Photo credit: Copilot
July 2026 is a dense Copilot, Purview, SharePoint, and Planner month, with strong movement toward agentic automation, mobile data protection, and cross‑M365 consistency. I also viewed the Message Center. This adds Teams meeting production controls, Planner Agent chat availability, and Copilot Pages enhancements.
Table of Contents
- TLDR
- Copilot & AI Experiences
- SharePoint & OneDrive
- Microsoft Purview (Security, Compliance, DLP)
- Outlook
- Microsoft Teams
- Planner
- Microsoft Viva
- Microsoft Edge
- Enabled by Default (Behavior‑Changing Features)
- Follow
TLDR
- Copilot continues expanding Sales Agent, Workforce Insights, rich answer cards, and multimodal capture.
- Purview delivers major DLP upgrades, auto‑labeling scale increases, network-layer protection, and Intune MAM integration.
- SharePoint pushes deeper into Copilot plugins, personal skills, workflow creation, and Engage distribution.
- Outlook and Teams ship quality-of-life improvements across categorization, templates, drag‑and‑drop scheduling, and light theme support.
- Planner gains AI status reports and Cowork integration.
Copilot & AI Experiences
Sales Agent Enhancements
- Enrich meeting prep with more data sources — Sales Agent now pulls service tickets into meeting prep for richer context. “With access to richer data, like service tickets… you can spot open issues and opportunities before the conversation starts.”
- Add custom insights to record summaries — Bring non‑CRM insights into unified account summaries.
- Engage prospects faster with enriched leads — Sales Agent reviews all inbound leads across internal + external sources and synthesizes insights.
- Link meetings to CRM records automatically — AI auto‑connects meetings to the correct CRM records.
Copilot Studio
- Share Autonomous Agents (Run‑Only) — Makers can now share agents with end users securely.
- Express mode for agent-invoked flows — Faster, more reliable flow execution.
- SharePoint lists as knowledge sources — Ground agents in structured SharePoint list data.
- Invoke agents as workflow steps — Agent node adds reasoning directly into workflows.
- Safe sharing enforcement — Detect unsafe identity oversharing before publishing.
Copilot in OneNote
- Multimodal capture (Android) — Combine audio, images, and typed notes into a structured Copilot Page. “Copilot then creates a structured Copilot Page with insights and user‑captured content…”
Copilot in Edge
- Ask Copilot about an image — Right‑click any image in Edge and send it to Copilot for analysis.
Copilot Answer Cards
- New Rich Answer Cards across weather, sports, finance, images, video, places, news.
Workforce Insights Agent
- New agent for leaders to explore org structure, skills, flexible work patterns.
Message Center Updates
- MC1302906 — Copilot schedule prompts in Agent Builder
- MC1330886 — Suggested edits in Copilot Pages
SharePoint & OneDrive
Copilot in SharePoint
- Enterprise store plugins — Use tenant‑wide or personal plugins directly in Copilot in SharePoint. “A plugin can bundle skills, MCP servers, and other capabilities…”
- Personal Skills — Create personal Copilot skills stored in OneDrive and usable across SharePoint + OneDrive.
- Workflow creation with Copilot — Describe intent and Copilot builds triggers, conditions, actions.
SharePoint + Viva
- Cross‑post SharePoint News to Engage — Unified rendering + shared conversation thread across Engage surfaces.
- Campaigns in SharePoint (Amplify) — Create lighter-weight campaigns directly inside SharePoint sites.
- Viva Connections multi‑home site management moves to SPAC — Consolidated admin experience.
Microsoft Purview (Security, Compliance, DLP)
Insider Risk Management
- DS Triage Agent summaries in Defender — IRM alert summaries appear directly in Defender queues. “IRM alerts surfaced in Microsoft Defender will now include the agent summary…”
Data Loss Prevention
- Intune MAM DLP policies — Clipboard actions in managed mobile apps evaluated against DLP policies.
- Auto‑labeling scale increase — From 100k → 500k files/day for SharePoint/OneDrive.
- SLA‑based alert reporting dashboard — MTTA/MTTD/MTTR trends + custom SLAs.
- Rule‑based tagging & auto‑resolution — Auto‑resolve predictable alerts; tag alerts for routing.
- User‑based aggregation of alerts — Consolidate related alerts into a single object.
- Data security for non‑Microsoft apps — Extend DLP + auto‑labeling to Google Workspace, Box, Dropbox, Salesforce, AWS, Webex.
- Network-layer DLP via Entra Internet Access — Inspect text + AI interactions at the network layer.
Information Protection
- Sensitivity labels for Entra security groups — Same labels used for M365 groups now apply to cloud security groups.
Data Lifecycle Management
- Graph API access to Archive mailboxes — Unified Archive view as EWS Graph APIs deprecate.
Outlook
iOS + Mac
- Save Contacts improvements — System‑wide caller ID without full address book access.
- Copilot Chat pop‑out — Float Copilot Chat over Outlook window.
