Community Means Showing Up

Reflections from Microsoft 365 Community Conference 2026

Last week, Orlando hosted the Microsoft 365 Community Conference, three days at Loews Sapphire Falls and Loews Royal Pacific that drew roughly 3,000 admins, builders, MVPs, and Microsoft product makers. The focus was agentic, fast-moving, and trying hard to make sure the people doing the work don’t get left behind.

This year also marked 25 years of SharePoint, which got its own documentary short film premiere and a panel at the Microsoft booth. A platform that started as a 2001 and I got my start as a technical trainer. Go MCTs! What felt like an experiment in web parts and document libraries is now the backbone for agents that can generate pages, organize content, and run workflows. The product has changed. The community hasn’t, it grew with it.

I want to talk about two kinds of skills that came out of this conference. One is literal. One is the kind nobody announces.

What Microsoft Announced

The headline announcement on day one was AI Skills in SharePoint going to public preview. Microsoft is splitting how AI in SharePoint operates into three layers, and the framing is worth getting right.

The first is What to Know, which is site-level context. You tell SharePoint something like “our team color is purple” or “avoid jargon,” and it remembers, applies it across the site, and shares that context with anyone working there. The second is How to Act, which are skills proper. These are multi-step, repeatable processes a team can save once and reuse forever. Think a finance team’s quarterly report, a sales team’s proposal flow, a project standard. The third is What to Produce. This is the most exciting as content generation that ends in a real Word, PowerPoint, or Excel deliverable, or in structured outputs like reports and dashboards. Save the generation step itself as a skill, and you get the same output.

Two things make this interesting beyond the announcement itself.

First, context and skills are stored as Markdown files in a new Agent Assets library on the site. SharePoint and OneDrive now natively view and edit Markdown in the browser. The “we always do it this way” stuff that usually lives in one person’s head becomes governable and reviewable like any other document.

Second, separating what AI needs to know from how it should act from what it needs to produce. This is the same separation showing up across the agent ecosystem. Microsoft is making that pattern available to the people who actually configure SharePoint sites, not just to the developers building. The next wave of “who runs SharePoint well” is going to be the people who can write good context and good skills, the same way the last wave was the people who could write good metadata and information architecture.

If you’re a SharePoint owner or a Copilot champion in your org, this is worth opting into now. It requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license, and the opt-in is at aka.ms/SPAIoptin.

A handful of other announcements happened. SharePoint page agents can now generate a page from a document or a Teams conversation, and AI-assisted curation can find broken links, surface content gaps from search logs, and flag low-activity pages for retirement. These are in no doubt a quiet solution for the unsung intranet admins of the world. Agent 365, first previewed at Ignite 2025, is heading toward general availability as the control plane for managing AI agents at scale. And Copilot Cowork, which Microsoft has positioned as powered by Anthropic’s Claude, takes outcome-level prompts and acts on them. New surface area worth watching.

Community

Here’s what I keep coming back to after every M365 Community Conference: the thing on the badge says conference, but the thing that actually compounds is community.

That word gets used loosely, so let me be specific about what I think it means and where I think we’re getting it wrong.

With this being an event where I was supporting the Microsoft booth as a MVP, it means that I was immersed in the community. To me, this is different as I was that someone replying to a stranger’s question at 9 PM with a working answer because they remember being stuck on the same thing before.

Community is one of those items where you need to give before you can take. Volunteering takes time, speaking takes time, supporting takes time and most important, showing up takes time. As my organization, RSM, was one of the sponsors this is one of those areas that can make me feel uncomfortable. Am I only there because my company is there? Are others going to see me as a another salesperson? The community knows who treats it as a lead-gen event. People notice the ones who only show up when they’re hiring or selling. They also notice and remember the people who support conversations, provide solutions and build relationships.

Below is proof of that, working in the Microsoft booth, is supporting the Community.

We are all getting old.

A lot of the loudest voices in M365 community spaces have been there for ten or fifteen years. We’re great at what we do. We’re also not getting younger, and we are not always doing a good job of pulling new people into contributor roles instead of audience roles. If you’ve been at this a while, the highest-leverage community work you can do this year is probably co-presenting with someone newer, citing their work, or making space for them on a panel that would otherwise default to the usual suspects. That’s how community renews itself.

Pictured below are a few other RSM team members, including the ones I am pulling along.

What to do with all of this

If you were at M365 Community Conference, you already know the drill. Don’t let the energy decay. The conference insight is about two weeks if you don’t write it down, share it with your team, and pick one thing to actually try. Additionally, don’t be afraid to take a risk, try something new and show up.

Either way, the question I hold onto is not what did Microsoft announce? It’s what skill, in either sense of the word, am I going to build next? Pick one piece of context to teach SharePoint about your team (Skill). Pick one community space to actually contribute in this quarter rather than just lurk.

Twenty-five years in, SharePoint is still here because the community around it kept showing up. That’s the part Microsoft can’t ship.

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Original Post https://patpetersen.com/2026/04/28/microsoft-365-community-conference/