Microsoft 365 in August 2026: Copilot gets a new name, classic pages get an end date and a lot switches on by default

July brought SharePoint Copilot Apps to try out and promised two concrete things for August: excluding folders from OneDrive sync and adaptive scopes for DLP in SharePoint. August delivered only the first. Instead, it brought news that was missing from our July outlook: Microsoft 365 Copilot was renamed Microsoft Copilot, on the last day of August classic SharePoint pages got an end date, and a striking number of new features arrived already switched on. This is the fifth instalment of the monthly recap — what August 2026 brought and what to do about it.

The main news, in plain words

A short summary for everyone who simply uses SharePoint and Microsoft 365 day to day:

• Copilot has a new name. Microsoft 365 Copilot is now called Microsoft Copilot and its web version is moving to a new address. Licences don’t change.
• Classic SharePoint pages have an end date. From March 2027 you won’t be able to create classic publishing sites, and from October 2028 old classic pages will be read-only. The content won’t disappear.
• Send a Copilot answer to a colleague as a link. They see it read-only and can continue with their own conversation.
• Mailboxes of up to 100 GB. Users on Microsoft 365 Business Basic, Standard and Premium get another 50 GB on top of the existing 50 GB.
• The end of SMS codes is in sight. Since September Microsoft has been offering passkeys as the default sign-in, and it will stop providing SMS and voice-call verification itself on 1 February 2027.

If that’s enough for you, you have the big picture. For context and detail, read on.

Microsoft 365 Copilot is now Microsoft Copilot

August’s most visible change looks cosmetic at first sight — and still calls for a check by IT. From 18 August Microsoft is renaming the Microsoft 365 Copilot app to Microsoft Copilot, with a new icon and a single experience for work and personal accounts (you recognise the work account by its “Work” label). The price list still uses the original licence names for now, such as Microsoft 365 Copilot Business, so you will see both for a while.

For administrators, the address is what matters: the web version is moving from m365.cloud.microsoft to copilot.cloud.microsoft with an automatic redirect. Microsoft doesn’t support allowing only selected addresses — the whole *.cloud.microsoft domain must be allowed in firewalls and proxies, otherwise users may not be able to reach Copilot after the redirect. Licences and the application ID don’t change and existing policies keep working.

Classic SharePoint pages get an end date

The month’s most important SharePoint news came on the last day of August. Microsoft announced (MC1464926) that classic publishing sites, classic pages and custom scripts in SharePoint Online are ending — in two phases:

• From 1 March 2027 you won’t be able to create classic publishing sites (Publishing Portal, Enterprise Wiki, Product Catalog and others) or activate the publishing feature. Tenants created from that date won’t create new classic pages by default and will have custom scripts turned off.
• From 1 October 2028 all classic user-created pages — wiki pages, web part pages, blogs, publishing pages and custom ASPX pages from SharePoint Designer — will be read-only, and the ban on custom scripts will apply to all tenants.

What doesn’t change: content isn’t deleted and existing pages can still be read. Modern pages and solutions built on the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) keep working, and classic list and library views are not in scope for now.

Microsoft says fewer than 5% of active tenants use the classic features today. But if your intranet came to the cloud by migrating from SharePoint 2010 or 2013, there’s a chance you are among those five percent. Microsoft recommends mapping usage in Purview audit (the SharePoint Classic Activities category) and with the Microsoft 365 Assessment Tool, then modernising in waves — with PnP Modernization or a new open-source page migration agent, which is still in preview and not supported by Microsoft.

More than two years until the freeze looks like plenty of time. Anyone who dealt with the end of InfoPath this July knows how fast such time disappears.

August in “on” mode

Look at August’s news through an administrator’s eyes and one pattern keeps repeating: a lot of it arrived already switched on. None of it is bad in itself — it’s just better to decide consciously than to find out from the helpdesk:

• Sharing Copilot conversations via a link — the recipient gets a read-only view and doesn’t gain access to the files the answer refers to. On by default.
• Power BI data in Copilot — users with a Copilot licence and access to Power BI content can now ask about Power BI reports and semantic models too, with their permissions respected. On by default; queries go through Microsoft Fabric, which is subject to different contractual commitments than Copilot. The switch: Fabric data in Microsoft 365 Copilot.
• Expanded Copilot in OneDrive on the web — Copilot in OneDrive has been generally available since 2024, but from 24 August users with a Copilot licence are getting an expanded version (working across files, analysis, creating documents) as a preview that the organisation has to opt out of. Opting out also turns off Copilot in SharePoint — there are no separate switches.
• Copilot Chat on mobile — older mobile blocks (an Intune key and the Analyze content option) stop blocking it from mid-August. You can still block it via Integrated Apps or by blocking the whole app.
• Excluding files from sync — OneDrive users can now exclude individual files themselves. If you don’t want that, turn it off by policy.

