Microsoft 365 Roadmap Weekly: Teams will add channel cards and more

Microsoft 365 app icon with Office apps arranged on the sides

Even though it's a holiday weekend in the US, there's lots to report from this past week's new entries on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap website. We have already reported that the roadmap site has shown Excel will be getting more Copilot features in June. Also, the roadmap posted up a new entry about Teams getting support for adding custom emojis and reactions, which we reported on earlier this week as part of Microsoft Build.

Teams will also add a new feature in July for the desktop and Mac versions called Channel Cards:

Channel cards will provide you quick overview of key information about what is happening within the channel, including who is in the channel and the purpose of the channel.

The new Outlook email app for Windows and the web is getting some updates for its Scheduling Assistant feature:

We are updating the scheduling assistant view to help users have better readability. Some of these changes are in alignment to customer the feedback. These changes will also improve the grid lines, availability view, adding combined availability bar and much more.

The new Outlook Windows app will also add S/MIME support in September:

New Outlook for Windows will support S/MIME (Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail extensions) signing and encryption. All new and existing S/MIME configurations will work without any explicit action from admins.

All versions of Outlook will be getting improvements to its Copilot Compose feature, including "a polished, lightweight UI" which will be released in preview form in July with a full rollout in August.

Excel is scheduled to get some more Copilot improvements in June for the desktop, the web and iOS in June. One adds an additional Copilot function:

Copilot will enable the edit box on any worksheet regardless of selection. Copilot will reason over the nearest table or data range to the customer’s selected grid area on the same worksheet.

The other new feature will allow Copilot in Excel to "reason over data ranges with a single row of headers on top, even when they’re not Excel tables."

That's it for this week's look back at the Microsoft 365 Roadmap. Join us next Sunday for a look at what will be added to the site next week.