Microsoft 365 in June 2026: Copilot in SharePoint, authoritative sites and the final countdown

May was the month AI moved right inside SharePoint. June is the month it got a name and started delivering: the Knowledge Agent was renamed Copilot in SharePoint and began rolling out in preview, authoritative sites reached general availability, and Microsoft opened the AI era to developers too. Meanwhile the July deadlines this column has been writing about since spring have come into plain sight. This is the third instalment of the monthly recap — what June 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:

• SharePoint has its own assistant. It’s called Copilot in SharePoint and you can tell it in plain language what you want to find or build — it finds it, creates it and even describes it (filling in labels and metadata).
• The new SharePoint look has reached almost everyone. A top bar organised around Discover / Publish / Build, a clearer start page, less visual noise. There’s no going back — but a few minutes is all it takes to find your way around.
• Copilot can now “see”. It can look at your screen or through your phone’s camera and help with whatever is in front of you.
• Your organisation can mark official sources. Copilot then prefers them in its answers and labels them as coming from your organisation — fewer answers built from five-year-old drafts.
• Old technology ends on 14 July. InfoPath forms, SharePoint Designer and SharePoint Server 2016/2019. If you don’t know whether that concerns you, ask your IT — now, not in August.

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

Copilot in SharePoint is no longer “coming soon”

The main story of June. Last year’s SharePoint Knowledge Agent got a new name — Copilot in SharePoint — and has been rolling out in preview since mid-June. Instead of clicking through document libraries, you describe in plain language what you want to find or create, and the agent does it.

More interesting than the search, though, is the second half of its job: automatic care for metadata. Copilot in SharePoint extracts and applies metadata to newly uploaded documents on its own, adapts library structure as content changes, and continuously prepares your data for downstream AI scenarios. That’s exactly the painstaking work there was never time for — and the work that decides how good the answers AI gets out of your environment will be.

The governance note remains the same as in May: the agent reads and organises whatever the user has permission to. The quality of the outcome stands and falls with the state of your environment, not with the licence.

The new SharePoint has reached everyone

The worldwide GA of the new SharePoint Experience has been running since mid-June, completing by mid-July — closing out the rollout that started in March. Alongside it, Microsoft introduced a visual “new look and feel”: a calmer, more neutral interface focused on content, an app bar unified around Discover, Publish and Build, and the renamed Favorites (merging the former Followed Sites and Saved for Later).

One small thing that will please anyone who cares about accessibility: the title area of pages can now use H1 as a selectable heading level — pages can finally have proper semantic structure.

For administrators the message is the same as in May, only more urgent: old screenshots in training materials no longer apply, and users should know about the change before it appears on their screens.

Authoritative sites: May promised, June delivered

Authoritative Sites reached general availability on schedule (MC1310687, GA in the second half of June). A site marked as authoritative gets a higher ranking weight in Copilot Chat and Copilot Search answers, and its content carries a “from your organisation” label — users can see at a glance that an answer comes from a verified internal source.

Two practical notes:

• Configuration currently runs through PowerShell (Set-SPOSite -IsAuthoritative); a graphical option in the admin centre isn’t available yet. The feature is off by default and requires Copilot licensing.
• The best way to start: pick 5–10 sites that genuinely are the official source (intranet, HR, policies, company news), mark them — and make sure someone maintains them. An authoritative site with outdated content is worse than none.

It’s the cheapest improvement to AI answer quality you can make in M365 right now.

SharePoint Copilot Apps: the AI era for developers too

June brought one of the biggest announcements for SharePoint developers in years: SharePoint Copilot Apps. It’s a new way to bring rich, interactive components built on the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) directly into the Copilot canvas — an answer no longer has to be just text, but a fully-fledged UI connected to business data.

The essential part is that nobody starts from scratch: developers reuse their existing SPFx skills, tooling and investments, and extend the reach of their apps across SharePoint, Teams and Viva, with Copilot as a first-class surface. Public preview starts in July, with general availability targeted for later in 2026. Alongside the announcement, SPFx 1.23.2 shipped as a stabilisation release preparing the ground for Copilot Apps.

For organisations with their own intranet or SharePoint-based applications, this is a signal to start planning: what lives as a web part today can work as an interactive Copilot answer tomorrow.