Half an hour over this list is enough — and the organisation decides about its environment instead of just reacting to changes.

Copilot in August: Notebooks, Cowork and agents on credits

Copilot Notebooks now come in two connected forms — a lightweight one in the Copilot app and a full one in OneNote — and Copilot suggests which document to create from the notebook’s content. Copilot Cowork, the mode that works with your mail, calendar, files and the web on your behalf, learned event-triggered tasks (an incoming email, a mention in Teams) and a choice of effort level. On top of the Copilot licence it is billed by consumption in credits — so choosing the effort level is also choosing the price.

Watch the credits in Copilot Studio too: the new GitHub Copilot harness (generally available since 3 August) plans its own steps and creates Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF documents — but such agents are always billed in credits, even for users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot licence. What you won’t find in the Copilot price list — the annual commitment, delayed indexing or excluding content only by whole sites — we covered in our article What the Microsoft 365 Copilot price list doesn’t tell you.

Sharing: a new link and a per-file report

Two August items touch the question we keep coming back to in governance — who can get to the files.

The first is a new form of sharing. Every file and folder gets one main link which by default works only for people added to the file — the link itself grants access to no one. Changing the scope updates the existing link instead of creating another one. The catch for administrators: the default scope of the new link can only be set per site and per OneDrive, there is no tenant-wide setting yet, and existing default link settings and link-expiration policies don’t apply to the new link. Microsoft moved the rollout to mid-September through late October. If your policy requires links to expire, it’s time to rewrite it.

The second is an item-level permissions report for the “Everyone” and “Everyone except external users” groups in SharePoint Advanced Management (SAM is unlocked by Microsoft 365 Copilot licences in your organisation or by a separate add-on). It lists every site, list, folder and file in SharePoint and OneDrive that these groups can access, including the permission level — up to a million rows of CSV. “Everyone except external users” is exactly how content most easily ends up unintentionally open to the whole company.

OneDrive: the August promise kept

July’s outlook promised excluding folders from sync — and it arrived. An administrator sets folder names by policy (such as node_modules) that stay on the device only; the feature is off by default and removes nothing retroactively. It came with check-out straight from a synced folder: after checking a file out from File Explorer or Finder, the local copy is editable, whereas until now it was read-only — something organisations with controlled documents will appreciate most. OneDrive on the web is getting a new file view built on modern SharePoint libraries with combinable filters, and from September the Mac is gradually moving to a new native sync engine.

Identity: the end of Microsoft-provided SMS and stricter password reset

Three changes in Microsoft Entra worth checking in every tenant:

• Passkeys as the default sign-in. Since 1 September Microsoft has been offering them as the default verification method, including to users who verify by SMS or phone call today. From 1 February 2027 Microsoft will stop providing SMS and voice-call verification itself (for Global Administrators and external users from 1 July 2027); anyone who wants to keep it will need their own provider. Passkeys are included in all Entra plans at no extra cost.
• Self-service password reset only with registered methods. From 7 November password reset will stop accepting the phone number and email filled in the directory — only methods the user explicitly registered, administrators included. Microsoft moved the date from September in August.
• The end of the MemberOf operator in dynamic group rules (the operator was only ever in preview). Anyone using it must rewrite the rules by 3 November — otherwise membership stops updating, and with it access to Teams and SharePoint.

If your people verify with an SMS code, the plan to move to passkeys or the Authenticator app belongs in the autumn, not in January.

Slips and corrections

The column also keeps track of what slipped or didn’t go to plan:

• Adaptive scopes for DLP in SharePoint, promised for August, were moved by Microsoft on 27 August to January 2027.
• Auto-labelling of up to 500,000 files a day did not start on 18 July as we wrote in July — according to the Message Center it’s a preview in September and general availability in October (we have corrected the July instalment).
• SharePoint Copilot Apps now have the final name Copilot UX components (in August Microsoft still called them Copilot Components). The preview is open to all tenants without a Copilot licence, and general availability is targeted for October together with SPFx 1.24 — which brings React 18, so web parts are worth testing.
• The retirement of one-time passcodes (OTP) for external sharing takes place in October; external users without an Entra B2B account will then be denied access to previously shared links for specific people.
• AI Citations Analytics from our spring instalments only starts rolling out from late August, only in tenants with more than 50 Copilot licences, and counts only citations from Copilot chat. Microsoft cancelled the chat history filter from June.
• The end of OneDrive updates on Windows 10 (15 August) concerns versions 21H2 and earlier, not 22H1 as we took over in July from Microsoft’s original message.

