Perspectives on 2023

Our mission in the Microsoft 365 Collaborative Apps And Platform group is to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more working together. I believe 2023 was our biggest year yet towards this mission and I want to thank our customers, partners,?and team for their work across Microsoft and the industry. Below is my perspective on the highlights for 2023 including links to key announcements (click on the section header).

Copilot for Microsoft 365

Academia and industry have been working on AI for decades, but this year saw a breakthrough in AI helping people learn and create in new ways. Earlier in 2023, we built on years of foundational work with the Microsoft Graph and interfaces to our apps adding the latest large language model to introduce Copilot for Microsoft 365. It was an intense year and I am proud how our team helped build Copilot on data from SharePoint and integrate it across experiences inside Teams. Thousands of developers are building their own AI solutions in Teams and on SharePoint as a platform as well. While just a few weeks after the GA of Copilot V1, over 70% of users wouldn’t give it up - and there is much more to come in 2024.

New Teams

When it was released in 2017, Microsoft Teams was a breakthrough in collaboration bringing together asynchronous and synchronous tools in a more seamless way than ever before. With the need for distributed work accelerating during the pandemic, we added hundreds of new capabilities for end users, IT, and developers. In parallel, we rearchitected the Teams desktop which we released in October to make it simpler, twice as fast, use half the resources, and be the foundation of the next wave of collaboration and AI we will introduce in 2024.

Mesh

With the growth in distributed work, people are looking for new, more engaging to collaborate than just an expanding grid of videos. We have been working on this for a while with Microsoft Mesh and were excited to release the public preview this year and have Satya announce the GA is coming in January 2024. Mesh runs on both a desktop and on a VR headset starting with the Meta Quest - and includes natural integration with Teams. We are excited to see early adopters engage their employees with their custom Mesh scenes and unveil the next wave of collaboration experiences with 3D and AI for release next year.

New OneDrive

We want to make it easy for everyone - from first-time consumers to the largest organizations - to work with their content in the cloud. To keep it safe, make it available across devices, collaborate with others, and share engaging experiences with photos and video. In October, we took a big step redefining what the “OneDrive” experience stands for - going beyond just your personal files to all your content with a consistent experience across all the Microsoft 365 apps including Teams which hit GA last week. In the post we also shared what is next including Copilot and new photos experiences.?

SharePoint Experience

For two decades SharePoint has been the easiest way for anyone to create a site from the smallest project to the largest enterprise portal. SharePoint powers many new experiences across Microsoft including Teams, OneDrive, Viva, Stream, Loop, and more. This year we announced the next big leap in the core SharePoint UX making it even easier to create and share even more engaging sites with major design updates, co-authoring, and Copilot integration.

Microsoft Loop

One of our biggest innovations in the year was the GA in November of Microsoft Loop, a new collaborative tool that spans workspaces and pages to shared components across Teams, Outlook, Whiteboard, etc. I believe Loop is unique in the industry but takes inspiration from the days when I first joined Microsoft and we had introduced OLE. Now we have the high performance, collaborative cloud platform to make these scenarios a reality - from the Office team, on SharePoint, in Teams.

Teams Premium

A few years ago we began investing in high value meeting capabilities and scenarios including a “moonshot” where we hoped AI could summarize a meeting almost as well as a person and more turnkey webinar and virtual appointment solutions. This year we released these and much more. In February of this year, Teams Premium’s Intelligent Recap was the first feature that Microsoft announced using the GPT large language model. We followed it by more Teams Premium updates through out the year.

Teams Phone

?As companies got more comfortable shifting video conferencing to the cloud, we added depth to the Teams Phone experience, service, and device and network operator partnerships. It was great to see the response to the latest wave of announcements at Ignite as companies are moving their telephony to Teams to save money, increase agility, and take advantage of new intelligent, voice-based workflows.

Teams Rooms

In March of 2020, the world of work changed for ever. While every person and organization will have a different preference for their mix of in person and remote, everyone of them wants it to be a more natural and engaging. We are excited about the progress we made in 2023 from the intelligent experience with Front Row to streamlined deployment and management and the range of devices at different price points from our partners.

SharePoint Premium

Content is the lifeblood of organizations - powering collaboration, business processes, and knowledge management while addressing growing security and compliance capabilities. And with AI, great content management is more important than ever to leverage, ground, and govern content for AI. We were excited at Ignite to rename Microsoft Syntex to SharePoint Premium adding depth for the next era of content management innovation.

SharePoint Embedded

Numerous SaaS and custom applications have rolled their own content management middle tier on top of lower level blob and database storage. This is complex work that includes hard problems (co-authoring, compliance, etc.) and takes away from the capacity to write the domain specific code. We have wanted to solve this for a long time and announced the SharePoint Embedded Public Preview at ESPC building on our internal work with Loop and Designer and early adopter partners.

Microsoft 365 Backup & Archive

As the scale of content our customers have in Microsoft 365 grows (some now in the tens of petabytes), they have asked us for a better backup and archive solution with a more seamless experience, higher fidelity, and higher performance. We worked closely with many of the industry leading cloud backup vendors so they could build their more comprehensive solution on our new more efficient backup and archive base platform.

Viva Connections

Since the earliest days, SharePoint has delivered a holistic content platform spanning document management, web publishing, and portals. Two years ago we build on this foundation and added more capabilities with Microsoft Viva - our employee experience platform suite. Viva Connections is our out-of-box solution for employee information and we added lots of capabilities to it throughout 2023.

Viva Amplify

One of the most exciting Viva announcements was the GA of Viva Amplify this fall. We are?excited to give people inside their organization the kind of targeting and analytics capabilities people use on the internet for digital marketing. I use Viva Amplify to publish my weekly updates to SharePoint, Teams, Outlook, and soon Viva Engage - sharing our latest work and career advice, aligning our plans, and soliciting feedback.

More in 2024 @ The Microsoft 365 Conference

Thank you again for all your support and feedback on an incredible 2023. There is more to come spanning fundamentals to AI to new modes of collaboration and more in 2024. To see the latest be sure to register for the Microsoft 365 Conference from April 30 to May 2.

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