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Microsoft SharePoint Blog
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SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop January 2025

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Mark-Kashman
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Feb 06, 2025

Kicking off 2025 with a bang, and a BIG SharePoint event. January 2025 brought a lot of new offerings: Viva Connections on the SharePoint app bar, Pay-as-you-go billing model for SharePoint agents, Re-imagined Hero web part, and more. Plus, important audio snippets from the BIG SharePoint Event in the related podcast episode.

Details and screenshots below, including our audible companion: The Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop: January 2025 podcast episode – all to help answer, "What's rolling out now for SharePoint and related technologies into Microsoft 365?" 

All features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Microsoft 365 as of January 2025 (possibly early February 2025).  

Inform and engage with dynamic employee experiences. 

Build your intelligent intranet on SharePoint in Microsoft 365 and get the benefits of investing in business outcomes – reducing IT and development costs, increasing business speed and agility, and up-leveling the dynamic, personalized, and welcoming nature of your intranet.

 

Viva Connections in the SharePoint app bar. 

"Bartender. Viva Connections on the rocks! Intranet cocktails for everyone." 

That's right. There's a new entry point for Viva Connections on the SharePoint app bar. This is the universal navigation element you see when in SharePoint, on a SharePoint site - and in this case, enhancing the integration between your broader Intranet and Viva Connections. The new entry point sits alongside existing SharePoint app bar nav elements: Global navigation, My sites, My news, My files, My lists, and the Create experience. 

Viva Connections now lights up on the SharePoint app bar when you have it configured in your tenant.

For everyone in your organization, they'll have a seamless way to go to Viva Connections from any SharePoint site.  

Note: This feature will only be available to customers who have a configured and published dashboard and an enabled Viva Connections experience on their tenants. This feature will be on by default. 

  

New Pay-as-you-go billing model for SharePoint agents. 

We're introducing a pay-as-you-go (PayG) billing model allowing organizations to use an Azure subscription to pay for the SharePoint agents service based on the number of queries used. With this update, admins can now provide users without Copilot licenses with the ability to use and create agents on any SharePoint site or document library they have access to. People with Microsoft 365 Copilot seat licenses can continue using SharePoint agents according to their license terms.  

To use agents in SharePoint on a pay-as-you-go basis, admins must first set up billing and activate the service in the Microsoft 365 admin center. An Azure subscription and resource group are required to set up pay-as-you-go billing. 

Note: The use of PayG to allow unlicensed users to utilize SharePoint agents will respect any controls in place to manage Copilot within the organization. 

  

Re-imagined Hero web part, bringing a new carousel layout to SharePoint pages and news. 

True heroics. This new layout features a slideshow and a selection of new styles with imagery, bold text, and a call to action, creating more engaging page experiences. Authors can create eagle-eye-catching carousel slides in any section type, with up to five slides in Carousel layout, you can beautifully highlight key content.  

You can choose between three new styles, and it supports Clipchamp/Stream videos to make the page more appealing and media rich. Why stop at touching the sky when you can soar in the cloud. 

  

Viva Engage: Leadership feed is now available when using the Viva Engage conversations web part. 

The "Leaders" feed now sits alongside the previous feed choices you selected to program the web part: 

  • The Community feed 
  • User feed 
  • Topic feed 
  • Home feed 

Once the feed is viewable, it's functional, too - including the ability to ask questions, get answers, and share best practices.  

The Viva Engage "Conversations" web part edit pane, configured to show the "Leaders" feed on the selected SharePoint page.

Note: The end user experience of the Leaders feed does depend on their license status. People with either a Viva suite or Viva Employee Communications and Communities license will see content from their leadership corner feed. People without a Viva suite or Viva Employee Communications and Communities license will see content from their home feed.  

  

New "Editorial card" web part, for use on SharePoint pages and news posts. 

This is one of those simple AND powerful web parts. You can display content in an engaging card format with advanced background and content settings. 

Unlike automated web parts like News and Events, this new Editorial card allows you to manually tailor the content presentation. You choose a background image, add a category name, type in a headline, add descriptive text, and light up an actionable, hyperlinked button with text. You can also choose from three layout options for image overlay, color block, or a cool split view. 

So, editorialize your comms to your heart’s content - it helps you communicate the heart of your content - and looks snazzy, too.  

BONUS Sample | Using the Editorial web part to advertise The Intrazone on an internal SharePoint site.

New Accessibility assistant tool for authoring SharePoint pages 

The team has designed a new Accessibility assistant tool to help content creators meet accessibility standards when authoring SharePoint pages and news posts. This tool provides checks and brief guidance to help ensure pages are inclusive and accessible to a broad audience. Authors can initiate an accessibility test while editing a page by selecting the Accessibility assistant icon from the right vertical toolbar. 

The new Accessibility assistant in action on a SharePoint page.

As you work within the Accessibility assistant, it guides you to address accessibility issues in the specific supported web parts: Banner, Text, Image, Hero, and Quick Links.  