Deadlines: a busy autumn

Date	What ends / changes
25 Sep 2026	Whiteboard — migration tooling retired, legacy boards view and export only (originally 22 Aug)
30 Sep 2026	Project Online — end of service
1 Oct 2026	Exchange Web Services (EWS) — retirement enforcement begins, full shutdown 1 Apr 2027; Publisher disappears from Microsoft 365
1–31 Oct 2026	End of one-time passcodes (OTP) for external sharing in SharePoint and OneDrive — move to Entra B2B
5 Oct 2026	Teams live chat (the chat widget on websites) ends; the Admin app in Teams and Outlook also ends in October
13 Oct 2026	End of support for Office LTSC 2021; Windows 11 24H2 Home and Pro — last update
16 Oct 2026	Whiteboard — legacy boards deleted and standalone apps retired (originally 5 Sep and 14 Sep)
3 Nov 2026	Entra — end of the MemberOf operator in dynamic groups
7 Nov 2026	Entra — self-service password reset only with registered methods
31 Jan 2027	Restricted SharePoint Search ends (replacement: Restricted Content Discovery)
1 Feb 2027	End of SMS and voice-call verification provided by Microsoft
1 Mar 2027	Classic publishing sites — no more new ones
1 Jul 2027	Remote Event Receivers — final date (replacements: SharePoint webhooks, Graph change notifications)
1 Oct 2028	Classic SharePoint pages read-only

For a typical organisation, EWS means the most work: if older applications or third-party integrations work with your mail, they need to move to Microsoft Graph. And anyone with legacy boards in Whiteboard has only days left to export them.

What’s around the corner

• Copilot UX components generally available (target: October) — together with SPFx 1.24.
• Consent before joining a Teams meeting (mid-October to mid-November) — a new optional feature, off by default. An administrator can set a text (recording notices, responsible AI use guidelines, terms) that every participant must then accept, including the organiser, guests and anonymous attendees; consents are written to the audit log.
• HTML pages in SharePoint (October) — HTML created by Copilot or uploaded from elsewhere is displayed as a SharePoint page. Copilot in SharePoint can already generate a live dashboard connected to the data from a list.
• Copilot memory generally available (mid-September to late October).

Small things worth a mention

• Mailboxes of up to 100 GB on Business plans — another 50 GB of primary mailbox (the archive doesn’t change). Microsoft doesn’t overwrite manually set quotas — anyone who once lowered them won’t see 100 GB.
• Planner in Outlook (on the web and in the new Outlook for Windows) and now also as a tab in private and shared Teams channels, for basic plans for now.
• Microsoft 365 Backup now keeps backups for up to two years — you can choose 3 months, 6 months, 1 year or 2 years; until now it was a fixed one year.
• Excel: change history with Copilot — Copilot summarises who changed the workbook and how (people and AI) and helps undo edits. Finally an answer to “who overwrote my formula?”.
• Copilot in 30 — a trial of Microsoft 365 Copilot Business for 25 users for 30 days through a CSP partner, for organisations with fewer than 300 employees; the offer runs until the end of the year — check availability with your partner.

What to take away from August

Three things to remember:

1. Copilot has a new name, the licences stay. For IT it means one task above all — check that the whole *.cloud.microsoft domain is allowed; for everyone else, update guides and training.
2. Classic SharePoint pages have a date. From March 2027 no new publishing sites, from October 2028 old pages freeze. Map them now, while modernisation is a project rather than firefighting.
3. Review what switched itself on. Sharing Copilot answers, Power BI data, expanded Copilot in OneDrive, mobile Copilot Chat — decide consciously for each whether it should run in your organisation.

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At EP365 we deal with these transitions with organisations almost daily — and after August we expect the most questions around modernising classic intranets (what to do with publishing sites and wiki pages before they freeze), Copilot’s default settings (what to leave on and what to turn off consciously) and cleaning up sharing (links for the whole company and the new way of sharing). If you run into any of the above and don’t know where to start, have a look at our services or just drop us a line — we’ll talk it through with no strings attached.

The next instalment of the monthly column will be out in early October — a recap of what September 2026 brought.