SharePoint Online Weekly Update — July 27, 2026

Copilot in SharePoint Ships Its Biggest Release Yet

Microsoft's July 2026 update to Copilot in SharePoint is one of the largest the feature has seen since launch. The headline change is scope: Copilot can now build an interactive HTML report from content stored across your sites, and it can generate a Word document, Excel workbook, or PowerPoint deck directly from the files and lists you already have — without leaving SharePoint. Users drive all of this with natural-language prompts, from creating documents and reports to managing files, kicking off approvals, and authoring reusable AI skills.

Just as important as the new capabilities is the rollout model. Copilot in SharePoint is now enabled by default for every user who holds a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. What began as the Knowledge Agent preview in late 2025, then briefly AI in SharePoint, has settled into a mainstream, opt-out experience — which means many of your licensed users will simply find it live rather than waiting to turn it on.

For a consulting-minded organization, the practical value here is less about the buttons and more about the content underneath them. Copilot's document generation and reporting are only as good as the metadata, structure, and permissions in your libraries, so this release rewards teams that have already done the housekeeping.

What to do: Confirm which users hold Copilot licenses and expect the experience to be on for them now. Review your admin-center controls if you need to stage the rollout, and publish short governance guidance clarifying what Copilot can read and generate before people start producing reports and Office files from live content.

SharePoint Copilot Apps Enter Public Preview

The most forward-looking news this week is the start of the SharePoint Copilot Apps public preview, shipping alongside SPFx 1.24. SharePoint Copilot Apps let developers build rich, interactive UX components that render directly on the Copilot canvas — so users can see information, make a decision, and act without being redirected to another application. Microsoft frames it as "going beyond text" in Microsoft 365 Copilot, and it reuses the SharePoint Framework skills, tooling, and investments your teams already have.

This is the clearest signal yet of where the platform is heading. In the accompanying roadmap, Microsoft describes SPFx's shift from "modern SharePoint extensibility" toward "AI-connected Microsoft 365 extensibility." General availability of SharePoint Copilot Apps is targeted for later in 2026, with the 1.24 GA milestone (September 2026) also bringing the SPFx CLI to general availability and new navigation customizers. The "working name" caveat still applies — the feature name may change before GA.

What to do: If you have developers or partners building on SPFx, get them into the public preview now and gather early feedback while the developer experience is still being shaped. For everyone else, treat this as the direction of travel: solutions that used to redirect users out of Copilot will increasingly be expected to act inside it.

SPFx 1.23.2 Lands as a Quality Release — With React 18 Still Pending

Underneath the Copilot Apps announcement, Microsoft shipped SPFx 1.23.2, a deliberately focused quality release. It addresses reported issues to keep enterprise-scale solutions stable, cleans up npm audit vulnerabilities in build pipelines, and lays groundwork for new and edit panel override support in lists and libraries — with the server-side piece arriving this month.

The version most teams are still waiting on is React 18 support for out-of-the-box web parts. Microsoft says the broad enablement depends on finishing the update to its own first-party web parts, and expects that support to arrive around the 1.24 general availability milestone in September. Until then, React 18 applies to custom web parts only.

What to do: Have your developers update to SPFx 1.23.2 to clear dependency and security warnings and stay ready for the panel-override and Copilot Apps capabilities. Hold off on assuming tenant-wide React 18 support until 1.24 GA.

InfoPath Forms Services Has Now Retired

The long-signaled deadline has arrived: InfoPath Forms Services in SharePoint Online reached full retirement on July 14, 2026. Publishing new or updated InfoPath forms was already blocked earlier in the year, and existing forms are no longer usable in SharePoint Online after the retirement date. The InfoPath 2013 client reached end of support on the same timeline.

If any InfoPath forms are still lingering in your environment, they will now be broken rather than degraded, so this shifts from a migration project to an incident-response one. Microsoft's recommended replacements remain Power Apps, Power Automate, and Microsoft Forms, depending on whether you need rich forms, workflow, or lightweight data collection.

What to do: Run the Microsoft 365 Assessment Tool to find any sites that still referenced InfoPath, and prioritize rebuilding business-critical forms in Power Apps or Microsoft Forms. Communicate to affected teams that these forms no longer function so they don't rely on stale processes.

Classic SharePoint Alerts Are Retiring

Alongside InfoPath, classic SharePoint Alerts are reaching the end of their life in July 2026. The ability to create new alerts was already blocked for new tenants in July 2025 and for existing tenants in January 2026, and existing alerts now stop functioning entirely. Alerts have been a quiet workhorse for years — the "email me when this document changes" feature buried in list and library settings — so their disappearance tends to surface as confused users rather than a formal project.

Microsoft points to modern replacements that are more capable and centrally governable: Power Automate notifications, SharePoint rules, activity views, and Teams-based notifications. These provide richer conditions and better auditability than the old alerts ever did.

What to do: Inventory where teams depend on classic alerts for change notifications and rebuild the important ones as Power Automate flows or SharePoint rules. Flag this proactively — users who lose a silent notification often don't realize why they stopped hearing about changes.

File-Level Archiving Flips to On by Default

Microsoft 365 Archive file-level archiving is reaching general availability, with worldwide rollout that began in late June and is expected to complete by late July 2026. The feature lets users with Edit permissions move individual files or entire folders in a document library into low-cost cold storage while they remain visible in place — retaining metadata, permissions, and compliance coverage — instead of archiving an entire site.

The change admins should note is the default. For existing Microsoft 365 Archive customers, file-level archiving is enabled by default starting in July 2026, moving the behavior from opt-in to opt-out. All archive and reactivation actions are written to the Microsoft 365 audit log, so the activity is trackable, but the shift means end users may begin archiving content without an administrator explicitly turning the capability on.

What to do: Decide whether file-level archiving should stay enabled for your tenant and adjust the setting before users start relying on it. Review the reactivation cost model so nobody is surprised by charges when archived files are pulled back, and confirm your audit-log monitoring captures archive activity.

Sources

Back to all news