SharePoint Online Weekly Update — August 3, 2026

The New SharePoint Experience Reaches General Availability

The redesigned new SharePoint experience (MC1240699) has moved from preview into broad general availability, with the GA rollout that began June 15 continuing across tenants through the summer. The centerpiece is a rebuilt SharePoint app bar organized around three hubs — Discover for a personalized view of sites, content, and news; Publish as a central place to create and share communications; and Build — alongside a refreshed SharePoint start page for finding what matters across your tenant. Your organizational home site, if one is configured, continues to anchor the bar.

The change is being applied to all SharePoint users, not just Copilot-licensed ones, though some of the AI-assisted creation, management, and discovery features layered into the experience require a Microsoft 365 Copilot license to use. That split matters for change management: everyone will see the new navigation, but only licensed users will see the AI entry points, so a single screenshot won't describe what every employee encounters.

For a consulting-minded organization, this is the kind of update that generates help-desk tickets not because anything broke, but because familiar navigation moved. The value in getting ahead of it is mostly communication — showing people where Discover, Publish, and Build now live before they go looking for the old layout.

What to do: Confirm whether the new experience is already live in your tenant, and if you are still on the checkbox in SharePoint admin center → Settings → SharePoint → New SharePoint experience, decide whether to enable it deliberately rather than waiting for the automatic push. Publish a short "what moved where" guide and clarify which AI features depend on a Copilot license.

SharePoint One-Time Passcode Retirement Slips to October

The transition away from SharePoint One-Time Passcode (SPO OTP) authentication toward Microsoft Entra B2B (MC1243549) remains one of the most consequential external-sharing changes on the calendar — but the timeline has moved. As of the July 17 update, Phase 2, the actual retirement of SPO OTP, was rescheduled to begin October 1 and complete by October 31 for production environments, rather than the July window originally signaled. New external sharing invitations have already been flowing through Entra B2B since May 2026.

The mechanics of the change are what admins need to internalize before October. Once OTP is gone, external users without an Entra B2B guest account can be denied access on previously shared "specific people" links. Restoring access requires either creating a guest account in Entra B2B or having an internal user re-share the file, folder, or site at least once. In exchange, external collaboration aligns with Microsoft identity standards, giving you consistent guest lifecycle management, governance, and Conditional Access coverage that OTP never supported.

The schedule slip is a gift, not a reprieve — it buys roughly two more months to prepare rather than removing the deadline. Organizations that share heavily with outside parties should treat the extra time as runway for auditing existing guest access.

What to do: Inventory your external "specific people" shares now and identify recipients who lack Entra B2B guest accounts, since those are the links most likely to break in October. Confirm your Conditional Access and guest-governance policies are ready to cover the newly-B2B external users, and warn frequent external collaborators that a one-time re-share or guest invitation may be needed.

Home Sites Get Simplified Admin Controls and New Web Parts

Microsoft has been rolling out a set of SharePoint home site updates (MC1304293) that reduce the friction of one of the platform's more awkward configuration tasks. The headline for administrators is a direct "Set as home site" control in the SharePoint admin center — designating a home site no longer requires dropping into PowerShell, which removes a long-standing gotcha for teams standing up an intranet landing page.

The update also ships two purpose-built web parts for home sites: a new Announcements web part for surfacing organizational messages, and a new Resources web part for highlighting key links, tools, and destinations. Rounding it out is a refreshed customization experience for the SharePoint app in Teams — the renamed Viva Connections app — letting admins tailor the desktop and mobile experience. Existing Viva Connections branding, app names, and logos are preserved, so this is additive rather than disruptive.

Taken together, these changes lower the bar for building a credible intranet home without custom development, which is exactly the kind of "shape the platform with configuration, not code" work that pays off for lean IT teams.

What to do: If designating your home site once meant a PowerShell script, revisit it in the admin center now that the control is native. Evaluate the new Announcements and Resources web parts as replacements for hand-built link lists, and review your SharePoint app in Teams customization while you are in there.

Governance Tooling Sharpens: Permissions Reporting and the Admin Agent

Alongside the visible UI work, Microsoft continues to build out the governance surface in the SharePoint admin center, and it is worth flagging as the AI-content wave accelerates. A new Permissions Report under Data Access Governance shows which sites a given user can reach — including both direct and group-based permissions — which is the sort of question that used to require scripting or a third-party tool to answer cleanly.

The forward-looking piece is the emerging SharePoint Admin Agent, an AI assistant inside the admin center aimed at analyzing permissions at scale, detecting oversharing, spotting storage-governance opportunities, and surfacing compliance posture. The through-line connecting these tools is oversharing: as Copilot in SharePoint makes it trivially easy for users to generate reports and Office files from whatever content they can see, the blast radius of over-permissioned sites grows. Permissions hygiene stops being a tidy-up task and becomes a prerequisite for safe AI adoption.

What to do: Run the Permissions Report against a handful of your most sensitive sites and any accounts with broad access, and remediate obvious oversharing before Copilot usage widens. Treat permissions cleanup as part of your AI-readiness checklist, not a separate housekeeping project.

Inline Commenting Comes to Markdown Files

A smaller but genuinely useful collaboration improvement is on the near-term roadmap: inline commenting support for Markdown files stored in OneDrive and SharePoint, currently listed as in development. The feature lets teams review, discuss, and comment on .md content directly in Microsoft 365, the same way they already can with Office documents, rather than routing Markdown reviews through a separate tool or a code repository.

This lands squarely on a real workflow gap. Markdown has quietly become the default format for technical documentation, AI prompts and skills, and lightweight internal wikis — but until now, collaborating on it inside SharePoint meant editing without a proper comment layer. Being able to leave contextual feedback on a .md file makes SharePoint a more credible home for the growing pile of Markdown-based knowledge that organizations are accumulating, including the prompt and skill libraries many teams are now building.

What to do: If your teams keep documentation or AI prompt libraries as Markdown in SharePoint, watch for this capability arriving in your tenant and plan to consolidate those review cycles into SharePoint rather than external tools. In the meantime, standardize where your Markdown assets live so the commenting feature has a clear home when it ships.

Standalone SharePoint and OneDrive Plans Wind Down

On the licensing side, Microsoft is closing out the lifecycle of the standalone SharePoint Online Plan 1 and Plan 2 and OneDrive for Business Plan 1 and Plan 2 SKUs. New customers can no longer purchase these standalone plans, and organizations still holding them should treat this as a signal to plan their transition to the bundled Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites, where SharePoint and OneDrive entitlements now live by default.

For most organizations this is a procurement and renewal question rather than an operational one — the underlying service is unchanged — but it can catch out tenants that carried a few standalone licenses for specific users or scenarios. Renewal conversations are the moment this surfaces, so it is better to map the affected seats before a renewal forces the decision on a compressed timeline.

What to do: Audit whether any users in your tenant are still assigned standalone SharePoint or OneDrive plans, and work with your licensing partner to map a path onto a bundled suite ahead of your next renewal so no one loses entitlements unexpectedly.

Sources

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