Microsoft 365 Roadmap Weekly: Prepare for meetings in Outlook with Copilot and more

Microsoft 365 app icon with Office apps arranged on the sides

It's time once again to check back with the Microsoft 365 Roadmap website as we look at the new entries that have been added over the past seven days.

One interesting new listing concerns the new Outlook for Windows app, as well as Outlook on the web. The Roadmap site says that starting sometime in July, they will get a Copilot-powered feature that is supposed to help people prepare for upcoming meetings:

Copilot can identify and summarize the key points so you can show up prepared in just a few minutes. When you have an upcoming meeting, Copilot proactively shows you a "Prepare" button in your inbox which helps you quickly get context for the meeting providing a summary of the meeting and showing and summarizing relevant files leveraging the power of the Microsoft Graph.

Another feature for Outlook on the web that's coming will be adding Microsoft's To Do to its app launcher. It will replace the current tasks module. However, this change won't happen until sometime in September.

For Microsoft Teams, the company is planning to roll out a new feature in May for all of Team's platforms that will add new functions for group chats:

Users can now access applications in group chats with individuals outside their organization, fostering improved collaboration, interactivity, and productivity. The group chat’s host involving external participants can install, remove, or update applications for use by all members.

Another feature for Teams on the PC, Mac, and Web that's coming later in April will add support for slash commands:

Users will be able to type slash in Teams compose box and select a command, helping them complete their task quickly.

Also later in April, the Microsoft Forms app on the web will let users send forms to others with some of the fields in those forms already filled in. Microsoft says this will "simplify respondent experience and improve data accuracy."

That's our look at the Microsoft 365 Roadmap this week. Come back in seven more days to see what the company has added to the site in the upcoming week.