SharePoint Online Weekly Update — August 24, 2026

Copilot in SharePoint Turns Lists and Files Into Live Interactive Dashboards

The headline item this week is the August update to Copilot in SharePoint, which can now turn a SharePoint list, an Excel file, or a CSV into a live, interactive dashboard that stays connected to the underlying data. Instead of exporting a list to a spreadsheet, building a chart, and re-doing that work every time the numbers change, a user describes the view they want and Copilot generates a dashboard that refreshes from the source each time the page is opened. The generated experience is HTML that stays wired to the list, so the data movement problem that used to make SharePoint reporting brittle largely goes away.

Alongside dashboards, the update introduces one-click page buttons: a button web part you drop onto a SharePoint page and wire to a custom Copilot prompt. Anyone who visits the page can run that prompt in a single click without knowing how to phrase it themselves. That is a meaningful shift, because it lets a page author package a good prompt once and hand a repeatable, guided AI action to every reader — a summarize-this-policy button on an HR page, a draft-a-status button on a project hub, a translate button on a global site.

The through-line is that Microsoft is moving Copilot in SharePoint from answering questions to helping people create, analyze, and act on content directly where they already work. For an organization thinking deliberately about how to shape AI, this is exactly the kind of capability worth getting ahead of: the quality of a dashboard or a page button is entirely a function of the quality of the list behind it and the prompt wired into it, and both are things you can standardize rather than leave to chance.

What to do: Pick two or three high-traffic SharePoint lists that people already treat as sources of truth, clean up their columns and values, and pilot a Copilot-generated dashboard on each — then codify a small library of vetted page-button prompts so teams reuse good prompts instead of inventing weak ones.

The SharePoint One-Time Passcode Retirement Now Has a Hard October 1 Date

The most time-sensitive item for admins is the retirement of the SharePoint One-Time Passcode (SPO OTP) external authentication method, tracked under MC1243549. The production retirement — Phase 2 — is now scheduled to begin October 1, 2026 and complete across production environments by the end of October. External sharing is moving to Microsoft Entra B2B guest accounts, which became the default path for new sharing invitations back in May 2026.

The practical risk is quiet and specific. External users who previously authenticated with a one-time passcode on older "specific people" links can start seeing an Access denied message once OTP is gone, because there is no corresponding Entra B2B guest account for the email address that received the original link. Nothing looks broken until an external partner tries to open a link that has worked for months, and the failure lands on them rather than on your help desk, so it is easy to miss until a relationship is already strained.

Restoring access is straightforward but manual: create a guest account in Entra B2B for the affected email, or have an internal user re-share at least one file, folder, or site so the B2B account gets provisioned. The better move is to get ahead of it rather than react link by link in October.

What to do: Before October 1, audit external sharing for links that still rely on SPO OTP, confirm your Entra B2B external collaboration and guest settings are configured the way you want, and proactively provision guest accounts for the external partners you actively work with so no one hits an access-denied wall mid-project.

The New SharePoint Experience Completes Its Preview Rollout

The new SharePoint experience — the reimagined interface built around a redesigned app bar with Company Home, Discover, Publish, and Build — has been moving through its rollout, with the public preview beginning in early August and completing by mid-August. Discover acts as a personalized front door that surfaces recent and favorite sites, file activity, and updates from the people you work with; Publish centers on pages and news; and Build is where users create sites, lists, libraries, and agents.

The detail worth flagging is that this is not an optional cosmetic refresh over the long run — it is the direction of the product, and the AI-powered elements of the new experience require a Microsoft 365 Copilot license to light up. Admins can turn it on today from SharePoint Admin Center → Settings → New SharePoint experience to evaluate it, but the more important task is preparing users for a navigation model that reorganizes familiar entry points around jobs to be done rather than the layout they have memorized.

Change like this is cheap to manage early and expensive to manage late. A short internal walkthrough of where Discover, Publish, and Build put the things people use every day will prevent a wave of "where did X go" tickets when the experience becomes the default for everyone.

What to do: Enable the new SharePoint experience in a pilot or test tenant, confirm which Copilot-dependent features your licensing actually unlocks, and prepare a one-page orientation for end users before the interface becomes the standard rather than the preview.

SharePoint Framework Keeps a Steady Security and Release Cadence

On the developer side, SharePoint Framework (SPFx) continues the cadence it set with the 1.22 release — the major toolchain overhaul that brought a modernized build pipeline, a TypeScript 5.8 upgrade, and a cleanup of known npm audit vulnerabilities in the Yeoman generator and scaffolded projects. Microsoft has committed to addressing audit-related issues through monthly minor releases, exemplified by 1.22.2, so that the vulnerabilities npm audit reports in SPFx projects stay near zero rather than accumulating between major versions.

Looking forward, the 1.23 preview is available for developers who want an early look at what is coming next, with general availability targeted for mid-April. For teams still maintaining classic SharePoint Add-ins, the strategic context has not changed: add-ins reached retirement in April 2026, and SPFx is the supported path for custom SharePoint extensibility going forward.

For organizations that have custom SharePoint solutions, the monthly-audit model is the useful signal here. It means keeping SPFx projects current is now a routine, low-drama maintenance task rather than a periodic scramble, and it is worth building that cadence into your own release hygiene.

What to do: If you maintain custom SPFx solutions, adopt the monthly update rhythm — rebuild against the latest 1.22.x minor release to keep npm audit clean — and start testing critical components against the 1.23 preview so the eventual GA upgrade is uneventful.

Deprecations Still on the 2026 Radar

Beyond OTP, several previously announced retirements remain relevant as the year progresses and are worth keeping on a running checklist. SharePoint Alerts have been winding down toward full retirement, with Power Automate and SharePoint Rules as the supported replacements for notifications. Featured links on the SharePoint start page and mobile app were retired for low adoption, with global navigation and Viva Connections Resources as alternatives. And a set of legacy records and information-management features — Information Management Policies, In-Place Records Management, and certain document- and site-deletion policies — are being retired in favor of Microsoft Purview Data Lifecycle Management and Records Management.

None of these is new this week, but each tends to surface as a broken workflow or a compliance gap only when someone finally trips over it. The organizations that handle retirements gracefully are the ones tracking them on a shared list with owners and dates rather than rediscovering them from an error message.

What to do: Maintain a single living inventory of SharePoint retirements with the replacement technology and a target date for each, review it monthly, and make sure any admin documentation or training that references a retiring feature by name points users to its replacement.

Sources

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