Microsoft 365 Conference Recap - Spring 2023

The Microsoft 365 conference took place Spring of 2023 and introduced the community to a lot of updates road mapped for the platform. Continue for Sympraxis’ take on many of these changes!

Copilot

Microsoft Copilot is going to be rolling out slowly and is a new artificial intelligence software. Although there is a lot of excitement about this introduction, we need to mention that it’ll likely be a service you’ll have to pay for and the cost is yet to be announced.

SharePoint sites and pages productivity roadmap

Road mapped to debut in September is a new SharePoint start page experience which is shifting towards a creator experience. This page will be more focused on creating lists, pages, etc. At Sympraxis we do have some concerns with this large shift for this page due to potential corporate governance issues and other challenges with non-creators having more access to create content.

Brand Center

This is an exciting update for anyone working as a UI designer and those focused on aesthetics. This is a new centralized location to manage your organization’s brand including logos, icons, fonts, imagery, theming, etc. all within the Microsoft 365 admin center. Therefore, your branded details will integrate between all the different applications. As well, there are new themes, new customizations to themes, and new templates to be on the watch for within the next 6-12 months.

News posts sent via email

This adjustment will allow for news posts to be sent in full fidelity to users’ inboxes. Although there are use cases where this is beneficial, such as newsletters, keep in mind that these are point in time. A benefit of a URL in an email instead is that any changes to the article will be relayed when a user opens the URL. For these news posts in email, any changes will not be reflected and you may not always open the most updated version.

Improvement to personal files in OneDrive

A new OneDrive landing page will be rolled out with visual improvements. This will also include refinement of Sharing Dialogues which will ideally make it easier to choose the correct option when creating a sharing link. Another big update coming is the ability to adjust the color of folders in OneDrive. There are also going to be two views available, one called meeting view, where it’ll show all your meetings across your different apps, and one called people view, which will show all your connections.

Needless to say, there are positives and potential backsides to each of these updates. We are looking forward to seeing how they will play out. If you have any questions about what was discussed or other Microsoft 365 inquiries, please submit them to our mailbox for our next Ask Sympraxis session on June 28th!

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Do you have any questions for us? Continue the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #AskSympraxis and mention @SympraxisC.