Copilot in June: Vision and the agent fabric

Copilot itself added several things in June that widen its context:

• Vision (Roadmap 561037) — Copilot can analyse what’s on your screen and the live feed from your phone’s camera, and help with what you’re looking at. A note for admins: the feature comes on by default — it’s worth making a conscious decision about whether and where you want it.
• Teams meetings in Copilot Notebooks (560706) — past meetings with transcripts, chats and files can be used as a notebook source.
• Remote MCP in Copilot Studio (559020) and the Work IQ API in GA since 16 June (559021) — agents connect to external systems over the open MCP protocol, and workflows can be invoked through a single REST endpoint. The building blocks of enterprise AI automation.
• Agent grounding on SharePoint lists (561920) — agents can use lists as a structured knowledge source. It opens the way to agents over business registers, from catalogues to operational lists.
• Chat history filtered by environment (559601) — a cleaner view of past conversations when switching between endpoints.

The common denominator hasn’t changed since May, it has only grown stronger: Copilot sees more and reaches into more sources. Which makes it all the more important to know how far that context reaches — and who keeps an eye on it.

Deadlines: no longer “around the corner” — they’re here

The dates this column has tracked since spring have arrived. The state of play as of today:

Date	What ends
14 July 2026	SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019 — end of extended support (migrate to SE or SharePoint Online)
14 July 2026	InfoPath Forms Services + SharePoint Designer 2013 (replacements: Power Apps, Power Automate, Forms)
July 2026	SharePoint Alerts — e-mail notifications (replacement: Power Automate or SharePoint Rules)
End of July 2026	Featured Links on the SharePoint Start Page (completion pushed from June to late July)
From July 2026	SharePoint One-Time Passcode (OTP) for external sharing — transition to Microsoft Entra B2B

One item is new compared with the May recap and deserves attention: the end of one-time passcodes (OTP) for external sharing. Authentication of external guests in SharePoint and OneDrive is moving to Microsoft Entra B2B — if you actively share with external parties, check that B2B integration is switched on and tested, otherwise external access may stumble over the summer.

And a reminder from last month that has since taken effect: standalone SharePoint / OneDrive plans (Plan 1/2) can no longer be purchased by new customers as of June — a new deployment means a Microsoft 365 suite.

What’s around the corner

• SharePoint Copilot Apps — public preview (July). The first real chance to get hands-on with the new model.
• OneDrive and SharePoint modernisation (July) — the new Libraries view, document libraries directly inside OneDrive, Markdown co-authoring with comments, and a more neutral look.
• Enhanced Copilot memory (551195, July) — more remembered context across conversations.
• Adaptive Scopes for DLP in SharePoint (549288, August) — dynamic targeting of DLP policies by site attributes, ending the static 100-site limit.
• Dataverse data in Copilot (560539, September) — grounding extends to business data from the Power Platform.

Small things worth a mention

• AI audio summaries of News posts (562018) — listen to company news instead of reading it.
• Copilot Suggested Rename in OneDrive (564909) — file name suggestions based on content.
• Hand-drawn signatures in SharePoint eSignature (548670) — stylus, touch or mouse.
• SharePoint Link Previews in Teams (561321) — links to SharePoint content show up in Teams as rich visual cards.
• DocGen and Power Automate triggers from forms (561025, 561026) — a submitted form turns straight into a finished document.
• Expanded permissions reporting — better visibility of group access and oversharing.

What to take away from June

Three things to remember:

1. Copilot in SharePoint is a preview reality — and it looks after metadata by itself. But the quality of its work will be determined by the state of your permissions and content, not by the licence.
2. Authoritative sites are GA. Marking 5–10 official sources is the cheapest improvement to AI answers you can make right now — via PowerShell for the time being.
3. 14 July is days away. InfoPath, SharePoint Designer and SharePoint Server 2016/2019 are ending, and external sharing is moving from OTP to Entra B2B. Whoever has no plan is no longer managing a project — they’re managing an incident.

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At EP365 we deal with these transitions with organisations almost daily — in June most often around legacy forms and workflow migration (the last wave before 14 July), governance for AI (authoritative content and permissions before a Copilot rollout) and user training for the new interface. 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 August — a recap of what July 2026 brought.