Microsoft 365 Evergreen Update | August 2026

Microsoft continues to deliver a steady stream of improvements across Microsoft 365, Teams, SharePoint, Copilot and the Power Platform.

In this Microsoft 365 evergreen update, there’s plenty to explore this month in the latest wave of updates, including some genuinely significant changes the way private channels work in Teams, a steady expansion of Copilot Notebooks, and a run of features that put Copilot to work directly inside the applications that people are using every single day.

As always, not every update will affect every organisation, and some are still rolling out over the coming weeks. But there are several features here that could reduce everyday friction, improve productivity and help users get even more value from their Microsoft investment. Here are the ones we think are worth paying attention to.

 

Teams Private Channels get a Major Update

If your organisation makes heavy use of private channels in Microsoft Teams, this is one of the most important changes to be aware of this month.

Private channels are moving to a shared channel mailbox model, and with that shift, some substantial increases to their limits. Teams are no longer capped at 30 private channels and can now include private channels up to the overall limit of 1000 channels per team. Private channels can also grow to 5000 members, up from the previous limit of 250, and for the first time you’ll be able to schedule meetings directly within a private channel.

There is an important action for administrators here, though. Compliance for private channels, such as retention, legal hold, data loss prevention and eDiscovery, will now be governed at the Microsoft 365 group level rather than on individual user mailboxes. If you have compliance policies in place for private channels, these should be reviewed and applied to the team’s group before migration begins, to ensure continuity. It’s well worth getting ahead of this before the transition reaches your tenant.

 

A Cleaner, Simpler Teams Meeting Experience

As Teams has added more and more capability over the years, the meeting controls and sharing panel have become increasingly crowded, leading to mis-clicks between high-impact actions like Share, Leave and Raise Hand, and the occasional accidental share of the wrong content.

Drawing on customer feedback and telemetry, Microsoft is introducing a redesigned in-meeting experience. Core actions such as microphone, camera and share are grouped together and centre-aligned, while the Leave button is separated out to reduce accidental exits. Less-used controls move into a tidier More menu, and users can personalise their toolbar by pinning and rearranging the controls they most use. Just like your Team toolbar on the main screen.

The sharing experience is being refreshed too, with live previews of screens and windows, a cleaner tabbed layout, and a two-step confirmation designed to prevent accidental shares. It’s a small change on paper, but one that should make meetings feel noticeably less cluttered and give people more confidence when presenting.

 

Smarter Meetings with AI Notes and Archives

Microsoft continues to weave AI more deeply into the meeting experience, with two updates that stand out this month.

The first brings AI-powered meeting notes, via the Facilitator agent, to Teams Rooms on Android. This means teams gathered in a physical room can capture real-time notes, decisions and action items without needing a hybrid or scheduled meeting. Notes appear on the front-of-room display during the meeting and can be reviewed and edited afterwards through the meeting recap, with content stored securely in your own tenant.

The second is the introduction of AI meeting archive files. Where AI is enabled and a participant holds a Copilot license, Teams will generate an archive that captures key insights from a meeting, helping Copilot and Facilitator deliver more accurate, context-aware answers later on. Importantly, these archives are stored in a tenant-owned SharePoint location, contain only AI-generated summaries rather than raw transcript content, and are only accessible to people who attended the meeting, so the productivity gains don’t come at the expense of privacy.

 

Copilot Notebooks Keep Expanding

Copilot Notebooks continue to be one of the fastest-evolving parts of the Copilot experience, with several enhancements that make them more useful and more widely available.

Perhaps the most notable is that Copilot Notebooks are now available in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat for Basic users, giving even unlicensed users a persistent, AI-powered workspace to organise their content. Alongside this, Notebooks now support TXT and RTF files as reference sources, so transcripts, meeting exports and developer notes can all be brought into the mix.

