardrails and governance to manage its behaviors,” says Swapna Malekar, principal product manager for Information Discovery and Experiences in Microsoft 365 Copilot. “There’s a lot of intelligent creation and summarization with Copilot experiences, so naturally there are fears around organizational risk from overexposure, hallucinations, or misdirections that lead to user frustration.”

In the simplest terms, SharePoint agents are scoped versions of Copilot Chat. As a facet of agents in Microsoft 365 apps, SharePoint agents benefit from all of the same governance controls that protect our tenants in any other Copilot-enabled context.

That alignment with pre-existing tooling and policy means that SharePoint agents respect permission-trimming when they provide responses. Because the content itself honors permissions according to Microsoft 365 Copilot governance policies, users who don’t have access to that content won’t receive it as part of the agent’s outputs.

These capabilities arose from our iterative development process and experience as an enterprise, but it’s just the beginning. In our early experiments with SharePoint agents, we’ve also developed some helpful scenarios and best practices our customers can use.

Creating agent-friendly content ecosystems in SharePoint

Early adopters here at Microsoft have already created some highly useful SharePoint agents. In the Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS) business group, the Worldwide Learning team has used the following agents to support employees in specific contexts:

Ask MCAPS Academy

This agent makes it easy for learners to query the Microsoft learning catalog to find specific answers contained in our course content. For example, before a salesperson demonstrates Microsoft Fabric, they could ask for best practices without having to take an hour-long course.

Ask MCAPS Tech Connect

MCAPS Tech Connect is a strategic training event for technical field roles, designed to help them uplevel their expertise and build confidence through collaborative learning and hands-on skilling. The Ask MCAPS Tech Connect agent gives employees easy access to content from more than 70 sessions. Users ask questions about the material, and the agent retrieves Microsoft PowerPoint decks and summarizes sessions so they can determine if they want to watch full videos.

During the process of creating these agents and others, our internal site editors and administrators have developed best practices to make sure employees get the most value out of their new digital assistants. The following techniques can help you create your own agents:

• Understand agent instructions. It’s helpful to think about creating agents with two sets of parameters: sources and behaviors. Sources are how you define the sites, folders, and content your agent will encompass. A more expansive scope will be more likely to return an answer, but that answer might be too broad. A more limited scope will provide better accuracy, but it might not have access to answers from a wider content base and therefore not return results at all. Meanwhile, behaviors are the explicit instructions and guidance you provide your agent, for example fine-tuning the structure of the summaries it delivers or specifying the technical level of responses the agent should provide.
• Optimize your libraries for AI. Just like it’s important to structure web content for search engine optimization (SEO), it’s helpful to structure your SharePoint sites for AI optimization—what some super-users are calling “AIO.” We recommend using all available metadata to ensure content is highly available to SharePoint agents; for example, headers, meta-tags, and alt-text. File names are particularly impactful. We recommend naming a file according to the way a user is most likely to search for it, like “Q3 AI impact executive summary.” It’s also helpful to name files associated with each other in similar ways. For example, the PowerPoint presentation and recording transcript for the same conference session should have similar titles.
• Recognize human behaviors. If site administrators and editors want to enable their users, they need to think about how to accommodate the ways they work. Plenty of employees will know to access SharePoint agents through the built-in chat, but why not provide even easier onramps? Our insiders have learned that it’s extra helpful to share agents through Microsoft Teams chats, in communications, and anywhere else people might need content support. It’s also helpful to use the UX design capabilities in SharePoint to create explicit call-to-action buttons that direct users to particular agents.

“SharePoint agents unlock and scale knowledge,” Flanigan says. “If there’s an answer locked somewhere in a content library, agents essentially turn that library into a responsive assistant, and people can ask it questions to get the information that empowers their work.”

The agentic future of enterprise knowledge

As our teams continue to experiment with SharePoint agents, they continue to find value in more accessible and authoritative knowledge. Site editors and administrators across Microsoft are eagerly seeking out advice and opportunities for more and more agents to support their organizations.

“SharePoint revolutionized enterprise content management and collaboration once before. Now, we have an incredible opportunity to use the power of AI to help people get the information and insights they need.”

Jeff Teper, president, Microsoft 365 Collaborative Apps and Platforms

Our product teams are also extending SharePoint agents’ capabilities to amplify their impact even further. In addition to linking to agents in Microsoft Teams chats, they’ll soon be available in channels to provide AI assistants as digital liaisons for specific projects or teams.

Other, more complex features are on the way as well. These improvements will lead to even greater value, all stemming from the combination of enterprise content and AI assistance.

“SharePoint revolutionized enterprise content management and collaboration once before,” says Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 Collaborative Apps and Platforms. “Now, we have an incredible opportunity to use the power of AI to help people get the information and insights they need, driving more informed decision-making, better collaboration, and more streamlined business processes.”

Key takeaways

Here are some things to think about as you consider getting started with SharePoint agents at your company:

• Experiment with different scopes and behaviors by iterating your SharePoint agents over time.
• Pay special attention to the metadata in your SharePoint sites and files to ensure they’re optimized for AI discoverability. This resource shares best practices for managing metadata.
• Tailor your SharePoint agents and how you disseminate them to human needs and behaviors to encourage uptake.

Try it out

Want to start streamlining access to content for your employees? Get started with SharePoint agents here.

Related links

• See how our Microsoft legal team is helping clients find answers faster with SharePoint agents.
• Find out how we’re reimagining content creation with our Azure AI-powered Inside Track story bot.
• Discover ways we’re unlocking enterprise AI extensibility at Microsoft with Microsoft Copilot Studio.
• Learn how we’re embracing this new ‘agentic’ moment at Microsoft.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Unlocking knowledge through intelligence: Lessons learned using SharePoint agents at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

To address these challenges, knowledge must be captured, presented, and made accessible so that individuals can quickly find answers on their own. Our legal team supporting marketing at Microsoft developed a SharePoint agent to help achieve just that.

Over the years, our Microsoft legal team, Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs, has developed rich, comprehensive, and curated content accessible through SharePoint. This includes guidelines, policies, summaries of laws, self-service tools, and more; all presented in a way that’s understandable for a non-legal audience. The marketing section of this SharePoint site alone drives approximately 8,000 page views per month, resulting in significant cost savings.

When Microsoft released SharePoint agents, it created an opportunity to do even more. Now, the marketing legal team’s newly developed SharePoint agent sits on top of its robust SharePoint site, adding the power of AI to answer legal questions and further unlocking the value of the existing resources in an elegant and streamlined way.

SharePoint agents are natural language AI assistants tailored to specific tasks and subject matter, providing trusted and precise answers and insights to support informed decision-making. Each SharePoint site includes an agent based on the site’s content. Or, with a single click users can create and share a custom agent that accesses only the information they select. 

“At Microsoft, AI is transforming how our legal teams operate, creating new opportunities to enhance workflow efficiency,” says Hossein Nowbar, chief legal officer and corporate vice president for Microsoft. “We’ve used SharePoint agents to improve the discoverability and delivery of legal resources, scale our legal advice, and gain critical insights into content usage. This saves considerable time for teams that need advice and those that provide it, all the while driving greater legal compliance and consistency.”

To determine whether using the SharePoint agent shown in the demo was better than using search and navigation alone, the legal team ran a test consisting of six legal questions for which five participants were asked to find answers. For each question, the participants were timed using search and navigation alone, and then using the new SharePoint agent.

In timing each participant, we stopped the clock either when they were satisfied that they had found the correct answer, or at five minutes if they did not find the correct answer. In the first test, using search and navigation, participants only found the answer 83.3% of the time, leaving 16.7% of the questions unanswered. Using the SharePoint agent, participants found the correct answer 100% of the time.

Not only were participants more successful at finding correct answers, but they also found the answers much more quickly using the SharePoint agent. Participants found and confirmed the answer in under 1 minute 46.7% of the time and found and in under two minutes 100% of the time. On average, participants found the correct answers 2.97 times faster using the SharePoint agent when compared with using site search and navigation.

We know from experience and feedback that when people can find answers to their legal questions quickly and easily using self-service resources, the legal department can focus on more complex issues. A SharePoint agent is an essential tool for any organization seeking to harness the power of AI to make answers readily available, reduce the need for live support, and bring their existing content to life.

“The Microsoft Legal team was an ideal early adopter of SharePoint agents due to their well-curated content,” says CJ Tan, principal group product manager for SharePoint agents. “They recognized the value of an agent in scaling support and handling easily addressable questions, allowing the team to focus on more complex, unique business scenarios. Instead of learning how to build an agent, they could concentrate on helping marketers surface and use the right content for their business needs. As subject matter experts, they were also well-positioned to validate and test their agent before publishing it on their SharePoint site.”

As we build out our array of Microsoft 365 agents, we continue to look to our internal experiences to guide the product’s evolution for our customers. We are exploring new ways for SharePoint agents to be shared and extensible across a variety of content sources. Lastly, we know that governance controls and analytics are critical as organizations introduce new features within their workflow and are excited about the roadmap for additional insights available and coming soon from Copilot Analytics, SharePoint Advanced Management, and SharePoint Purview.

“Organizations rely on SharePoint, creating more than two million sites and uploading more than two billion files daily,” says Jared Spataro, chief marketing officer of AI at Work @ Microsoft. “By giving every SharePoint site an agent, employees can quickly tap into this massive knowledge base with a single click.”

As with any new product and technology innovation, we’re focused on education and customer learnings. At the Microsoft 365 Community Conference we will host a variety of sessions on SharePoint agents, going deeper into business use cases and best practices for creation and usage.

