What’s the next big thing in Microsoft for 2024?

At ESPC in Amsterdam this year, we asked top Microsoft MVPs what recent Microsoft announcements they were most excited about.

We wanted to find out what they thought was the next big thing in the Microsoft 365 landscape for 2024. We compiled their answers into a short video, which you can see below. But they had so much to say that we decided to put all their answers together in this blog post so we could do them justice and share their amazing insights in full.

SharePoint Premium and Digital Employee Experience – Karoliina Kettukari

I’m super excited about SharePoint Premium because I think SharePoint, with all of this Copilot, AI hype, has been left behind for a while. But now with SharePoint Premium, there are so many new additional features from Syntex, from the Data governance point of view, that is really something to be looked at in the future.

I think one of the features that I really like from the productivity perspective is integrating your third-party applications and logins into Copilot. I was just in a session with Vesa and Fabian and they talked about extensions in Copilot. When you can bring your own systems and people can use them in Teams where they are already, that will be a huge productivity change.

Certainly, my favorite topic is Digital Employee Experience because we humans are the ones who are using all of these new technologies and new products and applications. When thinking, for example, utilizing Copilot, you are really putting people first. Think of the implementation, think of the user adoption, and how are you going to train all your employees so that they can feel well at work, be happy, and then be productive.

Microsoft Copilot and SharePoint Premium – Vlad Catrinescu

The next big thing? If I was able to predict everything, I’d be in the stock market and not necessarily doing SharePoint.

Well, you know, I am a SharePoint professional. I have SharePoint in my heart. So, of course, one of the first things I got excited about was SharePoint Premium. Even if technically it’s not a brand-new feature. Stuff that we knew was coming before with Syntex, bringing it back to the SharePoint world is super exciting, of course.

I’m also excited about all the Copilot stuff. Having Microsoft 365 Copilot in G.A., having any customer, I mean any customers over 300 users for now, be able to purchase it and start using the power of AI in their organization. I think it will really bring organizations to the next level of productivity.

Microsoft Copilot and Passkeys – Andy Malone

Well, obviously I’m excited about Copilot, and specifically because I’m in the security and compliance space. I’m really keen to take a look at Security Copilot when it comes out. Also, the thing that I’m talking about today here at ESPC is that I’m going to be discussing passkeys.

So FIDO keys have been out for quite some time, but they’re kind of like physical keys. So, it’s making that transition to mobile devices. And the fact that you can now store phishing-resistant kind of multi-factor authentication technology on your device as well as a mobile device.

Rebrand to SharePoint Premium and Microsoft Copilot – Gokan Ozcifci

So, the next big thing today that we have is Syntex being rebranded to SharePoint Premium. SharePoint Premium has all the next-generation capabilities from SharePoint under the SharePoint Premium umbrella, from management to data extraction to e-signatures. All of that will be available to you from the SharePoint Premium umbrella.

I’ve been using Syntex for at least the last two years and I really encourage you to go and use and test the models, the search, the image tagger, the taxonomy tagger, the e-signatures, the M365 backup archive, all of that stuff within the SharePoint Premium umbrella. But what I hope is that we will get an evolution from Copilot to autopilot. So that’s a message to Microsoft if they listen to me. If we could have autopilot which can do stuff without my input, that would be amazing.

SharePoint Brand Center – Elio Struyf

I’m excited about the Brand Center in SharePoint, which is near and dear to my heart, because I was working on a couple of Internet projects in the past and Brand Center is actually a thing that is new, shiny on top of SharePoint, where companies can bring their own fun, bring their own style finally into SharePoint. I’m so excited about that part of SharePoint Premium. Also, something a lot of people are talking about is the whole renaming from Syntex to Premium.

Am I excited about Copilot? Yeah, I think everyone will say that they are excited because it’s going to give you something and is going to make your work experience a lot better, like it is for me. Copilot in the code space is already making me much more productive because I have to change less to a browser in order to validate or check things.

SharePoint experiences and Microsoft Loop – Richard Harbridge

There’s a lot of new stuff, obviously tons of Copilot things. I’m a bit of a SharePoint geek from back in the day.

I’m really excited about the new SharePoint experiences. There’s a lot of changes and ways of laying out pages, making the core articles and content we have a little bit more compelling and interesting. You know, the font styling, the Brand Center, a lot of those things that are landing very soon in the next few months, that’s really what I’m kind of excited about on the day-to-day work that we do with intranets and things like that.

I think the other thing that’s happening is that, just with time, people are learning new ways of using the technologies that we already have. So, it’s been interesting seeing how for many users when they work on, say, a document or something like that, even something simple like versioning control, which we don’t really talk about, is becoming a little bit more popular. People feel a little bit more confident with things like SharePoint Online.

They feel a little bit more confident when they use something like Microsoft Loop for the first time and they start to see how like, “Hey, I can collaborate very actively with someone in an always up-to-date format and that can then be added to a document or can be added to an email or it can be added to other places so that I have this connectivity between the ways and places that I work.”

So, I think that sense of little changes in how people work, those little incremental changes make a difference. And arguably Loop is one of the best tools to teach people, not because they’re all going to adapt it and they’re going to change how they work to focus on Loop. But because Microsoft Loop teaches them arguably better ways to collaborate and be a little bit more proactive.

At the same time, coauthoring style approaches that, still today, not everyone does, right? We still have a lot of people still working a bit sequentially. And the more we can have emphasis on tools like that, the better it is.

Would you like to know more?

It was great hearing what MVPs had to say about the next big thing in Microsoft. They also gave us insight into balancing collaboration vs security and the benefits of Microsoft 365 Copilot. Thank you to all the Microsoft MVPs for their insights!

If you want to learn more about how to get ready for Copilot, check out our webinar Getting started with Microsoft 365 Copilot, where Zoe Wilson and Luke Evans will show you how to utilize Copilot’s capabilities fully and safely. And be sure you subscribe to our newsletter and stay ahead of the curve.