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Backup, Connections, and AI in SharePoint Feature
With the normal razzmatazz associated with SharePoint announcements, Microsoft marked SharePoint’s 25th anniversary with a bunch of announcements on Monday, March 2, 2026 (I discuss the anniversaries for Exchange (30th) and SharePoint (25th) here). If you prefer to read a version of the announcement in full marketing mode, you can read Jeff Teper’s note.
Like a lot of Microsoft announcements in the recent past, the text is liberally sprinkled with references to artificial intelligence, agents, and Microsoft 365 Copilot. Adam Harmetz mentions AI 34 times and Copilot 11 times in his description of the announcements. Given that less than 3.5% of the Microsoft 365 paid seats have licensed Microsoft 365 Copilot, I guess Microsoft must be hoping that more customers will be persuaded to use AI soon.
With that thought in mind, here are my highlights of the announcements, only one of which needs a Microsoft 365 Copilot license.
AI in SharePoint
Last year, Microsoft introduced the Knowledge Agent in preview. Customers with Microsoft 365 Copilot licenses will be able to use AI in SharePoint, which Microsoft says is natively integrated into the platform instead of being a separate agent. AI in SharePoint is designed to work across all of SharePoint Online instead of just sites or “AI in SharePoint lets teams plan, build, and evolve SharePoint solutions using natural language.”
Microsoft says that tenants that opted into the Knowledge Agent preview will automatically have access to the preview of AI in SharePoint. Opt-in is still available here. Microsoft has started to deploy AI in SharePoint to customer tenants and expect to have the deployment complete in the next few weeks. It seems like AI in SharePoint will use Anthrophic rather than OpenAI models, but we’ll have to see the final shape of the solution, particularly in respect of the ability of European Union and other non-US tenants to use Anthrophic. After everything is resolved, I’ll look forward to testing AI in SharePoint when it shows up in my tenant,
The Connections App Will Soon Be the SharePoint App
Microsoft is renaming the Viva Connections app in Microsoft Teams to be the SharePoint app, The change seems to be reasonable because the Teams app is simply a way of displaying home sites. Figure 1 shows the default home site for my tenant (configured through the Microsoft 365 admin center – soon to be configurable through the SharePoint admin center).
Microsoft says that customers who haven’t customized the Teams app will see the renamed app show up automatically. The change is covered by Microsoft 365 roadmap item 557983.
Departmental Billing for Microsoft 365 Backup
Microsoft 365 Backup has been available for a couple of years. Microsoft’s unique selling point for its backup solutions is that the data stays within their datacenter environment and removes the need to transfer data over internet links to external datacenters. When the time comes to restore data, the advantage of co-location is even more pronounced.
Until now, Microsoft 365 Backup has operated on a tenant-wide basis. In other words, configuration is done for sites selected from across the tenant and the costs of the backup are paid for through a single Azure subscription. The big change is that Microsoft is introducing department-level billing for Microsoft 365 backup. According to Microsoft, this update is generally available. However, it hasn’t yet turned up in my tenant – it takes time to distribute new software across an infrastructure the size of Microsoft 365.
Administrators can configure policies to cover different sites based on whatever organizational delimitations make sense, such as a department, operating company, or country. The point is that payment to backup a selected set of sites belonging to a part of the overall tenant is configured through pay-as-you-go in the Microsoft 365 admin center rather than an Azure subscription. The responsible body provides a credit card to fund the pay-as-you-go charges.
Billions and Billions of Files
Some of the statistics offered by Microsoft seemed off. Microsoft 365 has “over 450 million paid seats,” so it’s hard to know how SharePoint can serve more than 1 billion users each year. Maybe these are Gmail or other external accounts that Microsoft 365 users share files with. Microsoft also said that “over 2 billion files (are) uploaded every day” to SharePoint Online. I’ve heard that number (and some variations including higher values) over the past few years. The one billion users don’t seem to be very productive, but I do my best to meet my daily file upload quota.
So much change, all the time. It’s a challenge to stay abreast of all the updates Microsoft makes across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Subscribe to the Office 365 for IT Pros eBook to receive insights updated monthly into what happens within Microsoft 365, why it happens, and what new features and capabilities mean for your tenant.