We attended the Microsoft 365 Conference in Vegas 2023
Welcome back to the final part of this series – which I am writing back in our South African office. My recent trip to the states included a wonderful visit to Indiana where I visited potential locations for our new office space in Indianapolis and met with clients, partners and the wonderful IT community. It's a very exciting time for us here at GT. If you want to find out more, check out our website. Without further ado, let's get into the wrap up of the Microsoft 365 conference in Vegas!
Let's talk about the big takeaways from the conference that I believe are going to shape the future as we know it.
- Copilot is the big game changer, and no matter where you look, you will find it. From Outlook, to Excel, SharePoint to PowerApps, there will be a Copilot. Curious about the roadmap? Wondering when you'll be able to get your hands on the revolutionary Copilot tools that will transform the way we work? Well, I've got all the answers. Check this out.
- Copilot in SharePoint we are looking at November 2023
- Copilot Viva Engage coming this summer
- Copilot in Viva insights and glints coming this summer
- Copilot for knowledge and learning coming this summer
- Semantic Index for Copilot - not really mentioned at the conference but really cool is now rolling out.
- For everything else you can check out the roadmap link here https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=Outlook
To summarize, there is a lot of Copilot coming to Microsoft 365, but no need be in a rush to see it all right away, it's still in progress. However, if you are very keen to see Copilot in action, you can see GitHub copilot right now. It works and it works well. Get your dev team using this copilot to improve your productivity right away.
2. SharePoint improvements 
There is no doubt that Copilot is all the rage right now, but without data, your Copilot is near useless to you when you need organizational feedback. It is for this reason that SharePoint will remain the backbone of knowledge, not just for your organization but now for Copilot. What's more, it's great to hear that SharePoint got a few upgrades and a facelift to help everyone create compelling and engaging SharePoint sites. Let's look at the improvements I think you will like the most:
- Simpler authoring - introducing Copilot in SharePoint, a new SharePoint home page, and coauthoring experiences. You’ll be able to use natural language and AI to author SharePoint pages faster and easier and collaborate with others in real time.
- Compelling content - SharePoint is getting a major aesthetic update. You’ll be able to create visually stunning sites and pages that embrace images and videos in new ways to express your brand.
- Deeper engagement – with new integrations for SharePoint into email, Teams, and Microsoft Viva, you’ll be able to rely on SharePoint to meet your readers where they work and measure the impact of your content.
- Flexible platform – with continued investment in templates, the SharePoint Framework, and Microsoft Graph, your existing solutions will continue to work even as we update the user experience, so you’ll be able to continue to tailor your SharePoint sites to specific workflows and integrate them with custom applications.
Notable mention to InfoMailer - something we have had at GT for years - Microsoft have made it that much better with SharePoint pages in email. You can now create beautiful, dynamic SharePoint pages and have them emailed. When clients use Outlook to view the mail, it is rendered with the correct formatting.
Rollout Start: July 2023. Wonderful!
3. Microsoft Syntex 
This is what Microsoft have to say about Syntex "Microsoft Syntex puts people at the center, with content seamlessly integrated into collaboration and workflows."
Understand and assemble content with AI powered summarization, translation, auto-assembly, and annotations integrated into Microsoft 365 and Teams.
Discover and reuse content with AI powered search, eSignature and integration into business workflows like contracts and invoice management.
Analyze and protect content through its lifecycle with AI powered security and compliance, backup/restore and advanced content management.
What Syntex really does is understand your content and then make it useful to you by actioning tasks around it. I think most companies are going to take a long hard look at what they can do with Syntex models on their company data. I have put a link to some scenarios down below, such as contract management and document creation.
4. Viva 
Viva has got a number of products. Lesly Cook is probably the best out there when it comes to understanding the complexity here, and she made a great DIY origami how to which I will link down below. For me, I am most impressed with Viva Goals which can be a great tool for KPI's and OPK monitoring in your organization. We will be rolling this out internally and giving feedback in future.
The other big area in Viva I enjoyed is Viva Glint powered by Copilot - Viva Glint will help leaders accelerate and deepen organizational understanding by bringing together aggregated employee engagement data coupled with behavioural and collaboration data from Viva Insights and the Microsoft Graph.
5. Lists 
Lists and Copilot has taken a huge step forward and I think the team at Microsoft have done a great job here. I love that you can create forms for lists now which makes it super easy to collect data directly from users. The interphase has also had a number of updates to make this just work better. I think people will find the new experience really enjoyable.
6. Everything Else
Copilot is also coming to Word, Outlook and PowerPoint this summer so look out for those updates, it will change the way you work forever.
All in all, it was a great conference. It's a great time to be alive and we are really privileged to be a part of this shift. Thank you for investing your time in reading our blog. We will be back to deep dive and demo what we think works best to enable productivity in your organization.
For further exploration of the topics discussed in this blog, I've curated a list of helpful links below.