Connect with author Brent Sanders on LinkedIn.

Here are some of our top tips for getting started with SharePoint agents at your company:

• Prepare your content: Ensure your SharePoint content is highly curated, accurate, complete, and unique. This helps agents provide more accurate and relevant responses.​ Organize content into smaller, manageable sets to improve response accuracy (e.g., using smaller document libraries with fewer files and minimal graphics).
• Maintain your content: Updates made to content sources are reflected in the SharePoint agent responses, so make sure that content sources are maintained. Also, be sure to regularly check that file permissions are accurate, based on the agent audience.
• Use ready-made agents: Each SharePoint site comes with a ready-made agent scoped to the content of the site. SharePoint admins can approve this agent to help jump-start usage. Use our communication kit to help announce SharePoint agent availability and increase awareness.
• Identify where custom SharePoint agents can add value: SharePoint agents can be grounded in specific sites, folders, or files. Collaborate with business stakeholders to identify business objectives and priorities to create specialized expert and informational agents.
• Target no more than 20 content sources: If you are selecting a site or folder, you can have any number of files underneath. However, when selecting items individually, we recommend capping it at 20 sites, folders, or files for best results.
• Encourage users to provide feedback: Your employees can use “thumbs up or thumbs down” to give feedback on the SharePoint agent’s response. This feedback can be used to continuously improve content and enhance response accuracy over time.
• Measure the impact: We have a variety of analytics resources to help measure adoption and usage of SharePoint agents, including; the SharePoint document library, SharePoint Advanced Management, Microsoft Purview, and additional reports coming to Copilot Analytics.

For organizations with at least 50 Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses, any employee in the organization will be able to create, share, and interact with SharePoint agents. Learn more about SharePoint agents.

• Learn more about implementing and using SharePoint agents.
• Check out the Microsoft Learn content about how you can get started with SharePoint agents.
• Discover how we’re managing the wave of agents washing over Microsoft with good governance.
• Read about how we’re extending our infrastructure at Microsoft to manage the proliferation of agents.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Boosting efficiency with SharePoint agents: How our Microsoft legal team is helping clients find answers faster appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

When our employees look for content internally here at Microsoft, they go to Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat first. With Copilot Chat, they can easily get answers to questions, catch up on missed work, generate new ideas, and more by tapping into the work data that they have access to via Microsoft Graph.

An employee might ask, “Can you tell me how I can learn more about AI in health care and who the experts are in the company?”

Whether they ask in Microsoft Teams or another Microsoft 365 app, or right in their browser, they likely will get a helpful, accurate response very specific to the health care sector. The answer could refer to an AI industry PowerPoint presentation, articles on responsible AI strategies, Microsoft Research publications, or a list of employees who are experts on the topic.

But how does Copilot know how to reference the AI industry PowerPoint presentation for health care? How does it know which versions of the responsible AI strategies for health care articles to use? How does it identify experts in the company?

It’s because Copilot connects to all the content on the topic available through Microsoft Graph.

“Our internal Microsoft content is the content Copilot uses to generate its results,” says Dodd Willingham, a principal program manager and internal search administrator in Microsoft Digital, the IT organization at Microsoft. “How Copilot consumes and uses our content determines the success—or failure—of Copilot for our employees.”

Enabling useful results

When it comes to returning the right content with Copilot, context is key.

Copilot uses the capabilities of Microsoft Graph to power its AI-generated results. For Microsoft Digital—like most organizations—that includes the content our users store and work with in our Microsoft 365 tenant. Results from Copilot directly depend on the quality of the content it uses. There’s an enormous opportunity to increase the capabilities of Copilot-based solutions because the underlying content is of such high quality. We’re seizing that opportunity to get this right internally at Microsoft.

“You hear a lot of people talking about Copilot, but few address the importance of improving content quality,” says Stan Liu, a senior product manager and knowledge management lead with Microsoft Digital. “The quality of an organization’s content management must be considered in every implementation of Copilot, and we’re doing some great things at Microsoft Digital to ensure Copilot returns accurate, relevant, and up-to-date responses.”

It’s an exciting time to be in content management, and we’re excited to share how our team in Microsoft Digital has met and addressed the challenges of preparing our content for a bright future with Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Curating enterprise content for Microsoft 365 Copilot

There’s an urgency for organizations to bring advanced AI tools to their employees, but it must be done thoughtfully and with good intentions. One of the fundamental challenges in implementing generative AI technologies like Copilot is balancing the desire to move quickly with the need for caution with technology possessing potential risks that haven’t been fully revealed.

“A lot of what we do lies in managing our content in a way that aligns with company strategy, and Copilot isn’t any different in that respect,” says David Johnson, a tenant and compliance architect in Microsoft Digital who ensures that the company’s content is well governed. “It’s important that Microsoft employees understand why content management is important and how they can help do it well.”

To be effective, we must lean into our ongoing culture shift to embrace knowledge sharing. We’ve been fostering a knowledge-sharing culture at Microsoft for years, and our adoption of Copilot has magnified the importance of that culture and the need to continue driving awareness and education for Microsoft employees.

Liu and his team are prioritizing this culture transformation.

“You need to build and encourage a culture that embraces user-driven content management,” Liu says. “Teams that document their knowledge, follow a content lifecycle in their workflows, and manage content consistently across the company are contributing hugely to what we’re trying to accomplish.”

It’s a two-fold challenge that involves encouraging and supporting our employees in collaboration and sharing and ensuring that the tools they use—including Copilot—provide results they can trust and use confidently.

“We’ve set goals within our organization to make Copilot a daily habit,” Liu says. “Community engagement and participation is a significant part of Copilot adoption, and we’ve been identifying use cases and success stories across Microsoft to share as success stories to inspire our employees and encourage adoption and innovation.”

Next generation content management with SharePoint

Microsoft SharePoint is a critical part of our content management strategy to get the most out of Copilot. We’re using the AI capabilities in SharePoint to give employees access to simple and capable content management tools.

SharePoint helps our Microsoft Digital enterprise content team ensure the right capabilities are in place to help people manage content. Missing metadata is a common issue with content management, and SharePoint now makes it easier for users and administrators to add metadata and classify and organize content.

SharePoint now brings AI, automation, and added security to our content experiences, processing, and governance. The product delivers new ways to engage with our most critical content and prepare it for Copilot, helping us manage and protect it throughout its lifecycle.

Automating metadata extraction with document processing

The document processing capabilities in SharePoint simplify and automate the process of extracting important information from existing content. Liu’s team helped deploy the document processing capabilities across Microsoft to enable teams to automate processing of important content, such as contracts, invoices, and statements of work.

Document processing uses machine learning models to recognize documents and the structured information within them. Using optical character recognition (OCR) combined with deep learning models, it identifies and extracts predefined text and data fields common to specific document types, including contracts, invoices, and receipts. It also supports the detection and extraction of sensitive data such as personal and financial identification.

Liu’s team is using prebuilt and custom document processing models to automatically populate metadata columns in SharePoint for many different document types. The metadata this processing provides improves search and creates a more complete understanding of what the files contain, so Copilot can recognize and return relevant information that was previously incomplete or unavailable.

“We’re capturing information across a plethora of documents automatically and almost none of it was recorded previously,” Liu says. “Some of our business groups were entering the metadata manually, but it was a time-consuming and expensive process. For most documents, it just wasn’t done. It’s a massive difference-maker in finding information about a specific contract or invoice that would have been close to impossible. By combining SharePoint with the power of Copilot, it’s a simple question away.”

Standardizing content creation with content assembly

Liu’s team enabled the content assembly feature of SharePoint across the company to simplify document creation and ensure that new documents follow metadata and structure guidelines.

Content assembly creates modern templates that can be easily maintained and used to generate repetitive documents quickly. This feature is particularly useful for departments like finance, where templates for partner letters or contracts are frequently needed. By using content assembly, teams can reduce the time spent on template management and document generation, as it allows for the creation of documents with just the key parts needing changes.

While the time-saving benefits of content assembly don’t directly affect Copilot results, they do encourage users to create better documents, eliminating the need to rewrite entire documents or repeatedly upload the same document. These documents—created using modern templates—are significantly more discoverable and classifiable and lead to more authoritative answers in Copilot.

Taxonomy tagging

Liu oversees a team that has been managing the company’s corporate taxonomy in the SharePoint term store for many years, maintaining a hierarchy of terms that can be reused throughout the SharePoint environment. The term store helps ensure that SharePoint metadata is consistent across the organization, and it provides employees with a standard set of choices when populating commonly used metadata such as products, job roles, or departments.

Taxonomy tagging in SharePoint automatically tags documents in SharePoint libraries with terms configured in the term store using AI. As at other companies, we face the ongoing challenge of getting employees to tag content. Most times, even when you have managed metadata set up in your document library, employees often don’t use it. This means the content is never further enriched with that metadata.

With taxonomy tagging, you set it and forget it. Uploaded content is automatically tagged, which does the job that a person would typically do, but often never does. This automated process ensures that documents get one or more metadata columns populated with standard terms from the term store based on the document content. This leads to more complete metadata for documents and more authoritative results for Copilot results when referencing data in those documents.

Using generative AI to help generative AI with autofill columns

Autofill columns in SharePoint takes content management to the next level by harnessing AI LLMs to automatically extract, summarize, and generate content from files uploaded to your SharePoint document library. This feature allows users to set up a simple natural language prompt on a column in SharePoint that extracts specific information or generates content from files. The extracted information is then displayed in the columns of the library, making it easier to manage and analyze data.

