Microsoft 365 in July 2026: Copilot Apps go live, oversight of agents, and the 14 July that arrived

June opened the AI era to developers and promised two things for July: SharePoint Copilot Apps in preview and OneDrive modernisation. July delivered both. To that it added something that appears in this column as a topic of its own for the first time – oversight of AI agents. And behind all of it, 14 July truly arrived: InfoPath, SharePoint Designer and the old servers departed. This is the fourth instalment of the monthly recap – what July 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 answers are turning into little apps. Instead of a wall of text, Copilot can show you an approval panel, a form or a table you work with right there. For now, to try out (preview).
• Copilot in SharePoint can create a document from your content. Say “make a presentation out of this” and a Word, Excel or PowerPoint appears – no blank page to start from.
• OneDrive and SharePoint got a new coat. Clearer filtering, a new view of libraries, comments on Markdown files. Nothing was lost, it’s just easier to find.
• The company can see where AI agents reach. A new “heatmap” shows an administrator where agents are most active and where unusual access is happening.
• Old technology ended on 14 July. InfoPath, SharePoint Designer and the 2016/2019 servers are done for good. If you still use them somewhere, it’s no longer “around the corner” – it “happened”.

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

SharePoint Copilot Apps: from announcement to live

June’s main story was a promise. July’s main story is keeping it: SharePoint Copilot Apps have been in public preview since 9 July and rolled out worldwide by 20 July. It means a Copilot answer no longer has to be just text – but a fully-fledged interactive app right in its canvas.

Concretely: approving an expense, triaging an incident or an onboarding checklist can run as a real app inside Copilot, not a list of steps to click through by hand. Filterable data grids, multi-step forms, interactive maps, live charts and KPI dashboards, schedulers and approval panels are all available.

For developers the key point is that it builds on a familiar base – the SharePoint Framework. If you know SPFx, you build Copilot Apps straight away; a Copilot Workbench and a preview of SPFx 1.24 from npm are available. General availability is planned for later in 2026.

For organisations with their own intranet it confirms what we wrote in June: what lives as a web part today can work as an interactive Copilot answer tomorrow. The difference is that “tomorrow” has just begun.

Copilot in SharePoint keeps getting more practical

Alongside the apps, Copilot in SharePoint gained a set of very concrete abilities in July:

• A document from your content. Ask for a Word, Excel or PowerPoint assembled straight from content in SharePoint – no starting from a blank page.
• A workflow from a single sentence (from 10 July). Describe the intent – “when files are set to status Complete, post me a message in Teams” – and Copilot assembles the trigger, conditions and actions itself.
• Personal Skills (from 15 July). Reusable procedures saved as Markdown files in OneDrive that work across sites. A team captures its own standards and runs them consistently.
• Enterprise Store plugins – bundles of skills, MCP servers and other extensions work directly in Copilot.

On top of that, Copilot Studio now takes SharePoint lists as a knowledge source – agents rely on up-to-date structured data (catalogues, registers, operational lists) without manual data movement. The overall direction is clear: AI from SharePoint no longer just reads, it builds and acts too.

Oversight of agents: governance catches up with AI

And here is July’s new angle, worth more attention than anything else. As agents gain the ability to read company data and act, a way to keep track of them has to come too. In July it did:

• Agent Access Insights – a visual heatmap of agent activity across SharePoint and OneDrive sites. At a glance an administrator sees where agents are most active, where the hotspots are and where unusual access is happening. For the first time there’s a tool that shows where AI actually reaches.
• Restricted Access Control (RAC) enforced across search (late July). A site’s access restriction now also flows into Microsoft 365 search results – a user (and therefore the AI searching on their behalf) sees only what they have rights to.
• Restricted Content Discovery got an enhancement: content from RCD sites is kept out of Copilot and organisational search more consistently.

Anyone who read our series on labels and DLP will recognise the same logic: AI is only as safe as the permissions are healthy and as well as you know where it reaches. Agent Access Insights is exactly the “who keeps an eye on it” this column has been raising since May.

