Microsoft is kicking off 2026 with a big quality‑of‑life upgrade for anyone who lives in SharePoint lists, libraries, and pages all day. In the latest SharePoint Showcase, Microsoft outlines a wave of automation updates designed to move everyday work away from manual handoffs and toward connected, AI‑ready workflows that sit right next to your content instead of off in a separate tool.
These updates span a refreshed Workflows experience, new Quick steps for lightweight automation in the grid, streamlined built‑in approvals, and Forms that feed structured content straight into lists and libraries, all landing as part of SharePoint’s 25th birthday year.
Workflows move into the flow of work
The headline change is a revamped Workflows experience that now lives directly where you work, whether you’re in a SharePoint document library, a list, or the Teams Workflows app.
Instead of feeling like a separate automation product, Workflows become a unified experience across SharePoint and Teams, so you can discover, create, and manage automations without jumping between apps or breaking your focus.
Microsoft is rolling this updated Workflows UI out to SharePoint Targeted Release customers in early February, with the same experience also lighting up in the Teams Workflows app.
What’s new in Workflows:
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A unified Workflows canvas across SharePoint and Teams, with the same creation and management experience in both places.
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Template‑driven scenarios that understand your current site, list, or library, so you can start from pre‑wired flows that already know your content context.
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The ability to build from scratch when you need more control, choosing your own triggers and actions, and then extending into Power Automate for advanced logic.
The goal is to reduce the time it takes to go from “I wish this was automated” to a working workflow, while still keeping a clear path open for power users who want to layer on more sophisticated automation using Power Automate.
Guided “Mad‑Lib” style automation
To make workflow creation less intimidating, Microsoft is introducing a more guided, almost “Mad‑Lib” style experience that walks users through common patterns rather than dropping them onto a blank canvas.
Many SharePoint automations follow repeatable shapes—routing documents for review, posting into Teams when content changes, or kicking off follow‑up tasks when list items update—and the new experience leans into those patterns with context‑aware prompts.
Instead of manually wiring up connections, the workflow builder pre‑fills sites, libraries, and lists based on where you’re working, so you spend more time describing what should happen and less time hunting for the right objects.
Why this matters in practice:
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Templates are already connected to Microsoft 365 apps, so you don’t have to be an integration expert to get started.
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Workflows stay aligned to the existing SharePoint content structure because they’re aware of your metadata and location from the start.
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Business process automation becomes accessible to a broader range of users, not just admins or Power Automate specialists.
For teams that outgrow the basics, any workflow created here can be further customized in Power Automate, but Microsoft expects many everyday scenarios to stay fully manageable inside SharePoint itself.
Quick steps: automation in the grid
Not every task needs a full workflow with triggers and branching logic, and that’s where the new Quick steps feature comes in.
Quick steps bring lightweight, reusable automation right into the grid view for lists and libraries, letting you add action buttons that run predefined logic on selected items without writing JSON or building a full flow.
These Quick steps are already available to Targeted Release users and are scheduled to reach general availability across all lists and libraries in February.
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Create custom action buttons with no code, using a guided setup instead of custom scripting.
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Leverage existing SharePoint metadata as the logic that drives actions, keeping automation tightly aligned to your current columns and content types.
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Automate common repeatable tasks, such as moving files to a predefined folder, composing emails to people stored in a person or group column, updating choice/text/metadata fields, or translating selected files into a preset language.
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Apply conditions so Quick steps only appear when certain criteria are met—for example, only for specific statuses, content types, or metadata values.
For busy teams, this means fewer clicks, less context‑switching, and a smoother way to standardize repeated actions straight from the list or library surface.
Built‑in approvals that keep work moving
Approvals remain at the heart of many business processes, and SharePoint is tightening the loop between content and review by making approvals easier to enable and track directly in lists and libraries.
Instead of requiring custom Power Automate flows for every scenario, built‑in approvals now bring governance and accountability into SharePoint with a single toggle and a new default approver model.
Key approval enhancements include:
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A one‑toggle enablement experience, so teams can turn on approvals without building a separate flow from scratch.
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Default approvers, allowing site owners to define who should approve content upfront rather than selecting them every time.
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Ordered, multi‑stage approvals that support more structured review processes, including clearly defined sequencing across multiple approvers.
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In‑context tracking of approval status and history directly within SharePoint and the Teams Approvals app, so users can see where items stand without leaving their workspace.
Approvals are available across both lists and libraries, with the new default approver capabilities currently rolling out to Targeted Release users.
Forms feed better data into automation
Automation only works well when it starts with the right data, and that’s where SharePoint’s Forms capability comes into play.
Forms in SharePoint provide a structured way to collect files and metadata directly into lists and libraries, making it easier for content owners to ensure new items arrive with the fields and properties downstream workflows expect.
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Choose which fields matter most and build simple submission forms around them.
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Gather consistent metadata at the point of submission, improving the quality of data feeding into workflows and approvals.
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Automatically route new content into existing libraries under proper governance and trigger workflows or approvals right after submission.
Microsoft notes that Forms are now available across SharePoint lists and libraries, so teams can start standardizing intake processes immediately.
Laying the foundation for Copilot and agents
Beyond immediate productivity gains, Microsoft positions this wave of automation updates as groundwork for deeper Copilot and Knowledge Agent experiences that will expand later in 2026.
By tightening the connection between content, metadata, and automation today, organizations can modernize their everyday processes in a way that’s ready to scale alongside AI‑powered experiences without having to re‑architect everything later.
Together, Workflows, Quick steps, approvals, and Forms shift work away from manual, ad‑hoc tasks and toward streamlined, customizable processes that can plug into Copilot and agent‑based scenarios as they arrive.
SharePoint turns 25 and looks ahead
This Showcase also doubles as a celebration moment: SharePoint is turning 25, and Microsoft is marking the anniversary with a dedicated SharePoint 25th Birthday event.
The event will look back at milestones that shaped SharePoint and, just as importantly, look ahead at how SharePoint will continue to evolve as a content and knowledge platform in the AI era.
Attendees can expect to:
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Explore new content AI capabilities that structure and enrich information to improve Copilot responses.
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Learn what’s changing in how teams create, manage, and collaborate on content in SharePoint as AI becomes more central.
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Understand how SharePoint continues to serve as the knowledge backbone for Copilot and agents, and what that means for organizations adopting AI at scale.
Microsoft is also teasing a SharePoint Hackathon and pointing admins, builders, and long‑time fans to registration and event‑info links via short URLs like aka.ms/SPat25, aka.ms/SPat25/blog, and aka.ms/SharePointHackathon.
Whether your organization has been building on SharePoint since the early days or is just now leaning into SharePoint Online and Copilot, this month’s SharePoint Showcase makes one thing clear: the platform’s next chapter is all about smarter automation, richer metadata, and AI‑ready processes that live right where people already do their work.
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