Liu has a lot to say about how his team is transforming document processing with autofill columns in SharePoint.

“Autofill columns are a game-changer for enhancing productivity in Copilot,” Liu says. “They also ensure that our documents have the necessary context for efficient retrieval and use. Autofill’s impact on our metadata within SharePoint document libraries is huge.”

Teams within Microsoft have started setting up new and existing columns with prompts to identify the types of information to extract from a file. These prompts can be customized and tested to ensure that they provide the desired results. After the autofill columns are set up, any new files uploaded to the library are automatically processed (and existing documents can be manually processed), and the result of the prompt is saved to the corresponding columns.

This approach not only streamlines document processing workflows but also enhances the overall efficiency and accuracy of their data management practices, making Copilot even more powerful and effective.

Continuing to grow with SharePoint

Liu’s team continues to drive SharePoint as a crucial part of their content management toolkit.

“We’re seeing immediate and significant benefits from using SharePoint and its AI features to manage our content,” Liu says. “In the first half of 2024, we estimated that our employees saved more than 120,000 hours in processing documents, pages, and images across the company for over 1,000,000 content items in our environment. It’s a great start, and we’re targeting even greater improvements across more content soon.”

Protecting content with Microsoft Purview Information Protection

Microsoft Purview Information Protection provides a wide range of content governance capabilities that help us discover, classify, and protect sensitive information wherever it stays or moves in the Microsoft tenant.

We use Purview Information Protection tools to identify sensitive content using expressions, functions, and trainable classifiers. With these tools, our enterprise data teams and employees can use corroborative evidence like keywords, confidence levels, and proximity to identify sensitive information types. They can also use examples of sensitive content to train recognition engines on expected patterns. All of this helps to better inform Copilot regarding the relevance of our Microsoft 365 content.

We use sensitivity labels in Purview to apply flexible protection actions that include encryption, access restrictions, and visual markings. This capability ties in nicely with SharePoint, which also uses and applies sensitivity labels.

Purview sensitivity labels provide a single labeling solution across apps, services, and devices to protect content as it travels inside and outside our organization. Purview sensitivity labels can be applied to Microsoft Office documents, third-party document types, meetings, chats, and the broader Microsoft 365 environment.

The sensitivity labels that we use to protect our content are recognized and used by Copilot to provide an extra layer of protection. For example, in Copilot Chat conversations, which can reference content from different types of items, the sensitivity label with the highest priority (typically, the most restrictive label) is visible to users. If the labels apply encryption from Microsoft Purview Information Protection, Copilot checks the usage rights for the user and only returns content that the user has access rights to.

Looking forward

Our enterprise content management transformation is ongoing. Our teams are looking at new content management capabilities across the company to ensure Copilot continues to provide current, accurate, and relevant results for our employees.

We’re continually evaluating our enterprise content management to identify new ways to create a Copilot-assisted workday for Microsoft employees. We’re also evaluating new technology, organizational practices, and industry standards as we strive to set the standard for how an organization can capture maximum value from its content using Copilot.

We’re currently working with the SharePoint product team to grow the AI-based capabilities for content management and classification. We’re experimenting with our own solutions and capabilities in SharePoint that will lead to the next generation of AI-supporting features that drive innovation and creativity here at Microsoft and for our customers.

Are you looking to prepare your enterprise content for Copilot and AI? Here are a few suggestions:

• Pursue content quality. Ensure that the content is current, accurate, and relevant. This is crucial for Copilot to provide authoritative answers and maintain user trust.
• Promote knowledge sharing. Foster a culture of knowledge sharing within the organization. Encourage teams to document their knowledge, follow a content lifecycle in their workflows, and manage content consistently across the company.
• Use SharePoint. The AI capabilities in SharePoint can help you simplify and automate content management processes.
• Implement Purview Information Protection Use Purview Information Protection tools to apply sensitivity labels to ensure content is protected as it travels inside and outside the organization.
• Prepare for future enhancements. Stay updated with ongoing transformations in enterprise content management and Copilot capabilities.

Try Microsoft 365 Copilot.

• Here’s how you can get started with Microsoft SharePoint.
• Learn how AI is already changing work—including here at Microsoft.
• Explore Microsoft Purview.
• Check out how we’re reimagining content management at Microsoft with SharePoint.
• Discover getting to ‘search completeness’ internally at Microsoft.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Boosting Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat with smart enterprise content management appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

This article is the first in a series dedicated to showing how our team in Microsoft Digital, Microsoft’s internal IT organization, is collaborating with our internal partners to use AI to accelerate growth and radically improve operational efficiencies, specifically for corporate functions such as HR, legal, and real estate. The hope is that by providing concrete examples and outcomes, we can provide our customers with inspiration, a blueprint, and in some cases, a solution, to do the same.

Within Microsoft Digital, the organization that powers, protects, and transforms the digital experience here at Microsoft, we have the pleasure of working day in and day out with our corporate function partners across the company. From HR and legal, to our real estate team, all are being asked to do more with less, with a focus on keeping operational costs down while maintaining or improving productivity. As a partner to these organizations, it’s our job to find ways to allow them to do just that!

“With AI, we have so many new ways to innovate. We have incredible potential to make our corporate functions more efficient and impactful.”

Patrice Pelland, partner software group engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

And we’re sure it comes as no surprise that AI has been at the center of all this, playing a fundamental role in transforming business workflows while improving operational efficiency, user productivity, regulatory and corporate compliance, and data-driven decision making.

Over the last year, we’ve seen how it can revolutionize the way our internal corporate functions operate by automating repetitive and time-consuming operational tasks. Let’s look at our internal project, an AI-powered document lifecycle management platform, as one of the first examples of this. 

“With AI, we have so many new ways to innovate. From saving valuable time for our legal professionals, to optimizing building occupancy, to helping our HR professionals support employees in the hybrid workplace, to enabling many self-service experiences for our employees; we have incredible potential to make our corporate functions more efficient and impactful,” says Patrice Pelland, a partner software group engineering manager for HR & CELA in Microsoft Digital.

Document management gets a major makeover

Our new AI-powered platform aims to empower our corporate functions teams by revolutionizing end-to-end document management. From crafting templates, authoring documents, and facilitating collaboration to orchestrating seamless workflows, offering secure storage, and managing records, this system uses AI enriched capabilities to bring operational efficiencies, reduce costs, and ensure accurate compliance to any document-based process.

“This platform was developed to address the critical need for end-to-end document management across various verticals within Microsoft,” says Mohit Chand, a principal group engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “It was created to streamline processes like digitizing documents and address the common pain points that typically makes this activity take months to complete.”

The Microsoft Digital team set out to develop the document lifecycle management platform with six core principles in mind:

1. Automation empowerment: Automate document management to enhance productivity and efficiency.
2. Seamless integration: Integrate with Microsoft 365 and Azure for a seamless user experience.
3. AI-driven innovation: Use cutting-edge AI technology to enhance functionalities in search and analysis.
4. User-centric design: Focus on intuitive interfaces that simplify complex functionalities.
5. Scalable flexibility: Adapt to the needs of different organization sizes and processes.
6. Cost efficiency: Reduce operational costs through optimized document processes.

Transforming our document lifecycle

“Our intention after aligning on the core principles and key platform capabilities was to reduce the digitization process from three to six months to less than fourteen days. It was a North Star goal that I’m happy to say has now been achieved for all of our onboarded processes thus far.”

Andrew Voss, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

The team used Microsoft 365, Azure Open AI, Azure Cognitive Services, and Microsoft Purview to create the following system capabilities:

• Template digitization and management: Digitize and manage templates by creating and modifying snippets and operational data fields.
• Secure and controlled editing: Easily manage and update templates and snippets with controlled workflows to ensure only approved and published templates are used.
• Efficient document drafting: Start with standard templates and dynamically assemble documents, incorporating required metadata and content snippets seamlessly in Word.
• Streamlined approval processes: Automate review and approval workflows, integrate eSignatures, and keep everyone updated with real-time notifications and status changes.
• Smart ingestion and storage: Automatically ingest documents, perform validation checks, and securely store them while keeping track of all changes and updates.
• Intelligent content analysis: Extract and use metadata and content snippets for enhanced document classification, improving search capabilities and document retrieval using both keyword and natural language processing (NLP) techniques.
• Automated compliance enforcement: Apply retention labels, manage document lifecycles, and enforce policies to ensure compliance with legal and regulatory standards.

“Our intention after aligning on the core principles and key platform capabilities was to reduce the digitization process from three to six months to less than fourteen days,” says Andrew Voss, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital. “It was a North Star goal that I’m happy to say has now been achieved for all of our onboarded processes thus far.”

No gaming around: The results speak volumes

One of the first internal organizations to put the new platform to the test was Xbox. They were looking to automate one of their most frequent contract types, a critical process for onboarding new games into the Xbox ecosystem.

Historically this process was done manually, involving non-digitized templates and redundant data entry across multiple systems. The process typically consumed about 1,800 hours of staff time annually.

“Our collaboration with Xbox showcases the effectiveness of this solution for optimizing complex business processes. As Xbox continues to expand their use across a wider range of contract types, we are committed to introducing new technical advancements that will contribute to the platform’s growing autonomy, adaptability, and sophistication.”

Alpa Jain, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital

This manual contract creation process was more than just time-consuming; it could also be error-prone, significantly delaying the onboarding of new content and impacting service level agreements (SLAs).

In fact, the solution has saved the Xbox team over 1,600 hours resulting in an 88% time savings in the contract generation process, reducing the time it takes for these contracts from 1,800 hours to just 158 hours annually!