Accessibility is all about removing barriers and providing the benefits of technology, and your internal communications, for everyone. Great to see the team giving you a tool within reach to be more inclusive.  

 

BONUS | The new SharePoint Event (Jan. 29, 2025) microsite. 

The new SharePoint Event microsite: https://aka.ms/SharePointEvent.

This new SharePoint Event microsite contains the full event + AMA on demand, plus our new 5-part SharePoint learning series, new customer studies (Amey, Takeda, and Avanade), insights into the upcoming SharePoint Hackathon (March 2025), and more. 

Teamwork updates across SharePoint team sites, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams. 

Microsoft 365 is designed to be a universal toolkit for teamwork – to give you the right tools for the right task, along with common services to help you seamlessly work across applications. SharePoint is the intelligent content service that powers teamwork – to better collaborate on proposals, projects, and campaigns throughout your organization – with integration across Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Yammer, Stream, Planner and much more. 

 

SharePoint pages: Flexible sections 

You want more control where you place this or that on the SharePoint page canvas… You got it!  

Flexible sections are a new section type that allow page authors to build without a strict column structure. You will see a new option when adding a section to a page, called “Flexible.” Within a flexible section, users can drag and drop web parts anywhere on the grid. Web parts will snap to the closest grid line when moved.  

See them in action in part 2 of the new 5-part SharePoint learning series, “Design engaging SharePoint sites and pages” with Melissa Torres:  

You can also resize web parts. Note: Card-based web parts, such as Quick Links, People, or Hero, only have four different width options (full width, one-third canvas width, half canvas width, and two-thirds canvas width). These web parts can only be resized to one of the four options. Non-card-based web parts, such as Text, Image, and File & Media can be resized to any width on the grid.  

The flexibility of flexible sections also allows change the arrangement of overlapping web parts, multi-select web parts, and group web parts, and drag and drop a new section template from the content pane toolbox and keep on arranging things until they are just right. Flexible sections are available for use in SharePoint and Viva Amplify - which is based on the SharePoint pages platform.  

  

A new admin control for Microsoft Lists: Hide real-time list collaborators at the site collection level. 

Based on customer feedback regarding privacy, admins can run the PowerShell command Set-SPOSite -Identity -HidePeopleWhoHaveListsOpen $true to disable this feature on a per-site collection basis, so users cannot see who is working on the List at the same time AND the lists still support co-authoring capabilities, just minimizes the visibility of your co-authors on that sites' lists. 

The visibility of people in a list is ON by default, now with an admins control via PowerShell to configure OFF. Like the Karate Kid: People ON, People OFF. #CraneKick  

Related technology 

Microsoft Teams: New DVR capabilities for town halls (desktop and web) 

1999 TiVo, meet 2025 Teams. 

This new feature will allow town hall attendees on Windows desktop or the web to interact with a live streaming town hall in the same way they would interact with recorded content. You can pause and move forward or back in a town hall, navigate to any previous timestamp. 

Microsoft Teams DVR controls appear during an active Town Hall meeting.

This feature is available for Teams town halls from all organizers, regardless of the license assigned to the organizer. You'll see the DVR controls when you hover your mouse over the content presented in the town hall. And when you’re done jumping around, you can catch up and join the live event by selecting the Watch Live button next to the volume control. 

Great new feature to take control of your viewing experience, to catch up, skip around, and stay informed in real time.  

  

Reduced file sizes for Microsoft Teams meeting recordings exported from Clipchamp. 

Due to the way Clipchamp encodes the files, the file size of these exports can be larger than the original files. To address this issue, we implemented an algorithm to optimize the Teams meeting recording videos without compromising quality.  

Now, Teams meeting recordings exported from Clipchamp are compressed, making them easier to store and share. And since Clipchamp natively stores your video file on the SharePoint storage platform, this means less storage consumption across your Microsoft 365 tenant when it comes to the storage of Teams meetings video files.  

Or hold fewer meetings. 😉 

February 2025 teasers 

Psst, still here? Still scrolling the page looking for more roadmap goodness? If so, here is a few teasers of what’s to come to production next month… 

 

  • Teaser #1: New preview mode for SharePoint Pages and News posts [Roadmap ID: 473452]  
  • Teaser #2: Video creation in Copilot Visual Creator powered by Clipchamp [Roadmap ID: 402192] 

… shhh, tell everyone. 

Events 

Helpful, ongoing change management resources  

Thanks for tuning in and/or reading this episode/blog of the Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop – January 2025. We are open to your feedback in comments below to hear how both the Roadmap Pitstop podcast episodes and blogs can improve over time. 

Engage with us. Ask those questions that haunt you. Push us where you want and need to get the best information and insights. We are here to put both our and your best change management foot forward.  

Stay safe out there on the road’map ahead. And thanks for listening and reading.  

Thanks for your time,  

Mark Kashman 🧔🏻‍♂️ – Senior product manager (SharePoint/Lists) | Microsoft)  

The Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop - January 2025 graphic showing some of the highlighted release features.
Updated Feb 06, 2025
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