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In-Depth

The 2024 Microsoft Product Roadmap

Everything Microsoft partners and IT pros need to know about major Microsoft product milestones this year, including the next major Windows release, Microsoft Copilot, Windows Server 2025, Teams and more.

• ByGladys Rama
• November 13, 2024

UPDATED: Visual Studio 2022, .NET 9, Windows Server 2025, Windows 11, Copilot

Windows 11 24H2

Microsoft isfirmly in its Copilot era, and that means an inevitable AI-centric refresh is coming to Windows this year. The next version of the OS, Windows 12, allegedly codenamed "Hudson Valley," is expected in the second half of 2024 (potentiallyas early as June, though that timeframe is unconfirmed).

Windows 12's biggest differentiator will be how thoroughly it incorporates AI, building on theCopilot capabilities that were introduced as a preview in Windows 11 23H2 last fall. In fact, Microsoft indicated at the start of the year that all Windows 12 devices (and new Windows 11 devices) will have adedicated Copilot button, marking "the first significant change to the Windows PC keyboard in nearly three decades."

The Copilot button announcement also hints at Microsoft's aims for future Windows versions, starting with 12: "We will continue to build Windows to be the destination for the best AI experiences," the announcement read. "This will require an operating system that blurs the lines between local and cloud processing."

.NET 9 / .NET MAUI

Microsoft ships new .NET versions every November during its .NET Conf event, with last November's.NET 8 sporting full-stack Blazor, AI and .NET MAUI as major highlights. This November, .NET 9 will continue to advance better performance, speed, support for cloud-native development and, of course, AI capabilities.

According tothis GitHub roadmap, Microsoft's dev team is focusing on product quality across layout, control features and reliability of tooling experiences such as setup, build, deploy, hot reload, debug and diagnostics. Specific items being considered include interoperability with the Swift programming language, better integration between .NET MAUI and Blazor hybrid applications, customizable cursors and controls access via the Maui.Core layer. Specific items across the runtime, libraries and application models can be tracked on the company'sThemes of .NET roadmap.

Visual Studio 2022 Updates

Though it's coming up on three years since Microsoftreleased the latest version of its flagship IDE, Microsoft has kept mum about the next version, with no indication so far that a Visual Studio 2024 edition is in the works. Editions since VS 2013 shipped every two years, but that pattern was broken when the company skipped a year and launched VS 2022, perhaps due to the pandemic. So expect to see incremental updates to VS 2022, which broke ground as the first 64-bit version of the product.

As of this writing, Microsoft is focused on getting VS 2022version 17.9 out the door. Microsoft has described this upcoming version as a "transformation," not just an update, and as being very AI-focused.

"Imagine crafting perfect Git commit messages without a second thought, or seamlessly navigating complex code with advanced IntelliSense support for Unreal Engine projects," the company said last November when itrolled out Preview 1 of version 17.9. "We're not just enhancing features; we're rethinking the way you interact with your development environment."

Semantic Kernel (AI SDK) Updates

As 2023 came to a close, Microsoftdebuted version 1 of its Semantic Kernel SDK for AI development. The open source SDK serves as an orchestration layer for Microsoft's stack of AI models and Copilot AI assistants, providing interaction services to work with underlying machine language foundation models and AI infrastructure. While the version 1 release boasted advanced AI constructs including agents, plug-ins, planners and personas, in early 2024, Microsoft's dev team is focused on three core themes: AI connectors, memory connectors and additional agent abstractions.

SharePoint Premium

Microsoft plans to make the AI-optimized SharePoint Premium product broadly available in the first half of 2024. First announced last fall at Ignite 2023, SharePoint Premium is essentiallythe old Microsoft Syntex product repackaged. Syntex tapped AI to surface an organization's data. Its rebrand to SharePoint Premium makes explicit Syntex's ties to SharePoint, as Microsoft's Jeff Teper explained at Ignite. "SharePoint is the base content management collaboration platform for Microsoft 365; SharePoint Premium [is] value-added services on top," Teper said. Those value-added services fall into three categories:

• Content experiences using AI with organizational content.
• Content processing that applies AI to "workflows and processes in bulk to help transform and enrich that content," offering consistency, workflow automation and less drudgery.
• Governance capabilities, along with advanced content controls.

Some components of SharePoint Premium became available at the end of 2023, but the complete feature set -- which Teper indicated will eventually include "Business Documents app, Documents Hub, and the enhanced file viewer" --will become available when it publicly launches this year.

SharePoint Embedded

Currentlyin paid public preview, SharePoint Embedded (previously known as Syntex Repository Services) is expected to become generally available sometime in mid-2024. Microsoftdescribed SharePoint Embedded as "a new API-only solution which enables app developers to harness the power of the Microsoft 365 file and document storage platform for any app, and is suitable for enterprises building line of business applications and ISVs building multi-tenant applications."