“The amount of business impact and return on investment that we’ve been able to deliver by partnering with the Microsoft Digital team has been outstanding,” says Hoss Hostetler, a senior service engineer in Xbox. “The ability to automate initial contract generation from configured templates through to sending out signatures and getting notified of fully signed contracts via application programming interfaces (APIs) has been absolutely game-changing for our team.”

Xbox has been so encouraged by the initial outcome of their results that they are preparing to extend the solution to automate two more of their standard contracts. By doing this, the team is anticipating an additional 600+ hours per year in time savings.

“Our collaboration with Xbox showcases the effectiveness of this solution for optimizing complex business processes,” says Alpa Jain, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital. “As Xbox continues to expand their use across a wider range of contract types, we are committed to introducing new technical advancements that will contribute to the platform’s growing autonomy, adaptability, and sophistication.”

Making its way to our customers through SharePoint Premium

While the AI-powered platform started as an end-to-end document management solution for our internal Microsoft Corporate Functions teams, many of its capabilities will be showing up in SharePoint Premium. 

“This represents a unique case where Microsoft Digital, as Customer Zero, developed a product to solve the needs and challenges that our internal corporate function customers face, and that solution is now being incorporated into an external customer-facing product.”

Bidyadhar Patra, principal software engineering manager, Microsoft Digital

SharePoint Premium is Microsoft’s advanced content management and experiences platform for customers and brings AI, automation, and added security to content experiences, processing, and governance.

This collaboration with the SharePoint team exemplifies Microsoft Digital’s internal innovation being leveraged for external product development. The transfer of knowledge, capabilities, and insights from the internal document management product and Microsoft Digital team is sure to make the SharePoint Premium product much more effective for our customers from the get-go.

“This represents a unique case where Microsoft Digital, as Customer Zero, developed a product to solve the needs and challenges that our internal corporate function customers face, and that solution is now being incorporated into an external customer-facing product,” says Bidyadhar Patra, a principal software engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “For us, this approach highlights a new way of leveraging internal needs for broader product development.”

Key takeaways

Here are some points to keep in mind as you contemplate transforming your content lifecycle with AI at your company:

• AI is accelerating corporate functions growth across HR, legal, and real estate through operational efficiency, automated compliance, data-driven insights, and productivity for individuals. 
• By using AI and natural language processing, corporate function leaders can digitize templates for any business process, streamline reviews with AI-assisted analysis, and more easily govern their documents, with considerable time savings. The document lifecycle management platform, developed within Microsoft Digital, is a great example of this.
• Don’t fall behind when it comes to AI. The time is now to start experimenting with and using these technologies to improve business results and maximize return on investment.

Try it out

Get started with Microsoft SharePoint today.

Related links

• Learn how we’re reimagining content management at Microsoft with SharePoint.
• Read how we’re supercharging our SharePoint sites at Microsoft with Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Check out how we’re empowering employee self-service with guardrails with sensitivity labels.
• Explore how we’re leveraging the power of AI agents to improve employee self-service at Microsoft.

We’d like to hear from you!

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post AI is revolutionizing the way we support corporate functions at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

At Microsoft, we use SharePoint extensively across the company, including in Microsoft Digital—the company’s IT organization—where we’re taking advantage of its AI-powered add-on features to transform how the company manages its content.

SharePoint is the backbone of our content management and collaboration strategy. We use it to enable our employees to access, share, and co-create documents across teams and devices for more than 600,000 sites containing 350 million pieces of content and more than 12 petabytes of data. It’s at the core of everything we do, from being the place where individual employees and small teams store and share their work, to being home to our very largest portals, where the entire company comes together to find news and perform important common tasks.

At this scale, we continually face the challenge of ensuring that our content stored in SharePoint is secure, compliant, and easy to find and use.

It’s a big task, according to Stan Liu, senior product manager and knowledge management lead at Microsoft Digital.

“We have a complex environment,” Liu says. “With more than 300,000 users accessing the Microsoft 365 tenant across multiple global regions, a significant amount of content is being created and stored within our SharePoint environment.”

Liu is no stranger to the challenges of managing SharePoint at scale.

“We have several teams creating content and many trying to find content,” Liu says. “Discoverability is always at the front of our minds and making content easy to find requires time and effort in SharePoint.”

Liu’s team is focused on making content management as simple and effective as possible for Microsoft employees. SharePoint users at Microsoft Digital perform many manual tasks to keep SharePoint content secure, compliant, and easy to find and use. They apply their efforts to provide better governance over constantly increasing digital content, prevent accidental sharing, and effectively manage the content lifecycle.

At this scale, with the challenges of discoverability and manual effort clearly in focus, Liu’s team has turned to SharePoint to meet these challenges and prepare Microsoft Digital for the next generation of content management and usage scenarios.

Discovering, automating, and more with SharePoint AI-powered add-ons

SharePoint uses the power of Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, the Microsoft Power Platform, and AI-powered add-on features to bring automation and added security to content experiences, processing, and governance. It delivers new ways to engage with our most critical content, managing and protecting it through its lifecycle. AI add-ons are  a vital part of the SharePoint feature set, enhancing productivity and collaboration. AI-driven search provides personalized and relevant search results by understanding user intent and context. AI-powered insights help users discover patterns and trends in their data, enabling more informed decision-making. AI-automated workflows and content management streamline processes, while AI-infused advanced security measures ensure data protection.

SharePoint includes a large set of pay-as-you-go, AI-powered add-ons, including:

• Autofill columns. Autofill columns use large language models to automatically pull, condense, or create content from files in a SharePoint document library. This feature allows selected columns to store metadata without manual input, simplifying file management and data organization.
• Content assembly. Content assembly automates the creation of routine business documents, including contracts, statements of work, service agreements, consent letters, and other types of correspondence.
• Document processing. Using prebuilt, structured, unstructured, and freeform document processing models, SharePoint can extract information from many document types, such as contracts, invoices, and receipts. It can also detect and extract sensitive information from documents.
• Image tagging. Image tagging helps users find and manage images in SharePoint document libraries. The image-tagging service automatically tags images with descriptive keywords using AI. These keywords are stored in a managed metadata column, making it easier to search, sort, filter, and manage the images.
• Taxonomy tagging. Taxonomy tagging helps users find and manage terms in SharePoint document libraries. SharePoint uses AI to automatically tag documents with terms or term sets configured in the taxonomy store. These terms and sets are stored in a managed metadata column, making documents easier to search, sort, filter, and manage.
• Document translation. SharePoint can create a translated copy of a document or video transcript in a SharePoint document library while preserving the file’s original format and structure.
• SharePoint eSignature. SharePoint eSignature facilitates the sending of electronic signature requests, ensuring documents remain within Microsoft 365 during the review and signing process. eSignature can efficiently and securely dispatch documents to be signed by individuals within or outside the organization.
• Optical character recognition. The optical character recognition (OCR) service extracts printed or handwritten text from images. SharePoint automatically scans the image files, extracts the relevant text, and makes the text from the images available for search and indexing. This enables quick and accurate location of key phrases and terms.

“SharePoint is really built around discovery and automation, with a huge emphasis on AI to help perform tasks efficiently at scale,” says Sean Squires, a principal product manager in the OneDrive and SharePoint Product Group. “We need that granular control and understanding of how our content and intellectual property is represented, shared, and used.”

Creating a culture of content management

There’s also a cultural element that’s critical to the team’s work.

“SharePoint with AI-powered add-ons represents a shift in how Microsoft Digital approaches content management, not just as a new technology but as a new way of working,” Liu says. “It’s about integrating AI capabilities into daily practices to automate mundane tasks like tagging content, making it more discoverable, and keeping it up to date. This integration aims to make content management a part of daily habits and routines, ensuring content remains relevant and useful.”

Liu highlights the importance of making content management a daily habit and how AI can simplify the process. He recognizes the need for a cultural shift to incentivize active participation in content management. It’s also important to measure the impact of content contributions on others. The goal is to make content management processes, such as classifying content, a regular practice to ensure high-quality content within the enterprise.

Part of the cultural shift is in how we think about SharePoint itself. Moving from “site-centric” to “document-centric” usage of SharePoint signifies a strategic shift in how we manage SharePoint content at Microsoft Digital. Metadata and content context are critical to ensuring our content is easy to find and relevant, and we’re leaning on SharePoint AI-powered features to help us do that. Incentivizing active participation in content management and making it a daily habit for our employees is critical to a wider and more consistent realization of the benefits provided by SharePoint across the organization.

“How do we find ways to make things easier without somebody having to do anything?” asks Ray Peer, a senior product manager in Microsoft Digital. “That’s where we’re using the SharePoint AI capabilities to help with things like automatic processing and auto-tagging. These are mundane tasks that people don’t like to do. So instead of just forcing change on the culture, we’re finding ways to make it easier for the culture to change.”

Microsoft Digital has already seen huge successes in making it easier for the culture to change with SharePoint’s evolution.

The Microsoft Cloud Operations & Innovation Finance team experienced several issues in accurately tracking and managing their invoices. In certain situations, the team found it difficult to find unpaid invoices or uncover missing information in invoices. These issues made it more difficult to keep track of payments and created delays in locating invoices.

To address these issues, they created a SharePoint site dedicated to invoice management for the finance team. It used the prebuilt SharePoint document processing models to automatically extract important data from invoices uploaded to the document library, including PO numbers, dates, amounts, and client information. They added column metadata to track payment status and applied conditional formatting and highlighting to categorize invoices and draw attention to missing information in invoice fields.