- Drag & Drop rescheduling — Move events by dragging in day/multi‑day views.
Web
- Drag emails onto Favorite Categories — Faster categorization.
- Reply with a Template in Rules — Auto‑reply using templates based on rule conditions.
Microsoft Teams
Quality-of-life improvements
- PowerPoint Live Light theme — Present in light, dark, classic, high contrast.
- Events attendance/engagement report policy — Separate policy from CsTeamsMeetingPolicy.
- Prevent auto‑DND during screen sharing (GCC High/DoD) — Stay reachable while presenting.
- External phone call routing (GCC High/DoD) — Route external calls to voicemail or unanswered settings.
Message Center Updates
- MC1443520 — Specify who controls production tools in meetings/webinars
- MC1443518 — Expanded presenter visibility
- MC1443517 — External presenters can manage event production controls
- MC1443511 — Manage auto attendant shared voicemails in Queues app
- MC1440980 — Update Teams mobile app to maintain Calendar functionality
- MC1429018 — AI meeting archive file generation
Planner
Local Custom Fields
Add text, number, date, yes/no, choice fields; sort, filter, group, bulk edit.
AI Status Reports
Planner Agent generates stakeholder‑ready status reports from plan data.
Planner in Cowork
View, create, update plans; execute tasks across M365; write progress back to Planner.
Microsoft Viva
Copilot Dashboard
- Targeted Audience Surveys — Launch Pulse surveys to licensed/active users; privacy‑preserving sentiment.
Engage
- Custom Branding — Tenant‑wide logos, theme colors via Brand Center.
Message Center Updates
- MC1413302 — Discussion post previews in Viva Engage
- MC1431365 — Copilot Analytics dashboard
Microsoft Edge
Google Account Import
Import passwords, bookmarks, history, autofill anytime from Settings.
This is one of the strongest months yet for Copilot maturity and Purview breadth, especially for organizations preparing for large‑scale AI adoption.
Enabled by Default (Behavior‑Changing Features)
The July updates contains no explicitly default‑on or auto‑enabled features. All items are listed as In development with future preview/GA dates.
Source: Microsoft 365 Roadmap
Retirement Radar (created by AI)
The August Roadmap dataset contains zero retirements or deprecations. Every item is additive, new features, enhancements, or UX improvements. (Confirmed by scanning all entries; none include retirement keywords.) Up until this point, everything has come from Microsoft’s public roadmap. This specific section is the exception. This table below is created by when I prompted for: Microsoft apps being depreciated searching the web. Do your own research on these items prior to announcing any change. I have been burned by acting too hastily before!
| App / Service | Type of Retirement | Retirement / End Date | Source | MC Number |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Whiteboard (Standalone) | Standalone app retired; replaced by Loop whiteboarding | 2026 | Microsoft announcement | None |
| Office 2021 Apps (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, Publisher, Project, Visio, OneNote) | End of support (perpetual license retirement) | Oct 13, 2026 | Microsoft Lifecycle | None |
| Publisher 2021 | Permanent retirement (no successor) | Oct 13, 2026 | Microsoft Lifecycle | None |
| InfoPath 2013 | End of support | Jul 14, 2026 | Microsoft Lifecycle | None |
| SharePoint Designer 2013 | End of support | Jul 14, 2026 | Microsoft Lifecycle | None |
| Dynamics 365 Guides | Mixed reality app retired | Dec 2026 | Microsoft Dynamics announcement | None |
| Dynamics 365 Remote Assist | Mixed reality app retired | Dec 2026 | Microsoft Dynamics announcement | None |
| Windows 11 SE | OS discontinued | Oct 2026 | Microsoft Education announcement | None |
| Entra ID Sign‑In Risk Policies | Legacy policies retired | Oct 1, 2026 | Microsoft Entra docs | None |
| SQL Server 2016 | End of support | Jul 14, 2026 | Microsoft Lifecycle | None |
| SharePoint Server 2016 | End of support | Jul 14, 2026 | Microsoft Lifecycle | None |
| SharePoint Server 2019 | End of support | Jul 14, 2026 | Microsoft Lifecycle | None |
| Project Server 2016 | End of support | Jul 14, 2026 | Microsoft Lifecycle | None |
| Project Server 2019 | End of support | Jul 14, 2026 | Microsoft Lifecycle | None |
| Dynamics NAV 2016 | End of support | 2026 | Microsoft Lifecycle | None |
| Dynamics GP 2016 | End of support | 2026 | Microsoft Lifecycle | None |
| Dynamics CRM 2016 | End of support | 2026 | Microsoft Lifecycle | None |
| Windows Server 2022 | End of mainstream support | Oct 13, 2026 | Microsoft Lifecycle | None |
| Windows 11 24H2 (Home/Pro) | End of servicing | Oct 13, 2026 | Windows release health | None |
| Windows 11 23H2 (Enterprise/Education) | End of support | Nov 10, 2026 | Windows release health | None |
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