Microsoft 365 Roadmap Weekly: Lots of Copilot additions and more

The Microsoft 365 Roadmap website is buzzing with Copilot activity this week across many of the company's Office productivity apps. Let's take a look at what was included in the roadmap over the past seven days.

Copilot is coming to lots of Office apps

Microsoft announced Copilot back in September as its all-encompassing generative AI assistant. It also announced that Microsoft 365 Copilot would officially launch on November 1 for enterprise users, for $30 a month per user.

So it is not a huge shock to learn that the Microsoft 365 Roadmap added notices that Copilot would be rolled out to lots of Microsoft 365 Office apps in November. They include Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Whiteboard, OneNote, Loop, and Microsoft 365 Chat.

One Office app, Excel, is a bit different. The Microsoft 365 Roadmap shows it will get access to Copilot, but only in a public preview, in November. Its general availability won't go live until February 2024.

Finally, a new Copilot feature for classic Outlook will be available in preview in January 2024 and roll out officially in March 2024:

Copilot combines the power of LLMs and Outlook data to help you do more. Copilot can summarize email threads and extract key points.

Microsoft Teams will soon add support for Loop and more

There are a lot of upcoming new features coming to Microsoft Teams, according to this week's Roadmap update. It fact they are far too many to squeeze into this post so we will just hit on a few highlights.

One will add support for the Microsoft Loop collaboration service:

Co-create and collaborate using Loop components in channels. Share a Loop component like a table, a list or a paragraph, so anyone in the channel can view and edit it. Available in classic and new Teams.

Another upcoming Teams feature is supposed to make it easier to create messages:

A simplified compose box UI will make it easier to create and send messages. Edit your message, insert an emoji or call Copilot right from the compose box, or click on the plus button to choose from the extended menu of actions.

Yet another new feature will help with catching up with a lost call:

Easily stay in touch with your contacts after a missed call. A new chat button is added to your activity feed, enabling you to follow up on a missed call and start a chat with just one click.

All of these Teams features will roll out in November.

Microsoft Stream will add interactive quizzes, surveys, and polls

Microsoft Stream, the enterprise-based video streaming service, will be rolling out some interactive features in December 2023. One will let users add quizzes, polls, and surveys to videos:

Make your video interactive and more engaging by adding a survey, quiz, or poll using Microsoft Forms. You can add forms anywhere in the video timeline for videos you own. Go to Microsoft Forms to view responses and share a summary link with answers and scores in Microsoft Forms.

The Stream service will also add ways to include additional content to videos:

Make your video interactive and more engaging by adding annotations that can include hyperlinks and text. Call out important moments or share documents and other links to additional resources. You can add text and links anywhere in the video timeline to help guide your viewers to the right information.

That's all for this installment of the Microsoft 365 Roadmap Weekly post. Come back next Sunday for additional Roadmap updates.

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