What’s new from Microsoft Ignite 2025 that caught our attention?

Every year, Microsoft hosts their Ignite conference where technology professionals, partners and customers gather to learn about the company’s latest innovations, product updates and strategic announcements. Microsoft tends to keep new features and capabilities hidden behind a curtain of secrecy in their early stages. At Ignite, we get the chance to hear about new, innovative products directly from the teams who build them.

While there are plenty of excellent round-up articles online from MVPs and Microsoft partner companies, we wanted to share the highlights we feel are especially relevant to intranet owners, internal communicators and anyone focused on the broader domain of content and collaboration within SharePoint.

Here’s what caught our attention this year:

Microsoft’s #1 focus: Copilot, Agents and AI

It should come as no surprise that Microsoft’s primary focus from Ignite was on all things Copilot and AI. It was hard to find a session from the catalogue that didn’t have a relevant touchpoint to the overarching theme of 2025.

Knowledge Agent

While it was exciting to watch Microsoft introduce many new Copilot capabilities into SharePoint in 2025, arguably one of the most interesting updates at Ignite was the introduction of the Knowledge Agent.

SharePoint has long since been the industry leader for enterprise grade collaboration and knowledge sharing. For the past 25 years, we’ve seen organizations leverage SharePoint for all sorts of content and knowledge management challenges. Some companies invest carefully to create an intentionally usable experience for their employees. Others have been comfortable with SharePoint running wild and being used as a just-in-time collaboration tool with little thought to planning, design and content governance.

Regardless, 2025 will be remembered as the year Microsoft realized that SharePoint can no longer be a dumpster fire of content sprawl. The notion of garbage-in, garbage-amplified was shared across multiple sessions and became an underlying theme linked to the success of Agents and AI within the enterprise.

The introduction of the Knowledge Agent is notable addition for a few reasons. It helps clean up the mess of legacy content and rot. The Knowledge Agent will help improve your site by retiring inactive pages, finding content gaps or fixing broken links. What’s more, the Knowledge Agent can suggest metadata for your document libraries and auto-classify content, which has the potential to be a massive time saver.

Why is Microsoft finally trying to help organizations clean up their content? If your content is inaccurate or disorganized, any Copilot Studio Agents you build will have a difficult time finding accurate information. If you want to enable intelligent Agent workflows to answer questions or to complete tasks based on structured content, your underlying content house needs to be in-order!

What’s also interesting about the Knowledge Agent is the fact that its assumed control over a very prominent area of the SharePoint User interface. Microsoft is leveraging this space to float a small icon, referred to as a “contextual Agent menu” or FAB (Floating Agent Button), that opens up a variety of tasks or interactions depending on your role and the site. These skills will likely evolve over time and may be an entry point for more Agents.

From a licensing perspective, the Knowledge Agent will be bundled into the regular Copilot licensing and won’t require any additional SKU.

Agent 365

Another interesting announcement is the introduction of Agent 365, which is now available for early access by companies enrolled in the Frontier preview program. Agent 365 was built to help organizations manage a sprawling list of agents that could benefit from additional governance and centralized controls.

This AI management tool provides a control plane from which you can centrally manage agents from different platforms, including those outside the Microsoft ecosystem.

Each agent is given its own Microsoft Entra Agent ID, which can be used for identity, lifecycle and access management. It ties into the Microsoft 365 Admin centre, providing admins with visibility across the entire suite of agents.

We’re excited about the features this provides – it's time to transition from manually tracking agents in random documents and lists to using Agent 365, a more robust tool.

Work IQ

We all know that personalization features help people use tools in ways that best fit their needs. That’s why we’re excited about Work IQ, a new intelligence layer for Microsoft 365 Copilot that promises to personalize the experience based on work patterns, relationships and organizational context.

This goes beyond features that must be set up and configured by users, such as adding instructions to Copilot “Memory.” Instead, it simply enhances the experience – no action or set up by users required!

Work IQ promises to look at/through your work data – such as emails, files, chats and meetings – to generate insights about how your work gets done. It then incorporates work patterns, relationships and preferences into a concept they call memory. Work IQ uses inference to then combine the data and memory together to help make useful connections through the AI or to predict the next best action. We like to think of this as an evolution of the Microsoft Graph, or a model for creating meaning from all of your work signals and interactions that helps to create better AI experiences.

Your end users won’t likely realize Work IQ is helping behind the scenes, but this appears to be a key differentiation that Microsoft is making, which explains why they have an advantage with Copilot over external third-party Agent connectors.

What’s new with Viva Engage?

Target communications to custom audiences

You can now target and notify custom audiences for Viva Engage posts. Instead of the traditional broadcast messages within a community, Microsoft is rolling out a new feature that allows you to be precise and select the target audience by:

• Role
• Reports to
• Country
• Department
• Job title

This helps ensure employees only see content that is relevant to them. Note this is still in Public Preview state and requires additional Viva Communications & Communities licensing (aka Viva C&C licensing or Viva Suite).

Multi-language posts

Soon you’ll be able to create language variations to important posts to ensure you’re reaching global audiences. Think of this as one post, multiple languages, where both content and images can be translated in advance and offered to the end users.

Agents in communities

Available now in Public Preview, you can see various AI capabilities coming to life within Viva Engage. You can ask Copilot to help you find content written by someone or help you catch-up on what’s new within a community. Community Admins can use Copilot to help generate answers to open questions and review, edit and publish those answers to everyone.

Events in Engage

Coming soon in 2026, you’ll be able to host three different types of events in Engage. Broadcast events are the big ones, typically for Company-wide events capable of supporting > 10,000 people at a time. Meeting events are meant to be smaller but still have the possibility of supporting 1000 real time participants. And finally, Discussion/Q&A events like Ask Me Anything or YamJams where there isn’t video added, but you want a platform for hosting live conversations and Q&A.

Communities in Microsoft Teams

Finally, the last interesting update from all the Viva Engage announcements was the fact that Communities will now be integrated into Microsoft Teams in the Chat app. That means, when you are chatting with colleagues or reviewing a Microsoft Teams conversation, you’ll also have access to the Community discussions that you are a part of. It is hard to tell if this will help consolidate all the conversations into a logical interface or make the whole what-tool-when debate slightly more complex to nail down!