{"id":19805,"date":"2025-08-07T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-08-07T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=19805"},"modified":"2026-06-09T11:44:50","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T18:44:50","slug":"supercharging-our-sharepoint-sites-at-microsoft-with-microsoft-365-copilot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/supercharging-our-sharepoint-sites-at-microsoft-with-microsoft-365-copilot\/","title":{"rendered":"Supercharging our SharePoint sites at Microsoft with Microsoft 365 Copilot"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Microsoft SharePoint is one of the most ubiquitous and highly trusted content storage and sharing solutions in modern business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Around the world, organizations add over 2 billion pieces of content to SharePoint and create more than 2 million sites every day. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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\u2019s IT organization, we\u2019re using these new features to enable enterprise content sharing in exciting ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now, SharePoint has entered the era of AI<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “With AI, we have a chance to reimagine our existing product surface,\u201d says Melissa Torres, a principal product manager for SharePoint and OneDrive. \u201cOur goal is to make workflows that used to be highly manual easier than ever before.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Through the combination of authoring improvements and the power of AI, we\u2019re making it easier than ever to create a professional, compelling SharePoint page.\u201d<\/p>\n Sam Crewdson, principal program manager, Microsoft Digital<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n To boost SharePoint\u2019s power to communicate, the product team prioritized three key pillars:<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Through the combination of authoring improvements and the power of AI, we\u2019re making it easier than ever to create a professional, compelling SharePoint page,\u201d says Sam Crewdson, a principal program manager within Microsoft Digital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the business content space, aesthetics and easy authoring aren\u2019t always top of mind, but they have important roles to play for helping people access and share vital knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMaking delightful spaces is something we see in the consumer market all the time. For organizational resources, it\u2019s important to make beautiful content and get the brand and visual identity to surface in everything you do.<\/p>\nMelissa Torres, principal product manager, SharePoint and OneDrive<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Copilot in SharePoint acts as an overarching authoring and design assistant<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As we layer AI-enabled capabilities on top of Microsoft SharePoint, we\u2019ve been testing and using three new features that really highlight the power of this breakthrough technology.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSome features are available to customers already, and we\u2019re trying others out internally before they release,\u201d Crewdson says. \u201cBut they\u2019re already helping our Microsoft Digital teams create more beautiful, engaging, and effective SharePoint pages.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s what the improvements are all about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMaking delightful spaces is something we see in the consumer market all the time,\u201d says Melissa Torres, a principal product manager within SharePoint and OneDrive. \u201cFor organizational resources, it\u2019s important to make beautiful content and get the brand and visual identity to surface in everything you do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Users simply enter a prompt (we suggest prompts based on what\u2019s 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\u2019s already on the page. It also automatically adopts matching visuals and layouts to ease the design process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Crewdson often prompts Copilot to add content from Microsoft Loop, Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, and any other source that contains key knowledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Thanks to the combination of the new Flexible Sections feature and Copilot-powered authoring, you are no longer constrained by this fixed, blocky framework,\u201d Crewdson says. \u201cYou can make your content as interesting as your personality.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While Copilot in SharePoint assists with authoring, flexible sections, now generally available to customers<\/a>, 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\u2019s layout and look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eric Jaffe is the director of employee advocacy and US regional communications at the company. He\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jaffe and his team often look for design inspiration from the web, then apply those ideas to their internal pages. Frequently, they\u2019ll lead with a header image to grab attention, then create a page that flows through cleanly spaced sections with plenty of imagery and dynamism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s as simple as populating your sections, then experimenting and arranging them until they look just right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “We live in a world where we\u2019re competing against other highly engaging form factors, so having something that\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\nEric Jaffe, director of employee advocacy and US regional communications<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe live in a world where we\u2019re competing against other highly engaging form factors, so having something that\u2019s visual and draws the employee into the experience really enhances our impact,\u201d Jaffe says. \u201cWith these new tools, if you can dream it, you can build it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the past, Norris\u2019 team members had to search through content, anticipate user questions, and populate their FAQ modules manually. Now, they simply provide a prompt like, \u201cUse this known issues document to create an FAQ,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Each of these features offers simplicity, speed, and creativity on its own. But it\u2019s the combination of the three that makes for a fluid, intelligent authoring and design experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We\u2019re currently experimenting with these features internally, and we\u2019ve seen some powerful results already. Most importantly, internal SharePoint site owners report that these AI-enabled capabilities make their work much easier than before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe FAQ web part saves us a lot of time on the initial page creation,\u201d Norris says. \u201cWhere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s about easily making SharePoint what you want it to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cPeople have been craving this level of customization for a while,\u201d Torres says. \u201cPage authors who feel like they don\u2019t have the design chops or the time to invest in endlessly tweaking their SharePoint pages can now get the speed and assistance they need.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It isn\u2019t just about time savings and design improvements. It\u2019s about engaging teams with attractive, compelling content that promotes better knowledge sharing, communication, and collaboration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe\u2019re excited to see how much time the average user saves\u2014not just the SharePoint super-user,\u201d Crewdson says. \u201cAlmost 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Key takeaways<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Try it out<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Get started with Microsoft SharePoint today.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n Related links<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s the place where people connect with each other and share their content, doing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":115,"featured_media":19846,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_hide_featured_on_single":false,"_show_featured_caption_on_single":true,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[882],"tags":[199,597,850,852,263,827,90],"coauthors":[622],"class_list":["post-19805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-it-strategy","tag-ai","tag-employee-experience","tag-end-user-services-and-support","tag-it-and-business-operations","tag-microsoft-365","tag-microsoft-365-copilot","tag-sharepoint","m-blog-post"],"yoast_head":"\nThe vision behind an AI-enabled Microsoft SharePoint<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Three AI-powered features making waves in SharePoint<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Creating sections with Copilot in SharePoint<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Flexible sections<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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FAQ web part<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\nJon Norris, senior product manager, Microsoft Digital<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\nA powerful suite of authoring and design tools<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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