It’s a perfect example of how an AI-driven feature like document processing in SharePoint can radically transform a business process within a simple SharePoint document library. The solution reduced costs, decreased processing times, improved accuracy, and enabled better compliance for the Microsoft Cloud Operations & Innovation Finance team.

Peer reiterates that solutions like this have a way of gaining momentum in the organization.

“This solution quickly came to the attention of other finance-based departments within Microsoft,” Peer says. “Other managers wanted the same benefits and asked for the same solution. It was easy to replicate, and suddenly, those benefits were multiplied across the company.”

It’s not an isolated situation. Many other business groups have similar stories.

The Microsoft Partner Incentive Operations team sends hundreds of letters to Microsoft partners daily using a set of Microsoft Word templates. IT staff created the templates manually and updated them manually when necessary. On average, it took 75 minutes to create a template and 30 minutes to review each letter and send it to a partner organization.

To improve efficiency, they implemented a new letter generation process for partner letters based on the SharePoint Content Assembly service. They created a SharePoint modern template document for the letter types they used and integrated the templates with data sourced from internal systems containing relevant information customized for each partner, by market, region and sales offer type.

The new solution created a flexible method for creating partner letters with dynamic placeholders in the document and multiple letter formats, including text, tables, and conditional sections, all driven by a self-serve UI. Letter creators could completely automate the letter-creation process without any manual intervention.

The new solution created more consistent partner letter results, and the automated process saved the team more than 6,000 hours per year in manual template creation and refresh tasks, leading to a 30% increase in business agility and a decrease in time-to-market.

Integrating with Copilot to compound the benefits of AI

Microsoft 365 Copilot integrates seamlessly with SharePoint to enhance its capabilities, particularly in automation and AI. The content AI and intelligent document processing built into SharePoint use advanced machine learning models to classify content, organize it, extract relevant information, and automate workflows at scale. The improvements in metadata and content quality directly improve the performance and results in Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Copilot complements SharePoint by using large language models to assist with document creation, Q&A, and running complex queries. It can help find specific documents based on criteria and automate tasks like translations or routing documents to appropriate teams. The integration aims to democratize the ability to configure complex machine learning models, making it easier for users to apply them to their content and achieve significant productivity gains.

The symbiotic relationship between Copilot and SharePoint is particularly evident in their shared goal of automating content processing. For example, SharePoint with AI-powered add-ons can automatically tag documents with metadata, which Copilot can then use to perform more robust queries and assist with organizing content. This collaboration represents a step towards a future where sophisticated AI-driven workflows are accessible to all users, enhancing productivity and efficiency across the organization.

It’s a vision that’s already becoming a reality at Microsoft Digital.

Looking forward

We’re anticipating a near future where AI-based content management capabilities and automation fully intersect with large language models and language understanding services to create a sophisticated combination of intelligence and automation.

“We can easily envision the capability to perform a set of complex tasks over complex content with a single prompt,” Squires says. “I might ask Copilot to find all invoices for the Fabrikam company worth more than $10,000 from 2023 and send copies of those invoices to my finance manager. SharePoint is putting that future within reach at Microsoft Digital, and that’s exciting.”

Microsoft Digital will continue to invest in SharePoint capabilities across the organization and work with the product group as Customer Zero, growing SharePoint features to push the boundaries of what’s capable with AI-powered content management.

Here are a few takeaways that can help you get started with SharePoint in your organization:

• Explore the different Content AI services that SharePoint offers, such as autofill columns, content assembly, document processing, image tagging, taxonomy tagging, document translation, eSignature, and optical character recognition.
• Identify the business processes and scenarios in your organization that could benefit from AI-driven content management and automation, such as invoice tracking, partner or customer correspondence, document creation, and content discovery.
• Learn how to configure and use SharePoint features in your SharePoint document libraries, such as creating and applying metadata columns, setting up content assembly templates, enabling document processing models, and using image and taxonomy tagging.
• Integrate Microsoft 365 Copilot with SharePoint to enhance your content experiences and workflows, such as querying for specific documents, translating content, routing documents to appropriate teams, and creating documents with natural language prompts.

Get started with Microsoft SharePoint today.

• Read about how our Microsoft legal team is helping clients find answers faster with SharePoint agents.
• Find out how we moved our main employee portal to latest version of SharePoint.
• Learn more about SharePoint’s AI-powered add-ons like autofill, content assembly, translation, and e-signature capabilities.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Reimagining content management at Microsoft with SharePoint appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Search is part of our everyday life. It’s useful—we all know that—but how can you quantify that impact?

That was the challenge faced by Dodd Willingham, principal program manager and internal search administrator in Microsoft Digital. “There’s an obvious value, we can see that by the existence of Bing,” Willingham says. “But how do you put it in numbers?”

Lots of searches happen in a company, but when asked to demonstrate the business impact as part of justifying more investment, Willingham had an epiphany. He could use telemetry to make the argument for him.

Click the image to learn how Microsoft is using Microsoft Search internally to dramatically improve the finding experience for company employees.

Microsoft Search is unifying search for Microsoft 365 customers across Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft 365 apps on Windows, Microsoft OneDrive for Business, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft Bing. More specifically, the Microsoft Search team strives to bring complete, company-wide results to each individual, no matter where they’re searching from. No longer should they need to search in separate products to ensure that they search all possible content.

Internally at Microsoft, this shift is proving to be very powerful.

“Employees no longer need to change platforms to get the results they’re looking for,” Willingham says. “They do a single search and get all the results they need.”

Within the company, Microsoft Digital manages the internal deployment of search across the company. “The purpose of active search administration is to deliver the most complete search results, with good relevancy and good quality,” Willingham says. “These improvements to search are helping us do that.”

One crucial way that Willingham and his team help deliver better search results is through corporate bookmarks that allow internal teams like Corporate Communications and Human Resources to select the top results employees get when they search specific sets of keywords.

These bookmarks aren’t the kind used to save your favorite sites—they’re curated results that search administrators can use to point people to content located someplace that can’t be indexed. They highlight authoritative sources of content, and ensure popular content is accessible.

Bookmarks boost employee productivity because they get employees the right results very quickly.

Dodd Willingham, principal program manager and internal search administrator in Microsoft Digital

And they’re fast.

“Bookmarks boost employee productivity because they get employees the right results very quickly,” Willingham says.

The business value of search

Including telemetry in the overall improvements to internal corporate searching—a feature built into Microsoft Enterprise SharePoint—allowed Willingham and his team to measure how much time employees spend on a search.

And what story is the data telling?

“We found that bookmarks net a direct benefit of 6,250 hours a month and 17,160 hours in indirect benefits,” Willingham says. “Combined, 23,410 hours of benefits are being realized each month.”

How did Willingham come to these numbers?

“Forty-five percent of all searches click on a bookmark,” Willingham says. That percentage is across the 1.6 million monthly searches that take place internally at Microsoft within Microsoft Bing and Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise Search.

Scaled to an enterprise level, the business value of bookmarks quickly became apparent.

“Conservatively, our basic measurement of search success was yielding results of 60 seconds per search using a bookmark versus an average of 115 seconds across all searches,” Willingham says. “That’s one whole minute of productivity re-captured for every bookmark-backed search.”

Multiplied across Microsoft’s population and search usage, that one minute of search time netted 6,250 hours a month in productivity. But it’s not just time gained from quick search results, it’s also about getting the right answers.

There’s a measurement based on telemetry of whether a search succeeded or failed to find useful content. Using that metric, Willingham found that a person who uses a bookmark appears to be successful 98 percent of the time. By contrast, searches without a bookmark average 72 percent for the same calculation.

“The absolute calculation [of search success] is kind of meaningless; what’s important is that it moved by a significant margin,” Willingham says. “It suggests that with bookmarks, more people find the content they need faster.”

In direct benefits, you’re gaining 6,000 hours at the cost of 300. When you include indirect, you can triple that. The return on investment is 2,000 percent, and that’s using conservative estimates.

Dodd Willingham, principal program manager and internal search administrator in Microsoft Digital

Faster is a direct productivity gain. Getting the right content to the right person at the right time is an indirect benefit. But the biggest insight is that delivering these benefits only requires investing less than 300 hours per month, spread across several staff.

“In direct benefits, you’re gaining 6,000 hours at the cost of 300. When you include indirect, you can triple that,” Willingham says. “The return on investment is 2,000 percent, and that’s using conservative estimates.”

How Microsoft uses bookmarks

With new practices in hand and telemetry to chart impact, Willingham and his team set out to optimize using bookmarks in search.

“Over the course of three years, we took the volume of bookmarks from around 1,100 to a peak of 1,800,” he says. “We’re currently sitting at around 1,200.”

Bookmarks were already being used before Microsoft Search was rolled out.

“We didn’t do anything revolutionary, we just opened up the guidelines so that more bookmarks could be added when appropriate,” Willingham says. “We then tuned them based on actual usage so that only those being used were kept.”

The technology for bookmarks had previously been part of Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft OneDrive, made visible in the employee portal for Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise, MSW. Bookmarks had a set of configuration rules and standards for what could and couldn’t be a bookmark, but that’s it.

Librarians from the Microsoft Library Services team create and manage the company’s search bookmarks.

“It’s a multifaceted role,” says Beck Keller, also a member of the Microsoft Digital Enterprise Search team. “My responsibilities as a librarian at the Microsoft Library are far broader—bookmarks are just a small part of my job. This doesn’t take up my entire work week.”

What does she do for search administration?

