The Microsoft 365 Community Conference returned to Orlando, Florida between April 30 and May 2, 2024. Over the course of three action-packed days, Microsoft’s leaders got together with community experts to share the latest insights around innovations in AI and Copilot, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, Viva, Power Platform, and other related Microsoft 365 platforms.
The main talking point of the conference was about SharePoint Premium, Microsoft’s new content management platform that is evolving from Microsoft Syntex, enhancing the user’s experience with a mix of AI, automation, and more sophisticated security.
Richard Harbridge, Chief Technology Officer at 2toLead and a Microsoft MVP, led a session on the ways in which SharePoint Premium is an essential part of how the Microsoft community will achieve success with AI. Key insights from Harbridge included that through SharePoint Premium’s automated form processing and metadata extraction, there is a 50% reduction in manual, human-led processing, with a significant impact on cost reduction. Through SharePoint Premium’s automated content classification and curation, human curation efforts are reduced by 60-90%. Hence, SharePoint Premium allows users to drastically decrease time spent on large-scale document management projects.
Another session, led by Microsoft’s Sesha Mani, outlined the SharePoint advanced management innovations for the AI and Copilot era. This included an expanded preview of the Agreements solution, a new Microsoft Teams app that offers an end-to-end solution to manage the complete life cycle of high value content within an organization, from non-disclosure agreements, to purchase agreements, to statements of works, and proposals. Users will be able to view, create, and get reports on agreements, all within the app. The app will also use AI to extract key information, so agreements can be found and organized with ease.
Last but not least, SharePoint eSignature was discussed in Orlando, a new tool that will transform the way organizations deal with signing documents. With SharePoint eSignature, users will be able to request and sign documents without leaving the Microsoft 365 ecosystem.
They will also be able to keep all of their content within Microsoft’s trust boundaries during any signing process, and other eSignature platforms, such as DocuSign and Adobe, can be integrated within the Microsoft app.
With a real buzz emerging from Orlando around Microsoft’s latest offerings, the Microsoft community is already looking ahead to next year’s 365 Community Conference with much anticipation. It will take place between May 6-8, 2025 in Las Vegas.
If you would like help with the implementation of SharePoint Premium, or any of your Microsoft needs, feel free to schedule a chat with Crush Networks today.