Notebooks are also becoming more proactive. A new suggested artefacts capability will recommend relevant Word documents, Excel workbooks and PowerPoint presentations based on the content already in your notebook, reducing the need to write the same context into prompts over and over. And Notebooks are now surfaced directly within the Microsoft 365 Copilot app, staying in sync with OneNote so you can pick up your work in either place.

 

Copilot Does More Inside Your Everyday Apps

A recurring theme this month is Copilot moving beyond chat and doing real, in-context work inside the apps people already use.

In Outlook, a new side-by-side drafting experience lets users refine, expand and rewrite email content with Copilot right within the compose window. In Excel, Copilot can now analyse columns of unstructured text, such as survey responses or customer feedback, and automatically generate categories and tags, taking a lot of the manual effort out of making sense of messy data.

There’s a clear focus on brand consistency, too. A new Brand Kit skill in Excel, along with native access to brand assets and templates in PowerPoint, allows Copilot to apply your organisation’s approved colours, fonts and logos automatically, helping people produce polished, on-brand content without the manual formatting. PowerPoint for the web also gains one-click Review Presentation and Visualise Slide skills on the ribbon, plus the ability to bring your own custom Copilot skills stored in OneDrive.

 

Planner Becomes More Powerful

Microsoft Planner picked up a strong set of updates this month, aimed squarely at reducing repetitive setup and context switching.

Custom templates now allow users to turn an existing plan into a reusable template that can be shared across a Microsoft 365 group, complete with tasks, buckets, labels, goals and checklists. For any organisation that runs the same type of project repeatedly, this is a simple but effective way to standardise work and get new plans up and running faster.

Everyday task management is getting smoother as well. A new task details side pane lets users view and edit a task without leaving their Board, Grid or My Tasks view, and Planner Agent chat is coming to basic plans, allowing users to ask questions about their plans, understand priorities and take action using natural language. Planner capabilities are also arriving in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat, so tasks and plans can be created and updated conversationally without switching apps.

 

Smarter, More Accessible Power Platform Automation

Power Platform makers have plenty to explore this month, with a clear push towards making automation both more capable and more resilient.

Power Automate desktop flows can now use canvas apps built in Power Apps as their interface, giving makers a modern, customisable way to collect user input rather than relying on fragile UI automation. A new UI automation repair agent uses AI to detect when an application’s interface or selectors have changed and suggest fixes, cutting down on the manual troubleshooting that so often comes with desktop automation. Desktop flows also gain a visual flow chart view, making branching and dependencies far easier to follow, along with the ability to automate PowerPoint presentations as part of end-to-end workflows.

In Copilot Studio, autonomous agents can now be shared with end users and triggered to run on their behalf in the background, and a new agent node lets makers call a published agent as a single step within a workflow. Together, these updates continue Microsoft’s drive to make automation more approachable for business users while giving experienced makers more powerful building blocks.

 

Handy Updates for Mobile Users

Finally, a few updates worth flagging for people working on the go.

The Microsoft 365 Copilot mobile app gains a new Record option, letting users capture in-person conversations or voice notes and receive an AI-generated transcript and summary in Copilot Chat afterwards. Outlook Mobile now lets users set and edit their work location directly from the calendar, making hybrid work patterns easier to communicate to colleagues. And OneDrive mobile adds support for creating, viewing and editing Markdown files, bringing it in line with the web experience.

 

Looking Ahead

What stands out across this latest set of updates is the same theme we keep coming back to: Microsoft reducing everyday friction and making organisational knowledge easier to access and act on. Whether it’s larger and more flexible private channels, a less cluttered meeting experience, Copilot doing more inside Outlook and Excel, or more resilient automation in the Power Platform, the common thread is productivity.

Many of these updates require little or no administrative effort to enable, so users can begin benefiting from them as they roll out across Microsoft 365. The private channel compliance changes are the notable exception, and one worth planning for ahead of time.

As always, if you’d like help understanding how these updates could impact your organisation, or if you’re looking to maximise adoption across Microsoft 365, Copilot or the Power Platform, the team at Changing Social is here to help.