Microsoft 365 in April 2026: new SharePoint, dual Copilot and the final countdown
Monthly recap of news in Microsoft 365 and SharePoint Online. April brought GA of the new SharePoint Experience, the split of Copilot into Basic and Premium, the definitive end of Add-ins and 2013 Workflows, and three ticking retirement deadlines.
April 2026 was not a quiet month. Microsoft completed the rollout of the new SharePoint Experience, split Copilot into two licence tiers, definitively switched off SharePoint Add-ins and 2013 Workflows, and lined up several more retirement deadlines that will land in May and July. This is the first instalment of a regular monthly column — what changed over the past month and what’s worth paying attention to.
The new SharePoint is here — and you can’t opt out
In early April Microsoft completed the GA rollout of a fully redesigned SharePoint Online. The new app bar is structured around three destinations — Discover (corporate knowledge), Publish (publishing pages and news) and Build (building solutions and agents). The release also introduces 31 new page templates and deeper integration of AI-assisted features for users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence.
The key point: the rollout is non-opt-out. Full GA completion will arrive in mid-June through July, but Targeted Release tenants will be hit sooner. For administrators this means two things — update your training materials, and expect users to be lost in the new UI for several weeks.
Copilot in two tiers: Basic and Premium
From 15 April Microsoft changed the licensing model for Copilot inside Office applications. Users without a paid M365 Copilot licence are now labelled Copilot Chat (Basic) and have access only to the basic chat. Full functionality in Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote is reserved for M365 Copilot (Premium).
The change primarily affects organisations with fewer than 2,000 users and is activated automatically — administrators don’t have to configure anything, but they must audit licence assignments and explain in good time to users what is changing. If anyone has spent months experimenting with Copilot inside Word “because it was there”, as of 15 April it has disappeared.
AI: multi-agent, Anthropic Claude and Security Copilot
From an AI perspective, April was particularly dense:
- Multi-agent orchestration in Copilot Studio is now generally available to all customers (GA). Agents collaborate as a coordinated system — one delegates tasks to another, they share context, they drive complex workflows.
- Anthropic Claude Sonnet has been added as an optional model in Copilot Chat (Frontier) alongside the existing OpenAI models. The feature is not yet available in EU/EFTA, the UK or sovereign cloud regions — Czech organisations can’t reach it for now.
- Security Copilot is integrated into M365 E5 (GA on 20 April), with 400 SCU per 1,000 users. Security teams gain AI assistance for triaging alerts and analysing incidents directly inside E5 at no additional cost.
- AI Administrator RBAC allows administration of AI agents without Global Admin rights — a step in the right direction for least-privilege governance.
- SharePoint Knowledge Agent (Roadmap 501451) for automating content management (correcting metadata, identifying stale pages) is expected to arrive in May.
In parallel, Microsoft has redesigned the Agent Builder interface and introduced Microsoft Lists as a knowledge source for custom agents — both in Public Preview.
What was definitively retired
On 2 April Microsoft permanently switched off SharePoint Add-ins (MC693865) and SharePoint 2013 Workflows (MC542767). Organisations that hadn’t yet migrated their custom solutions could face real outages in their integrations. These two retirement windows have been in preparation for years, so they shouldn’t have been a surprise — and yet there’s always someone who waited until the very last minute.
Ticking deadlines in May
Three dates that IT managers and SharePoint admins should have had in their calendars:
| Date | What ends |
|---|---|
| 30 April 2026 | Office 365 Connectors in Microsoft Teams — migration to Workflow webhooks (Power Automate) |
| 1 May 2026 | IDCRL authentication for SharePoint Online and OneDrive — transition to OAuth/OpenID Connect |
| 18 May 2026 | InfoPath — blocking publishing of new forms (full shutdown on 14 July) |
In addition, July 2026 brings the end of One-Time Passcode for external sharing in SharePoint (transition to Entra B2B), the end of support for SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019, and the closure of the InfoPath Forms Service.
What’s around the corner
May brings the rollout of AI Citations Analytics — a new page in site usage / page analytics that shows how Copilot and AI agents cite your documents and pages. For information-architecture managers, this is the first standardised metric for content quality from an AI grounding perspective.
Microsoft has also signalled an expansion of Copilot integration directly inside SharePoint pages — AI-assisted Charts web part (preview), transferring Copilot Pages into a SharePoint News post, automatic generation of Word/Excel/PowerPoint files from site content.
In parallel, the integration of Microsoft Entra B2B with sharing in SharePoint is deepening — it will replace the legacy OTP mechanism and bring more robust governance for guests.
Smaller items worth a mention
- Markdown files can be viewed and edited natively in SharePoint and OneDrive directly in the browser since mid-April. For developers and documentation owners it’s a small but pleasant change.
- Teams now has automatic language detection in transcripts and captions — manual selection is a thing of the past.
- Generation of structured documents from forms is in Preview — a Word document template can be filled directly from Microsoft Forms responses.
- AI-powered DLP Alert Summaries (Triage Agent) automatically categorise and summarise security incidents.
Takeaways from April
Three things to remember:
- The new SharePoint is definitively here. If your organisation hasn’t updated its training materials, now is the time. No opt-out means users will land in the new UI without warning.
- Copilot is no longer a “free perk”. Without a Premium licence they’ll see nothing in Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Audit licences now, not when support tickets start arriving.
- The May retirement deadlines are not abstract. IDCRL, Office 365 Connectors and InfoPath publishing all end within a three-week stretch. An inventory of legacy integrations is a critical task.
At EP365 we work through these transitions with companies almost daily — most often the conversation starts around a technical audit (legacy forms, integrations, permissions), governance (authoritative content for AI grounding) and user training, which has to run alongside the rollout of the new interface. If any of the above hits home and you’re not sure where to start, get in touch — we’ll talk it through with no commitment.
The next monthly column will appear at the start of June — a round-up of what May 2026 brought.