OneDrive and SharePoint: the new coat is here

The modernisation June promised has arrived. Both OneDrive and SharePoint have a fresher interface: reworked filtering, a new Libraries view, document libraries directly in OneDrive, co-authoring of Markdown files with comments, and a more neutral, calmer look.

A few concrete touches for page authors arrived too: Flexible Section Authoring (from 21 July) with visual column guides and single-click section conversion, and a neutral theme in the page editor (phased July–September). On mobile, OneDrive now handles Markdown files and a My Sites tab with an overview of your team sites.

Purview at scale: labelling got five times faster

One item deserves a separate mention, because it ties directly to our article on sensitivity labels. From 18 July Microsoft raised the automatic-labelling capacity from 100,000 to 500,000 files per tenant per day. For companies working out how to catch up on labelling hundreds of thousands of existing documents, that’s a fivefold speed-up – and one of the main “we’ll never manage it” arguments falls away.

Purview also added smaller touches with teeth: blocking screenshots of PDFs with a matching sensitivity label in Edge (from 2 July) and annotating protected PDFs on mobile while keeping encryption.

Deadlines: 14 July arrived

What the column has written about since spring has happened. The state of play after 14 July:

Date	What ended / is ending
14 July 2026	InfoPath Forms Services + SharePoint Designer 2013 – end of support (replacements: Power Apps, Power Automate, Forms)
14 July 2026	SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019 – end of extended support
15 Aug 2026	End of OneDrive sync updates for Windows 10 22H1 and earlier (22H2 supported until October 2028)
22 Aug – 14 Sep 2026	Microsoft Whiteboard: migrate old boards by 22 Aug, deletion 5 Sep, standalone app retired 14 Sep
1 Jul 2027	Remote Event Receivers – final date (replacements: SharePoint webhooks, Graph change notifications)

Existing InfoPath forms still work for a while, but without support and without any guarantee – whoever still has them is now only dealing with a matter of time. Two items are new versus last month: the end of OneDrive sync on old Windows 10 and the retirement of Microsoft Whiteboard, whose old format needs migrating by the end of August before it’s deleted in September.

What’s around the corner

• Adaptive Scopes for DLP in SharePoint (August) – dynamic targeting of DLP policies by site attributes, the end of the static 100-site limit. A direct continuation of our data-protection series.
• Folder exclusion from OneDrive sync (August) – an administrator can exclude specific folders from syncing via policy.
• Copilot Apps – general availability (later in 2026). The preview is there to try now.
• Dataverse data in Copilot (September) – grounding extends to business data from the Power Platform.

Small things worth a mention

• Meeting recaps – a new app that gathers AI meeting summaries in one place and pins to the Teams sidebar.
• SharePoint app in Teams (from 9 July) – a link to a SharePoint page or news opens directly in the SharePoint app in Teams.
• A button on a page launches a Copilot prompt or a Power Automate flow – the Button web part now does both.
• Cross-posting News to Viva Engage and native Viva campaigns in SharePoint for corporate communications.
• Custom site groups in SharePoint Advanced Management via CSV, site properties and Entra ID attributes.

What to take away from July

Three things to remember:

1. Copilot Apps are live. An AI answer can now be an interactive app, not text. If you build on SPFx, you can start today.
2. Governance has finally caught up with agents. Agent Access Insights and RAC enforced in search are the first tools that show and limit where AI actually reaches.
3. 14 July happened. InfoPath, SharePoint Designer and the old servers ended. Whoever still has them isn’t dealing with a project but a risk – and Microsoft Whiteboard is now heading the same way.

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At EP365 we deal with these transitions with organisations almost daily – in July most often around migration after InfoPath (what to do with the forms and workflows that expired on 14 July), governance for AI agents (who watches where agents reach) and labelling at scale (auto-labelling hundreds of thousands of files). 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 September – a recap of what August 2026 brought.