The Evergreen Update | September 2025

While the days may be growing shorter and our Changing Social jumpers are making their way out of storage, Microsoft is still turning up the heat with a wide range of impactful Microsoft 365 updates across Teams, Copilot, Power Automate and more. Whether you’re collaborating in hybrid meetings, searching for that elusive email, or looking to automate your tasks, there’s something for everyone in this month’s update.  

Microsoft Teams 

Hide your inactive channels

Teams will soon suggest inactive channels, letting you review and hide them with a click. If you prefer to do your own housekeeping, you can also opt out of these suggestions entirely. 

Before this Microsoft 365 update, we were burdened with the task of manually reviewing all our Teams channels and managing their visibility. Now, this is something Microsoft are going to take care of for us. Through this update, you will now be prompted to review the visibility of channels that have not been used recently. You will have the option to opt out of this setting for those who prefer to manage their own channels of how streamlined you could be with this new update.  

Protect sensitive content with Teams Premium

For those handling sensitive meetings, Teams Premium now allows organisers to block screenshots and recordings across most devices. This means confidential discussions stay protected, even the quickest screen-snapper won’t get through. 

This Teams Premium feature is designed to support you when sharing confidential materials through screen sharing and recordings. When this feature is switched on it will restrict screen captures for those joining the call on an unsupported platform, they will only be provided audio access. Below is a breakdown of what this experience might look like on each platform:  

Windows desktop: Screenshots show a black rectangle around the meeting window, including pop-outs. 

Mac desktop: Captured content disappears, effectively hiding the meeting window and pop-outs. 

Android (phones and tablets): Screenshots and recordings are blocked. Users see a message indicating screen capture is restricted. Applies to key views such as stage, chat, participant list, notes, banners, Copilot panels, and more. 

iOS (phones and iPads): Screenshots and recordings are allowed, but live video (such as participant feeds) will not be captured. Profile pictures or static content will appear instead. Additional protections for more screens are planned for a future release. 

 

Private Channels: A big update for everyone to be aware of 

Let’s talk about the next wave of Teams updates and specifically, what’s changing for private channels. If you’re in IT or compliance, or even  work with private channels in your day-to-day this is going to be an exciting change coming at the beginning of next year. Private channels are moving away from individual user mailboxes and will soon use a dedicated channel mailbox instead. This is a key update for organisations with compliance policies in place (think retention, legal hold, data loss prevention, or eDiscovery).  

Private channels are about to become much more powerful: 

• There will no longer be a 30 private channels per team limit, you can now have up to 1,000 total channels per team, private or standard. 

• Member limits also make a giant leap: private channels can now support up to 5,000 members, shattering the previous cap of 250. 

• Scheduling meetings in private channels? Absolutely. That’s now supported too. 

We’ve always had questions around the way we work in private channels as there were many limitations. What we can extrapolate from this update is that this will allow us to integrate our tools a lot more with those private channels, giving you more flexibility in how you work.  

 

Here’s what our technical friends need to know:

Once migration is complete, compliance policies for private channels will be handled at the team group level. For any legal holds you already have, make sure they’re applied to both user mailboxes and the new group mailbox, so you don’t miss a thing. And for eDiscovery, you’ll need to include both to get a full picture of all messages, before and after migration. 

Purview Data Loss Prevention (DLP) also gets an update: after the shift, DLP policies will cover private channel messages as part of the team’s group, not just the user mailbox. Before migration, admins should tweak the “Teams chat and channel messages” policy to include the relevant team group as well as user mailboxes. After migration, only the group needs to be included. 

Retention Policies are evolving, too. After the change, you won’t be able to create new private channel-specific retention policies in Purview. Instead, you’ll manage everything at the team group level, which is a much simpler approach. Existing policies will still preserve messages in user mailboxes, but you won’t be able to edit them (removal is still possible). Before migrating, it’s important to apply current retention policies to the team group so new messages are included. If the team group’s retention policy doesn’t match the private channel’s current policy, you’ll need to create a new one to keep things consistent. 

In short, this overhaul means less policy sprawl, more flexibility, and a much easier-to-manage Teams environments. So, get those policies reviewed, inform your admins, and get ready for a smoother, more scalable Teams experience. 

 

 

Copilot Gets Even Cleverer 

Copilot is getting a range of updates so here’s your quick fire round taking you through new buttons, settings and features that are landing.  

1. Chat history is now consolidated in a single, streamlined list, which means no more hunting between contexts. You can see your recent conversations at a glance wherever you access Copilot. 
2. A new “Open in Word” button allows you to send a Copilot response straight into Word for further editing and collaboration. There’s less copying and pasting and more doing. 
3. Source controls for the Researcher Agent are landing, you will be able to specify the sources you want the Researcher agent to use when prompting. 
4. Typing ‘/’ in Copilot Chat will now let you pull in files or emails directly, making your prompts richer and Copilot’s responses even more relevant. 
5. Even users without a Copilot license can now generate and edit images, posters, banners, and infographics using AI-powered tools in the Create module, democratising visual creativity at work. 

 

 

Power Platform: More Automation, Less Effort 

Microsoft are introducing a new way to automate tasks in Microsoft Teams using emoji reactions. With the Workflows app, you will be able to trigger workflows by reacting to messages with emojis in chats or channels. This feature helps streamline collaboration, reduce manual follow-ups, and accelerate response times. For example, reacting with an ❗can escalate a support issue, while 👀 can route a message to the appropriate team. 

This will be available through either the Power Automate templates or as a trigger within custom workflows from November 2025.  

 

Time to retire?  

For the first time we have decided to include a note on some of the tools that are leaving the M365 platform. That’s because they are going to impact how you work with M365, (hopefully not too much!).  

The first update of note is that OneNote for Windows 10 will be reaching the end of support on October 14th 2025. After this date, the app will enter read-only mode. You will still be able to view your notes, but editing, creating, or syncing content will no longer be supported.  

You will still have access to OneNote for M365 so it’s always worth double checking which version you are working in.  

The next update to watch for is the removal of the toggle for calendar in Teams. The legacy calendar experience will be deprecated, and the toggle to switch between old and new calendars will be removed. Once this update is deployed, anyone accessing the Calendar app in Microsoft Teams will see the new calendar experience by default. The toggle to switch between the old and new calendar will be removed, and only the new Microsoft 365 calendar will be available.  

This is your opportunity to embrace change and try out some of those new calendar view features if you haven’t made the switch.  

 

Last Thoughts 

This has been another whirlwind month for updates with lots of bite sized changes and exciting new functions. We are most excited to start using emojis to create workflows and so ready to start using channel calendars in our private Teams, we hope you are too…

If you have any questions about these new Microsoft 365 updates, please feel free to reach out to us and chat with one of our Evergreen experts.