Every month, Keller pulls search query metrics and analyzes them for areas of interest that currently lack a bookmark or good naturalized results. From this analysis, Keller can update the enterprise bookmarks across Microsoft.

“Sometimes this means removing or changing bookmarks that don’t currently meet our standards,” Keller says. “I also review proposed bookmarks and offer guidance to Microsoft teams looking to create bookmarks for their own sites, outside of Enterprise Search.”

This is the administrative work Willingham is talking about—bookmarks can be added, removed, or updated with ease. But the impact can be bigger than recapturing lost productivity.

“A year ago, there were no searches for COVID-19,” Willingham says. “We now get hundreds and thousands of searches a month. We went from zero to around 200 [between October and February]. There was no way to surface relevant results about COVID-19 because there were so few of them.”

But this was the trait the administrative search team was looking for—how to get better and proactive insights on Microsoft Search. Informed by current events, the team sought to anticipate which results users would be looking for.

“We asked if there should be a bookmark for the right COVID-19 link,” Keller says.

Willingham and Keller reached out to Corporate Communications about where to direct Microsoft users searching for information on COVID-19. That team was putting together a landing page for employees dedicated to content on the topic, including a FAQ. The bookmark was quickly built and deployed.

This was February 2020.

“The next month, the volume of searches for COVID-19 went up 40-fold,” Willingham says. “Maybe users would have found the info on their own, but as search volume was growing, 8,000 times a month they would nearly always find what they were looking for quickly, thanks to the bookmark.”

That’s the main goal of a search administrator.

Bright future for bookmarks

So, what’s next for Microsoft Search and bookmarks?

“More telemetry,” Willingham says. “The custom telemetry that we created is something any customer can do. It’s a capability within SharePoint.”

Having even more metrics will also help to further quantify Willingham’s findings.

“We erred on the low side for our productivity numbers, but it shows what’s possible for a medium or large company.”

Both Willingham and Keller are excited to see others adopt bookmarks as a way of improving Microsoft Search.

“Bookmarks are easy to put in,” Keller says. “The owner of the content tells us what the URL is, and some basic info such as a preliminary title and description. We figure out the appropriate keywords, update the basic info where needed, and then say ‘Go.’”

It all adds up to a better experience for employees when they need to go looking for something.

“The same tools we use to optimize bookmarks are available to everyone,” Willingham says. “That’s why they’re so useful for productivity. When combined with telemetry, you can really gain some unexpected insights into the productivity of your organization.”

• Read this guide on how to create and manage bookmarks at your company.
• Getting to ‘search completeness’ internally at Microsoft.

Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Internal search bookmarks boost productivity at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

In an organization the size of Microsoft, employees need a wide array of tools to accomplish their work. For many, third-party software is part of their toolbox, and that means we need to purchase, organize, and manage software licenses on a massive scale. Robust software asset management is essential for making sure the process is efficient for employees, optimized for license managers, and meets rigorous compliance standards.

Our Software Licensing Service (SLS) is the Microsoft Digital team responsible for software asset management.

“When you think about software asset management, you want to track a license’s lifecycle from requisition through allocation and deployment,” says Patrick Graff, the senior service engineer leading the SLS team. “Then you need to maintain it until you can reclaim it at the end-of-life stage.”

If individual departments and employees manage their own software licenses, organizations are open to all kinds of inefficiencies and risks—not to mention a subpar experience for employees who need access to third-party software. Manually tracking the number of licenses enterprise-wide, total spend, and overall software entitlements is incredibly labor-intensive.

Under those fragmented circumstances, how can a procurement department know the total entitlements from a particular vendor? How do they ensure their company maintains the proper enterprise licensing position at scale? Do they know how many unallocated licenses are available? And how do they manage reclamation, reallocation, and rightsizing during renewal and true-up cycles?

SLS wanted an enterprise-level platform that would both streamline the employee experience and optimize license management. So they partnered with Microsoft Procurement and Infrastructure Engineering Services (IES) to implement a unified software catalog.

A strategic partnership drives software licensing excellence

Since 2015, we’ve used ServiceNow to automate our helpdesk support process. When they introduced their Software Asset Management (SAM) module, it was a natural fit for implementing a centralized software catalog.

“The scope of work and the objective resonated with SLS because they understood the pain points of using disconnected tools,” says Sherif Mazhar, principal product manager for the IES team partnered with SLS. “They were interested in consolidating those tools and gaining the ability to track license usage accurately.”

We started seeing better control, better insights, better reporting, and also better visibility into unused licenses and how we could reassign them.

—Sherif Mazhar, principal product manager, Infrastructure Engineering Services

Thanks to collaboration with ServiceNow engineering teams, ServiceNow features well-tuned, out-of-the-box compatibility with Microsoft technologies. They also maintain an enterprise roadmap to streamline large integrations.

The teams started small with a single license portfolio: Adobe Creative Cloud. Tools like Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Pro are essential for creatives, but many groups had purchased their own licenses on an ad-hoc basis.

Once the Adobe licenses were consolidated into ServiceNow SAM, the team saw rapid results. “The value realization was quick with Adobe,” Mazhar says. “We started seeing better control, better insights, better reporting, and also better visibility into unused licenses and how we could reassign them.”

Within 12 months, the team had cut back excess licenses across Microsoft, resulting in significant savings. With such a successful pilot already showing results, SLS decided to move forward with a more universal ServiceNow SAM implementation.

Implementing ServiceNow Software Asset Management across Microsoft

ServiceNow features several out-of-the box enterprise integrations, but the work of developing one process for license management required extensive collaboration between SLS and IES.

Several different technologies needed to come together to facilitate a unified experience:

• Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) connectors provide one-directional imports into ServiceNow, bringing relevant data into the ServiceNow instance from an SQL Server database and mapping it to ServiceNow’s SAM database.
• Microsoft SharePoint grants automatically provisioned access to relevant download files once the software is allocated to the end user.
• Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AAD) handles identity and access management for software acquisition, enabling single-sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) capabilities for cloud-based and SaaS tools.
• A Microsoft Teams integration for the ServiceNow Virtual Agent helps employees troubleshoot and seek support via chat within a Teams App.

Once the ServiceNow implementation was complete, the team needed to loop the whole project into the existing employee workflow by connecting it with internal procurement and IT portals. SLS ensured that employees felt at home in the new experience by unifying the catalog’s color coding and UI with the portals employees already know how to navigate.

The result is a streamlined experience for employees and a management environment that delivers optimization and compliance.

A transformative third-party software licensing experience

When one of our employees wants access to third-party software, they log in to the IT or procurement portal of their choice and navigate to the Unified Software Catalog in ServiceNow. From there, they simply find the software tool they need and submit a request.

If a piece of software requires no extra permissions, the employee can simply requisition it. Otherwise, they fill out a request form, which initiates an automated workflow that manages permissions, their device’s operating system, relevant purchase orders and cost centers, and our entitlements within that software portfolio.

The real power of the tool is that we can set up configurable workflows for different types of products.

—Tony Bouker, senior product manager, Infrastructure Engineering Services

When the license allocation is complete, the end user gets an email with installation instructions. They can then proceed to an automatically provisioned SharePoint folder to download and install the software.

For SaaS tools and cloud-based suites like Adobe Creative Cloud, the team has created another way to access their software. The system adds the employee’s alias to an internal identity group, which grants access through SSO powered by AAD.

“The real power of the tool is that we can set up configurable workflows for different types of products,” says Tony Bouker, senior product manager with IES.

Efficiency, optimization, and compliance

Microsoft SLS has integrated the software requisitioning process into the Bing search engine. Now, employees can search software titles through Bing, which then points to the Unified Software Catalog.

Employees no longer have to conduct manual, online searches for third-party software or send emails asking for requisitions. Now they simply search in Bing or head directly into the Unfied Software Catalog and initiate an automated requisition workflow.

For SLS, the outcomes are about data-driven insights and license consolidation. The team can track Microsoft’s overall licensing position across all third-party software without the need for time-consuming detective work or manual uploads. When the time comes for renewals and true-ups, that visibility is essential.

It also mitigates risk through robust governance and policy by reducing vulnerabilities, data breaches, and license compliance violations.

On a more strategic level, the tool helps SLS optimize our software licensing frameworks for individual providers. For example, if one employee uses several tools within a provider’s toolkit, the team has the data it needs to decide whether it’s more efficient to allocate those licenses individually or as part of an “all-apps” subscription.

On the macro level, it gives us the ability to negotiate volume licenses more accurately, at exactly the level that fulfils our organizational needs. Good data drives informed decision making.

As those optimizations scale, Graff estimates that we’re saving an average of 10 percent across all of our enterprise license positions. For an organization the size of Microsoft, that represents cost savings in the millions.

Beyond Microsoft, this implementation is laying the groundwork for a wide-ranging change in how enterprises manage their third-party software.

“If you look at the Microsoft presence in the market, every single customer who’s using our technologies leverages our endpoint management tools for asset management and license tracking,” Mazhar says. “So this will open the door for a lot of opportunity for Microsoft, for ServiceNow, and for our customers.”

• Start small with a targeted publisher and gain early wins to build confidence with stakeholders.
• Have a close relationship with your partner teams so you can recognize needs and grab opportunities.
• Build out your key process areas first, and identify workflow patterns you can reuse to scale your software asset management program.
• Establish policies to make sure the changes you put into effect have teeth.
• When working with a third-party partner, make sure you have the right connections to ensure you can provide feedback at the right level.
• Ensure leadership understands your priorities so they can manage those relationships at the highest level.

