Welcome to the latest edition of our Employee Experience newsletter! This month, we're excited to bring you all the latest news, updates, tips, and roadmaps for everything related to the digital workplace in Microsoft 365 and SharePoint. Dive in to discover new features, best practices, and innovative tools designed to enhance your productivity and collaboration.
We're also highlighting many new features rolling out in SharePoint that can provide significant value to your organization and the employee experience. From updates to the SharePoint header and footer to Viva Glint enhancements, Teams updates, and all new Page-Level Analytics, these upgrades are designed to make your day easier and more efficient. Scroll on for quick demos, rollout dates, and pro-tips to get these features working for you before they’re old news.
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SharePoint’s new modern page templates let you craft visually striking, mobile-friendly communications. By giving communicators ready-made, responsive layouts tailored to storytelling, you reclaim bandwidth, deploy updates faster, and spark greater engagement across your teams. These new templates offer repeatable, on-brand layouts that are mobile-ready and easy to update. For time-strapped communicators, that’s game-changing.
Here’s what’s in it for you:
This shift also supports enterprise-wide governance. Templates act like a guardrail, guiding communicators to align with brand standards while enabling creativity and autonomy. This isn’t just about prettier pages. It’s about giving Communications teams the tools they need to move faster, collaborate more effectively, and deliver high-impact content, without technical blockers.
The Modern SharePoint Page Templates has the Roadmap ID 490565. This feature will start rolling out to production in June and then be generally available to commercial customers worldwide early July 2025.
M365 Community Days NYC lands at Microsoft Times Square on July 25, 2025, a full-day dive into Microsoft 365, AI, Copilot, Viva, Teams, Azure, and modern workplace best practices led by industry experts. It’s a prime opportunity for communicators to network with peers, unpack hands‑on feature demos, and discover how to amplify employee experience through emerging M365 tools.
This community event is a must-attend for anyone looking to improve their knowledge and skills in Microsoft 365. The conference is designed to provide attendees with a wealth of information on the latest Microsoft 365 features and technologies. Industry experts deliver informative sessions, and you'll have the opportunity to network with other IT professionals to gain insights on best practices.
Join our session on Transforming Employee Engagement with AI-Driven Intranets. In this session, our very own Kanwal Khipple and Richard Plantt will cover strategies for leveraging Microsoft Viva, Copilot, automated content curation, and intelligent search capabilities for your intranet. You will discover how Copilot can revolutionize your intranet by creating highly personalized and engaging experiences.
Learn to anticipate employee needs, deliver relevant content effortlessly, and significantly enhance overall employee interaction and satisfaction with your intranet.
Microsoft Viva Glint and Viva Pulse are evolving into a powerful feedback loop, enabling organizations to continuously listen, learn, and act on employee sentiment in real time.
By uniting Glint’s engagement analytics with Pulse’s agile surveys, Employee Experience leaders can close the loop faster, from insight to action—accelerating trust, culture, and performance transformation at scale. Are your feedback tools helping you shape change—or just reporting on it?
As AI reshapes the future of work, Microsoft’s People Science team spotlights how six core “People Success” factors: purpose, growth, clarity, empowerment, connection, wellbeing, still anchor engagement in a world driven by tools like Copilot.
By analyzing insights from 6.8 million survey responses, they argue that AI must serve to amplify human-centered workplace experiences, not replace them. The People Science Team urges leaders to treat people-first change management as their north star. It's not just about adapting to AI, but designing EX systems that unlock human potential because of it. Are your people systems built for yesterday’s org chart—or tomorrow’s workforce?
Microsoft Viva Engage now equips communicators and network admins with AI‑powered “theme moderation.” By using LLM‑driven detection to surface and even auto‑mute conversations around key themes in real time.
This goes beyond keyword filters, enabling you to proactively guide dialogue, maintain workplace culture, and scale trust in employee communications, without lifting a finger.
M‑Files now natively stores content within Microsoft 365 via SharePoint Embedded, blending industry-grade metadata management with full Microsoft 365 co‑authoring, security, compliance, and Copilot support.
This first-of-its-kind integration lets you unlock AI-ready, agentic document workflows, no more choosing between deep domain tooling and Microsoft’s ecosystem benefit.
