SharePoint Online Weekly Update — July 20, 2026

SharePoint Copilot Apps Enter Public Preview

The biggest developer news this week is the arrival of SharePoint Copilot Apps in public preview, shipping alongside the SPFx 1.24 preview. The premise is a genuine shift in how SharePoint solutions get surfaced: instead of building a web part that lives on a page and waits for someone to navigate to it, you build an app that renders inside Microsoft 365 Copilot itself, so users can review, validate, decide, and complete work without leaving the Copilot conversation.

This matters because it changes the unit of delivery. A traditional SPFx web part assumes the user already knows where to go. A Copilot App assumes the user starts with an intent — "approve the pending vendor requests" — and Copilot routes that intent to your app, which renders a real interface with real actions rather than a block of generated text. Microsoft frames this as going "beyond text," and the framing is accurate: the output of a Copilot turn can now be an interactive experience backed by your business logic and data.

The preview follows SPFx 1.23.2, a deliberately narrow quality release that shipped earlier this cycle to stabilize the platform and prepare it for the new and edit panel override capability. Microsoft has signaled general availability for Copilot Apps later in 2026, which gives development teams a real window to prototype before the pattern becomes expected.

What to do: Pick one internal approval or triage workflow that already has an SPFx solution behind it and prototype it as a Copilot App during preview. The teams that understand this model before GA will be the ones setting the pattern internally rather than reacting to it.

The New SharePoint Experience Completes Its Worldwide Rollout

The new SharePoint experience announced in MC1240699 is finishing its global deployment this week, with Microsoft targeting full worldwide functionality around July 20. The rollout has been running since general availability began on June 15, so most tenants have already seen it, but the tail end lands now — and there is no opt-out.

The visible change is the redesigned SharePoint app bar, which reorganizes navigation into Discover, Publish, and Build hubs alongside the home site and OneDrive entry points. Discover becomes the personalized front door for finding relevant content, Publish consolidates pages, news, and campaign-style communications into a single authoring hub powered by Amplify, and Build gives makers one surface for creating and managing sites, lists, libraries, and AI-powered agents. Followed Sites and Saved for Later have been consolidated into a single Favorites concept.

The AI capabilities woven into these hubs require a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, which produces a split experience worth planning around: licensed and unlicensed users in the same organization see meaningfully different versions of the same navigation. That is a communications problem as much as a technical one.

What to do: Refresh any internal training materials, screenshots, or intranet help pages that show the old app bar. Users who were told where to click a year ago will be looking for controls that have moved, and stale documentation generates more helpdesk tickets than the change itself.

Copilot in SharePoint Adds File Creation, HTML Reports, and Skills Discovery

Microsoft's July roundup for Copilot in SharePoint is one of the more substantive in recent months. Copilot can now create Word documents, Excel workbooks, and PowerPoint decks directly from content stored in SharePoint, closing the loop between finding information and producing something with it. It can also generate an interactive HTML report summarizing a document library using that library's metadata — a fast way to give stakeholders visibility into what a library actually contains.

The most strategically interesting addition is Skills discovery. Anyone on a site can now type /Skills to see the skills, workflows, and shortcuts available in that context. Organizations have been investing in building custom skills for months, and the persistent problem has been that nobody knew they existed. A discovery command is a small feature that unlocks a large amount of previously stranded work.

Rounding out the release: Copilot in SharePoint now runs on the latest OpenAI reasoning model for everyone with no fallback model, citations are compact and clickable so users can jump straight to the source, and site owners get a per-site setting to disable the Copilot button for site visitors. That last item is a real governance lever for sites where broad AI access isn't appropriate.

What to do: Audit the skills your organization has already built and make sure their names and descriptions read well in a /Skills list. Discovery only helps if what surfaces is legible to someone who has never seen it before.

Retirements Land: InfoPath, SharePoint Server 2016 and 2019

July 14 was a hard deadline for several long-announced retirements. InfoPath 2013 and InfoPath Forms Services in SharePoint Online reached end of support, following the block on publishing new or updated forms that took effect May 18. Microsoft's recommended replacements are Microsoft Forms, Power Apps, and Power Automate, depending on the complexity of the form and what happens to the data afterward.

The same date brought end of support for SharePoint Server 2016 and SharePoint Server 2019. These servers keep running, but they no longer receive security updates — which converts every future vulnerability into unmitigated risk on a platform that typically holds an organization's most sensitive documents. The supported paths forward are SharePoint Server Subscription Edition or migration to SharePoint Online.

These deadlines have been on the calendar for years, so the organizations affected are generally the ones that couldn't migrate rather than didn't know. That distinction matters for how you triage: the remaining work is usually a small number of genuinely hard forms or customizations, not a broad inventory problem.

What to do: If you still have SharePoint Server 2016 or 2019 in production, treat it as a security exposure and document a compensating control — network isolation, restricted access, accelerated migration timeline — rather than letting it sit unremarked in your risk register.

File-Level Archiving and Admin Center Governance

File-level archiving began rolling out in SharePoint Online this month, letting admins move individual files to a lower-cost storage tier without archiving an entire site. Site-level archiving has been available for a while, but it was blunt: plenty of sites are actively used while containing large volumes of content nobody has touched in years. File-level granularity makes archiving a routine storage-hygiene practice rather than an end-of-life decision.

On the governance side, the SharePoint admin center continues to expand. The SharePoint Admin Agent — an AI assistant available to admins with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license — launched with roughly 15 to 20 supported actions and a stated target of around 150, letting admins analyze governance data and remediate issues from a chat interface. A new catalog management area lets admins organize sites into categories and groups, then scope reports, policies, and Copilot rollouts to that structure. Site owners now receive batched policy emails plus a single governance hub page listing everything the admin has asked them to do.

That last change is easy to overlook but addresses a real adoption failure. Governance programs stall when site owners get a steady trickle of individual notification emails and start ignoring all of them. Batching requests and giving owners one page that shows their outstanding tasks is a meaningful improvement in whether governance work actually gets done.

What to do: Review your largest sites for stale files that are good candidates for file-level archiving, and start building the site categorization structure the new catalog management area depends on — scoped policies are far easier to defend than tenant-wide ones.

Sources

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