• Discover how we’re enabling modern support at Microsoft with AI.
• Learn about streamlining vendor assessment with ServiceNow VRM at Microsoft.
• See how Microsoft is modernizing our internal Help Desk with ServiceNow.
• Read about instrumenting ServiceNow with Azure Monitor.

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Rethinking software licensing at Microsoft with ServiceNow Software Asset Management appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

We periodically update our stories, but we can’t verify that they represent the full picture of our current situation at Microsoft. We leave them on the site so you can see what our thinking and experience was at the time.

Looking to find your benefits, adjust withholdings, or find a specific policy? Microsoft employees can get this information and more through HRWeb: our internal human resources site that serves as a central hub for a variety of important employment information.

As part of a company-wide push to improve the employee experience and meet employee needs around the globe, HRWeb is now supported by the modern experience in SharePoint. Along with being integrated into Microsoft 365, SharePoint has been optimized for a better user experience, including mobility.

“Through this migration, we improved the performance, accessibility, and reliability of our HRWeb platform while also reducing the cost to maintain it,” says Sam Crewdson, a principal program manager with Microsoft Digital, the company’s IT organization. “The platform, the way it’s built, it’s more what-you-see-is-what-you-get. It’s no longer complex.”

And this transformation is critical to empowering self-service at Microsoft. There’s no need to file a help desk ticket or to go looking for someone to help you when you can find what you need with a quick search.

“HRWeb is a critical asset for HR from a standpoint of supporting employees,” says Corinne Dubedat, HR director for Employee Support Experiences within HR Services. “We try to make sure employees are connected to resources in the best way possible so that they can spend their time focusing on their customers, effectively empowering the people who empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.”

With the modern platform in place, the company’s more than 220,000 employees can find the information they need in a snap, but it’s also easier for HR to manage content at scale. All of this translates into the kind of experience employees expect from Microsoft.

Save the best for last

Since 2016, Microsoft Digital has been migrating major functions across the company from classic to the modern experience in SharePoint. This Herculean effort has focused on moving over high-traffic portals—including corporate communications, IT, legal, and the corporate library—all without disturbing users.

“HRWeb has some unique needs that made us put it at the end of the list,” Crewdson says. “We needed it to be able to target by specific role, geography, and company code, otherwise users wouldn’t be able to easily find the right information.”

Because Microsoft has a presence in so many different places (it has subsidiaries in more than 120 countries and regions), it needs policies that reflect these different regulatory environments. Users on HRWeb should only see content that’s appropriate for their circumstances, which means a policy search should return information relevant to a specific user.

The same could be said of different roles, like what information a manager might have access to that an employee might not.

When you factor this across Microsoft’s large number of teams, vast global presence, and specific roles, the personalization requirements only compound.

But there was a vision for meeting HRWeb’s personalization needs.

Getting the fit just right

While most of the out-of-the-box functions within SharePoint would be an upgrade for HRWeb, including user targeting, the complex Microsoft global footprint would require some custom code.

Fortunately, the product was built for that.

“The SharePoint Framework empowers anyone to build for this platform,” Crewdson says. “A web developer can be a SharePoint developer as well.”

This meant that Microsoft Digital could work closely with the Employee Support Experiences team and product groups to get the solution exactly right for HRWeb’s needs.

“We saw the modern experience in SharePoint as the perfect landing place for us going forward from a user standpoint,” says Andy Hopkins, a software engineer with Microsoft Digital, who helped ready HRWeb for the move. “So when we went from classic to modern, we revamped how the content was tagged. It enabled us to be able to take information and make it available in more relevant locations for the users.”

This move opened up the ability to access content on HRWeb in a personalized and scalable way.

The shift was also an important part of Microsoft’s commitment to accessibility, with the modern SharePoint giving users everything they need to use and navigate the platform by default.

But Employee Support Experiences saw this migration as more than just a system upgrade.

An opportunity to hit the refresh button

It wasn’t just the backend that was changing for HRWeb. The transformation was extending to the content that employees would engage with as well.

“The move gave us an opportunity to align a few things while also getting the latest and greatest,” says Jodi Kogan, a senior manager of HR content and knowledge on the Employee Support Experiences team, who led the team responsible for the audit and the business requirements for the site redesign and migration. “We didn’t want to just do a lift and shift; we wanted to improve the experience for employees.”

Migrating to the modern experience in SharePoint meant the Employee Support Experiences team could perform an internal audit across all the content, develop new style guides, and simplify HRWeb, making it easier to navigate and search.

This meant getting rid of what didn’t make sense and ensuring content was going to the relevant persona.

“The features in the modern experience for SharePoint make it easier to do this. We’re able to personalize content better,” Kogan says. “We can also reuse content and tag things so that it shows up in the right places. This way we can surface content in a way that isn’t manual.”

Using Microsoft Entra ID to define groups and then tags to define content, the Employee Support Experiences team can ensure the right content showed up in the right country or region for the right role. And since content is centralized in SharePoint, it is easy to edit and then disseminate to appropriate users without oversharing.

A foundational experience to power the future of Microsoft

“If you’re spending a lot of time looking for something simple, that’s wasted time,” Dubedat says. “We don’t want to make people hunt through content. Eventually, we want to envision a world where we remove the need to even go to HRWeb, because the information can be found from anywhere.”

Integration with Microsoft Search, made possible by the move to the modern experience in SharePoint, is one of the initial efforts to seamlessly connect employees to HRWeb’s content. The content audit and migration are also empowering advisors and a virtual assistant, enabling stakeholders to find the right information faster.

Part of that is due to the new tags and personalization features, but it’s also due to improved performance.

“We reduced the number of server calls by around two-thirds,” Crewdson says. “We think we can get it down even more, which makes HRWeb faster, less expensive, and perform better. End users get a faster and better HRWeb, and we have something that’s more reliable and scalable.”

Now that a new backend platform is in place, the Employee Support Experiences team is working on introducing further improvements to the content that lives on HRWeb. This includes even more personalization for employees.

“Everything has a new look and feel, and the feedback has been favorable,” Kogan says. “We want to do even more to improve the UX and reduce the number of touchpoints.”

And these new features? They’re possible because HRWeb is now on the modern experience in SharePoint.

“What started out as being just a lift and shift ultimately ended up adding some new interesting features,” Hopkins says. “The SharePoint Framework really exposes the ability to create components with some basic standard web development tools. That’s a huge benefit to the end user and administrator.”

• The modern experience in SharePoint covers most of your intranet feature requirements out of the box, including mobile responsiveness. The SharePoint Framework enables developers who are familiar with common tools to integrate custom solutions with ease.
• Content owners can publish directly inside SharePoint, freeing up other team members to take on other roles.
• A good intranet reduces the number of steps it takes to find information. Integration with other Microsoft 365 tools, like Microsoft Search, puts information into the hands of users faster and from anywhere.
• Using groups in Microsoft Entra ID along with tags targets content to specific profiles. This enables scaling and personalization without having to republish content to multiple different locations.

Want to implement the modern experience of SharePoint at your own organization? Learn more about the modern experience in SharePoint.

• Read about using the SharePoint Framework to build out customization in SharePoint.  
• Explore how Microsoft HR is using Viva and Copilot to empower our employees.
• Find out how Microsoft upgraded our core HR systems with SAP SucessFactors.
• See how Microsoft is helping its employees understand their value with the Total Rewards Portal. 

• Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

The post Microsoft’s HR portal gets personal, thanks to the modern experience in SharePoint appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Empowering self-service is important to us at Microsoft. Every employee should be able to create the resources they need without engaging IT to do it for them. To support this level of freedom, we rely on a strong governance strategy to identify and protect valuable content. By ensuring accountability, our employees are able to create the containers and content they need to stay productive.

With sensitivity labels, Microsoft Digital, the organization that supports, protects, and empowers the company, can now proactively enforce policies to keep shared workspaces safe. Microsoft 365 groups, SharePoint sites, Teams, Viva Engage communities, and any container used throughout Microsoft now utilize sensitivity labels to identify and proactively protect valuable information. In doing so, Microsoft can strengthen self-service without exposing sensitive information.

What sensitivity labels mean for Microsoft

Regardless of the technology behind it, labels represent a visual cue to people interacting with a shared workspace or document. Labels can inform an enterprise’s governance practices, letting the organization describe the landscape to properly manage it and enact the right policies.

At Microsoft, labels enable our employees to identify different degrees of value. Based on the label, we can apply the right amount of protection.

Previously, when a Microsoft employee created a new group a Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AAD) label would help classify it, denoting who should have access to the shared workspace according to Microsoft’s policies. On its own, an AAD label doesn’t do anything; it’s simply a string of descriptive text incapable of enforcement. Custom scripts run by administrators would apply policy rules based on these AAD labels. As a consequence of the gap between classification and enforcement, users could accidentally ignore the policies, creating circumstances where the group is out of compliance. Once the non-compliant container is recognized and remediated by the custom solutions, the user might be surprised or disrupted by enforcement actions taken to protect and secure the workspace.

In moving to sensitivity labels, we in Microsoft Digital are able to further empower users with compliant self-service right out of the box. Enforcement happens through sensitivity labels, so users are never disrupted or required to take additional compliance actions; they have a clear understanding of classification from the start, creating a better user experience while protecting the enterprise. The migration allows the organization to retire several custom solutions that are no longer necessary. Sensitivity labels have also enabled us to unify content and container classifications, creating consistent taxonomy and the opportunity for centralized administration.