SharePoint is rolling out a new "Processing status" pane in July 2025. This new pane will replace the old column view with a sleek, real-time panel that shows progress, success, or failure for autofill and document translation jobs.
By surfacing detailed AI-driven metrics, like language codes, glossary usage, extraction counts, and error logs, this update empowers you to monitor and troubleshoot at scale, reduce support load, and boost confidence in automated document workflows.
SharePoint now brings native eSignatures into Microsoft Word, letting you insert signature fields, send requests, and auto-generate signed PDFs, all without leaving the Word interface. This keeps sensitive content inside the Microsoft 365 trust boundary, streamlines approvals with reusable templates and audit trails, and is rolling out now via Beta and Current Channels on track for global release in 2025.
The June 2025 update for Microsoft Teams brings targeted improvements that directly impact employee experience, from meeting productivity to mobile-first flexibility. Users can now assign seats in Together Mode, track engagement with in-meeting reactions summaries, and access Teams Phone call history across devices.
Frontline workers gain even more power with mobile enhancements like pinned chats and @mentions in task notes—designed to reduce friction in fast-paced environments. These aren't just features—they're signals that Microsoft is aligning product evolution with how and where modern work happens.
Microsoft Teams now supercharges Town Halls and Webinars to support up to 50,000 attendees (with Teams Premium) and offer full-feature parity with Live Events, including robust screen control, presenter staging, CVI device support, attendee previews, dial-in options, Q&A, and deep reporting.
These enhancements empower internal communicators to orchestrate large-scale, polished hybrid events that feel inclusive, secure, and insightful. Letting your team foster connection, measure impact, and manage with precision at any scale.
Microsoft just rolled out the Teams Client Health dashboard, a live heat map of crashes, launch failures, and update gaps, visible right in the Teams Admin Center. You no longer wait for help‑desk tickets; the dashboard spotlights only user‑impacting issues and pairs them with guided fixes, so you can act before work grinds to a halt. Version‑compliance audits now take seconds, freeing you to invest that time in higher‑value experience wins for your people. How will you use the bandwidth you reclaim when troubleshooting stops stealing the spotlight?
Curious about what’s coming to Microsoft 365 this summer? Look no further as Vlad Catrinescu has done the heavy lifting, reviewing over 1,000 slides from the Microsoft 365 Community Conference. He has compiled a comprehensive PDF of roadmap updates across SharePoint, OneDrive, Copilot, Loop, Viva, Teams, and more. Whether you're planning, building, or just exploring, this roundup is a must-see.
SharePoint is updating site headers and footers with a modern visual refresh, adding new preset layouts and enhanced customization to align intranets more closely with brand identity and improve user experience.
Rolling out globally in June 2025 (Roadmap ID 489225), this update empowers communicators to strengthen navigation, reinforce visual cohesion, and create more engaging, intuitive employee touchpoints.
SharePoint is getting Advanced Page Analytics, rolling out globally in May 2025 (Roadmap ID 488502), a powerful upgrade that adds long-term metrics, distribution‑channel filtering, engagement reactions, and export capabilities.
These insights equip communicators to track content performance over time, optimize where news resonates most, and pivot strategy based on actual employee behavior, not assumptions .
SharePoint News posts will now display an estimated reading time, visible in the banner helping employees better manage their attention and time priorities (Roadmap ID 491024).
The feature is rolling out early to mid-June 2025 for Targeted Release and late June 2025 for global general availability across web and the Viva Connections Teams app. It’s enabled by default, but authors can toggle it on or off per post via the banner web part settings, no admin setup required. This subtle yet strategic change helps your people scan content more intuitively and frees them to choose when to dive in deeply.
This 40‑idea e‑book is poised to spark practical innovation across your digital workplace, grounded in real-world experience. Each idea is designed to make the most of Microsoft 365, boosting collaboration, automating workflows, and fueling data‑driven decisions.
It’s built for leaders who want to move from “we need better EX” to “we have a plan and proof points.” From smarter onboarding to data-driven engagement strategies, each idea is rooted in real-world success.
Ready to move beyond theory? This e‑book gives you tangible tactics, not just commentary. Which of these 40 sparks a “what if we tried this...” moment for your team?
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