In this month's newsletter I'm sharing a comprehensive overview of the upcoming integration between Microsoft Teams and Viva Engage Communities.
This month, we’re covering some big announcements across the Microsoft ecosystem, including:
- The new SharePoint experience: A major evolution of the platform, featuring AI-powered capabilities, a refreshed visual design, and new governance tools.
- Revised opt‑out date for the new Outlook for Windows: Microsoft has pushed the opt‑out phase from April 2026 to March 2027, giving organisations more time to prepare their transition plans.
- Teams Live Events retirement: Teams Live Events will retire on 30 June 2026, with organisations encouraged to move to Teams town halls and the new unified events experience.
- Changes to Teams Events licensing: Advanced event capabilities will soon be available for all Teams Enterprise users, enabling richer, larger-scale events without a Teams Premium add‑on.
If you want to ensure your organisation stays ahead of change in Microsoft 365, not caught up in it, our PACE service can help. Reach out for more information.
The new SharePoint experience
Microsoft used SharePoint’s 25th birthday on the 2nd March to announce a number of significant updates to the platform. The announcement detailed three major steps forward for SharePoint:
- AI in SharePoint - the Knowledge Agent gets a new name and refreshed capabilities
- Visual refresh - improved navigation with a new app bar, and the introduction of a new framework designed around the core user activities:·
Discover: what’s new for you, and finding relevant content
Publish: unifying core SharePoint and premium Viva Amplify publishing capabilities, with the ability to share across Microsoft 365 - SharePoint, email, Teams, and Viva Engage
Build: the home for makers - Sites, Lists, Libraries, and Agents
Enhanced content governance: The new SharePoint Admin Agent, announced at Microsoft Ignite 2025 and fully available to admins with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, brings proactive, AI driven governance into the SharePoint admin centre. New skills added to the agent include:
- Site permission skills
- Site lifecycle management skills
- Storage management skills
Our senior Product Manager for Fresh at Advania UK, @JHorst took a deep dive into the new experience, you can read the full article here: The new SharePoint Experience - what's in it for internal communicators.
Timelines and release settings
The new SharePoint Experience public preview is available now. Once an organisation opts into the new experience, all users will see the new experience automatically, including the new app bar with Discover, Publish, Build and new page styling.
All users will see a toggle on the new app bar to turn off the new experience, is option to revert will be for a limited period only.
The new experience ignores any previous organisational configuration to hide the app bar.
When the public preview ends, Targeted Release rollout will begin, followed by General Availability (GA). Starting with Targeted Release, the new SharePoint experience will automatically apply to all tenants and users. Any tenant-level preview settings or individual user opt-outs configured during the preview period will be overridden, and no tenant or user controls will remain.
Targeted Release: Rolling out in late April 2026; expected completion by early May 2026.
General Availability (Worldwide): Rolling out in early May 2026; expected completion by late May 2026.
Read the full Microsoft announcement here:
Update: revised opt-out phase start date for new Outlook for Windows
As anticipated, Microsoft have announced the postponement of the opt-out phase for new Outlook in Enterprise from April 2026 to March 2027. This gives organisations, and vendors, such as Outlook add-in providers, an additional 12 months to prepare. Alongside this, Microsoft will continue expanding the new Outlook for Windows capabilities and addressing customer feedback.
Feature parity between Outlook (Classic) and new Outlook for Windows is still some way off. Many organisations will also welcome the additional lead time to plan their migration approach, strategy, and business communications.
You can read Microsoft’s updated feature comparison here: Feature comparison between new Outlook and classic Outlook - Microsoft Support.
Existing installations of classic Outlook through perpetual and subscription licensing will continue to be supported until at least 2029.
Retirement: Teams Live events - June 30, 2026
Microsoft is retiring Teams Live Events and the Microsoft Graph APIs used to create them on June 30, 2026. Existing events scheduled before that date will continue to function through to February 28, 2027.
Organisations are encouraged to migrate to Teams town halls, which offer an enhanced, end-to-end experience for large-scale events and to begin using the recently announced Teams unified events experience.
Read Microsoft’s blog announcing the retirement of Live events:
Guidance on how to plan for Teams town halls: Plan for Teams town halls | Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Learn.
Changes to Teams Events licensing
Advanced event capabilities will be available to all users with a Teams Enterprise license (previously required Teams Premium).
Users will be able to organise and run events with up to 3,000 concurrent attendees. With this in mind, this may be the time to consider restricting which users in your organisation are permitted to create Teams events.
Advanced capabilities include:
- Streaming chat
- Interactive reactions
- Real-time insights
- Theme and email customisation
- eCDN
- Immersive events
Microsoft have announced that new capacity pack licenses will be made available. Sizes include: 5k, 10k, 25k, 35k, 50k, 75k, and 100k attendees.
Read the full Microsoft announcement: Licensing updates extend access to advanced capabilities in Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Places | Microsoft Teams blog
Timelines
General Availability (Worldwide) - these changes will go into effect in early April 2026.