Labels define the culture

Applying labels to a workspace not only informs the organization as to what a site or container is, but drives a culture of good governance. To have a successful implementation of sensitivity labels, Microsoft Digital built strong, meaningful, and self-explanatory labels. Alignment with partners at Microsoft Digital Security and Resilience (DSR) meant labels could communicate the level of sensitivity in the workplace or document without a technical explanation.

At Microsoft, we use four labels for container and file classification:

• Highly confidential. The most critical data for Microsoft. We share it only with named recipients.
• Confidential. Crucial to achieving Microsoft’s goals. Limited distribution—these are on a need-to-know basis.
• General. Daily work used and shared throughout Microsoft, like personal settings and postal codes. We share these throughout Microsoft internally.
• Public. Unrestricted data meant for public consumption, like publicly released source code and announced financials. We share these freely.

These definitions inform policies from a technological side, and once taxonomy was established, we were able to enforce consistent security policies across the company. From a user’s perspective, understanding these terms is easier to comprehend than the underlying rules and settings behind the classifications. Labels are intended to support security without creating an extra burden for users. It’s not always easy for users to understand the details of security, but they do understand constructs like “General,” “Confidential,” and “Highly Confidential.”

Aligning on label taxonomy also secured buy-in for company defaults. For some companies, governance policies are open by default, whereas Microsoft is closed.

With the new sensitivity labels, container classification communicates four things:

• Privacy level. Labels determine whether the workspace is broadly available internally or a private site.
• External permissions. Guest allowance is administered via the group’s classification, allowing specified partners to access teams when appropriate.
• Sharing guidelines. Important governance policies are tied to the container’s label. For example, can this workspace be shared outside of Microsoft? Is this group limited to a specific division or team? Or is it restricted to specific people? The label establishes these rules.
• Conditional access. While not implemented at Microsoft, tying identity and device verification to container labels introduces additional governance controls.

Unification makes things simpler

Prior to sensitivity labels, AAD tagged containers at a tenant level with document labeling being handled by security and compliance, or Microsoft Purview Information Protection. As a consequence, the two artifacts lived in two separate locations, requiring administrators to visit different sites for managing governance.

The two locations also meant container labels worked a little differently than document labels. Where tenant-level AAD labels for a container would display an entire list of classifications, document labels only showed classifications that were appropriate to the user. Once unified, sensitivity labels for containers only populate appropriate classifications, limiting the list to valid labels for the users and groups.

Shifting labels from AAD to Microsoft Purview Information Protection, where data-loss prevention and retention takes place, unified labels across the company, reduced the workload for administrators, and allowed Microsoft to take another step forward in readying the environment.

Strategic governance with labels

By using terms for labels that mean something to people, label definition becomes intuitive and reinforces a culture of accountability. Establishing this level of awareness creates corporate buy-in. Getting the company to stand behind these specific label classifications not only supports a consistent experience, but informs corporate strategy decisions around privacy and sharing.

Rationalizing a hierarchy of policies establishes where you are today and where you’ll be tomorrow. Currently, there’s no concept of inheritance between a container and its content. Labeling a workspace highly confidential does not pass that trait on to documents stored inside. In the future, however, unified taxonomy and centralized administration creates the opportunity for an efficient connection between the workspace’s label and the classification of documents within.

Readying Microsoft for sensitivity labels

For some organizations, those coming from a green state with no existing AAD classifications in place, sensitivity labels can be easily onboarded, and offer a chance to introduce a strong culture of governance.

But for companies like us at Microsoft, where existing AAD labels and custom governance solutions were already established, moving to sensitivity labels required preparation and alignment across the company before migration could occur.

Aligning on label definition

Onboarding sensitivity labels gave us an opportunity to create consistent classification language for containers. This entailed conversations about balancing employee experience and enablement with security and legal implications. Agreeing on taxonomy and selecting terms with meaning allowed us to protect the enterprise while empowering self-service.

Planning the migration

With clear taxonomy and a strong governance strategy, we were ready to start working on the logistics of applying sensitivity labels to existing containers. Careful coordination, including organized efforts and timing, prevented users from experiencing any disruptions in productivity or security while sensitivity labels were rolled out.

Synchronizing timelines with stakeholders

For a short period, we existed in a unique hybrid state, with both AAD and sensitivity labels active across the enterprise. To avoid any derailments or threats to the environment, we in Microsoft Digital had to time the conversion of existing labels to new sensitivity labels correctly.

Whether it be Microsoft Teams, Viva Engage, or a Microsoft 365 group, certain user interface and backend changes had to be completed to enable sensitivity labels. All stakeholders agreed to tasks and workloads that needed to be completed during a specific release cadence. This allowed the hybrid environment to be resolved without placing Microsoft at risk.

Coordination between stakeholders also meant Microsoft Digital had to support teams with smaller engineering capabilities, empowering them to complete tasks on schedule.

Mapping the scope of impact

There are over 333,000 Microsoft 365 groups at Microsoft, 55,000 SharePoint sites, and thousands of Viva Engage communities. Planning out the migration meant closely surveying these environments to understand what might be encountered and require attention before, during, and after the migration.

• How many groups are already labeled? Whether they be sensitivity labels or AAD labels, the current environment was evaluated for labels and their classification. Roughly 86 percent of groups at Microsoft had some kind of label prior to migration.
• Do existing containers map to sensitivity labels? Since previous tags were strings of text, they did not necessarily align with the new taxonomy. To reduce confusion, existing AAD labels were mapped to Microsoft Purview Information Protection container labels.
• What were the challenges they had to overcome? Once teams in Microsoft Digital understood the labelling conventions of containers, they could better understand if an area might break due to changes.
• Which groups have exceptions? Certain users required exceptions for policies relating to specific containers. Identifying these items meant we could avoid disruptions to users with specialized needs, all without exposing valuable information.

Resolving and retiring custom solutions

Having mapped out the environment, we could then reduce our reliance on the custom tooling that scanned AAD labels to trigger security and compliance settings. From an engineering perspective, this straightforward step meant labels would no longer call an API but make calls on behalf of users to get applicable labels.

1. Remove old references.
2. Locate and update calls and permissions.
3. Ensure that anything still needing custom tooling is handled with delegate permissions.

Addressing label assignment to groups

Only group owners and global administrators can assign a label to a group directly. This posed a unique challenge for us. Custom scripts run by global administrators could change the labels of these containers, but it was estimated to take at least 27 hours, which far exceeds Microsoft’s access policy for global administrators. Adding to the challenge, the administrator’s computer would be locked down and required to stay active throughout the duration.

Having a global administrator handle these responsibilities wasn’t going to happen and giving someone global administrator status for one job was a non-starter.

This required us to develop a different solution.

Thinking through the problem, the team recognized that labels set in SharePoint through AAD will get synced back to Microsoft 365, which is also a container. Knowing this, we were able to use custom workflows to map and migrate sensitivity labels for containers through an app, instead of a group owner, without compromising security.

Develop a rollback plan

Migrating to sensitivity labels would not use deployment rings. Once the PowerShell script was executed, the environment would be transformed by the new classification system. Extensive testing was done to identify break points and what the system could handle, but we also built tools to revert to the last good state if needed.

Several scenarios were defined, and of these, key indicators and circumstances were recognized as trigger events that would necessitate a rollback. Simultaneously, certain scenarios also helped to identify if there were any points of failure that we could coexist with until a fix was put in place.

Test tenants can only reveal so much about the real environment, and the team had the data points in place to demonstrate a successful migration but having a rollback plan in place meant they could reverse course and restore Microsoft’s environment to a working state in a pinch.

Readying users

Part of our duty is to inform and educate users about new features.

Sensitivity labels not only meant new label structures and compliance practices, but introduced new concepts, like parent and child labels for containers.

Child labels already existed for documents, but AAD labels were unable to offer this kind of granular definition for containers. The combination of parent and child labels in containers required users to understand how this relationship might impact shared workspaces, especially unique situations like containers that are internally confidential and require an NDA for external users.

Previous steps, like creating consistent taxonomy and classification across labels, made it easier for users to understand the impact of new labels.

Post-deployment validation

After migrating to sensitivity labels, we carefully examined the environment to make sure our workloads interacted as expected. This included testing multiple Microsoft 365 applications, provisioning groups in Viva Engage, and making sure that the correct labels were being applied by default.

Our team also checked to make sure users, legacy applications, and custom tooling were no longer able to make groups without labels. After investigating the Microsoft 365 environment, we felt confident that we could move forward with finalizing the migration to sensitivity labels for other product partners.

Our labelling environment now supports modern productivity while keeping the company safe. Users can freely self-service new groups without accidentally violating our governance practices. Tying policy enforcement to labels transformed a reactive compliance process into a proactive model, reducing the workload on administrators and allowing us to retire several custom solutions.

• Labels now self-enforce. Users who create a group in Microsoft’s environment will now be prompted to select a label classification, which will apply the correct ruleset on creation. Sensitivity labels make tags more than just a string of descriptive text, but a way to assure compliance in a self-service environment.
• Ability to release new policies quickly. We have already created and released new policies and guiding principles, all enabled by the speed and agility surrounding sensitivity labels. Several compliance policies can be tied to sensitivity labels, which makes it easy to push and enforce rules.
• Managing the tenant is easier. Under AAD labels, changing taxonomy meant you had to re-write over string values on every group. Sensitivity labels make managing at a tenant level easier.

With sensitivity labels rolling out across Microsoft, it’s easier for users and for us to support self-service and governance at the same time.

• Learn about sensitivity labels.
• Protect documents with sensitivity labels.

The post Microsoft creates self-service sensitivity labels in Microsoft 365 appeared first on Inside Track Blog.