SharePoint Server Subscription Edition Updates

Microsoft now mostly sells its application servers by subscription only, a plan announced during its 2020 Ignite event. At present,SharePoint Server Subscription Edition version 23H2 is the main product release. If past practice is a guide, Microsoft can be expected to release SharePoint Server Subscription Edition version 24H1 in March, followed by a version 24H2 release in September or November. These product releases, installed on customer infrastructure, aren't necessarily notable in terms of features, as Microsoft delivers new features monthly to the product via "Public Updates," which are supported for one year. A list of features for H-version releases can be found atthis Microsoft documents page.

Fluid Framework 2.0

Fluid Framework, Microsoft'sopen source document collaboration solution, is set to hit the Version 2 milestone this summer. Inbeta as of earlier this month, Fluid Framework 2.0 will feature support for Azure Fluid Relay and SharePoint Embedded. It will also include a SharedTree Distributed Data Structure (DDS) feature, which Microsoft explained is a new, intuitive programming interface.

"Like other Fluid Framework distributed data structures, SharedTree is designed to use the same patterns developers would use when working with local data structures such as an object model. The difference is that the data can be changed remotely and is kept in sync by the Fluid Framework," the company said. "SharedTree includes sophisticated merge semantics for working with arrays and supports features like atomic move operations that make working with collaborative data much simpler."

Windows Server 2025

Microsoft hasn't indicated when the next customer-premises version of Windows Server is coming, but withthe current version approaching the three-year mark, it's not a stretch to expect the next major launch sometime in the later part of 2024.

At any rate, work is already well underway on Windows Server "vNext" (which may eventually be named "Windows Server 2025" when it is officially released). The latest preview build as of this writing, 26010, wasreleased at the end of 2023, and more are on the way.

At Ignite last November,Microsoft revealed a few changes coming to the release, including an easier update process, a pay-as-you-go subscription option on top of the usual perpetual license, improvements to Azure Stack HCI, hotpatching, broad availability of SMB over QUIC and more.

Microsoft Planner

A new, improved and AI-powered version of theMicrosoft Planner product is coming in 2024, first as a component within Microsoft Teams in the spring, and then as a Web app later in the year.

According todetails shared by Microsoft last November, the new Planner will combine its existing capabilities with those of Microsoft To Do (task management) and Microsoft Project (project management). It'll also have natural-language AI capabilities via new integration with Copilot.

Microsoft Copilot Capabilities

Copilot generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology is becoming omnipresent in Microsoft products, with CEO Satya Nadella recently declaring Microsoft to be "the Copilot company." There are discrete Copilot-branded products (e.g., Security Copilot,currently in preview, and Microsoft Copilot,launched this past December) in addition to Copilot-powered capabilities within Microsoft services (e.g., Microsoft Teams and Windows).

Copilot for Microsoft 365 for organizations reached general availabilityin November for enterprise customers, but Microsoftannounced in January that it's also now commercially released to small and medium-size companies (Microsoft 365 Business Premium and Business Standard customers). Microsoft also broadened Copilot for Microsoft 365 sales to Office 365 E3 and E5 licensees and dropped a 300-seat purchase minimum requirement. Microsoft's Cloud Solution Provider partners are now selling Copilot for Microsoft 365 to commercial entities, as well.

Other Copilot products and capabilities are expected to become generally available this year. Here are some milestones to look out for:

• Microsoft Copilot for Service andMicrosoft Copilot for Sales (expected "early 2024" and "Q1 2024,"" respectively) are two new Copilot for Dynamics 365 products,first announced back in November.
• Copilot in Outlook (expected Q1 2024) will help users prepare for upcoming meetings by surfacing information from related files, invitations and e-mails. Users will also be able to set up meetings from existing e-mails, from creating an agenda to determining who should get an invitation.
• Copilot in Loop(availability TBD) will let users of the Loop collaboration application turn existing projects into templates for future ones, as well as link documents to Copilot prompts to create more contextually relevant replies.
• Copilot in Word(expected Q1 2024) will show users any revisions that other collaborators have made to a document.
• Copilot for Microsoft 365 integration with Viva (private preview expected in Q1 2024) will effectively turn Copilot into "a single interface to guide employees, managers and HR leaders with self-service insights and experiences such as understanding team health, setting new priorities with OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) or upskilling for career growth," as Microsoftexplained during last year's Ignite conference.
• Copilot in Viva Insights (preview expected Q1 2024) will give users the ability to create reports using natural language prompts.
• Copilot in Viva Engage (preview expected January 2024) will let employees and employers create AI-generated posts.
• Copilot in Viva Glint (private preview expected Q1 2024) will use AI to help employees pull insights from employee surveys.
• Copilot in Microsoft Fabric and Power BI (availability TBD) iscurrently in public preview, and designed to let users "create a well-orchestrated data estate that minimizes data fragmentation and makes it easy for business users to find continually up-to-date, accurate data."

Microsoftpreviously indicated that Copilot for Microsoft 365 for Microsoft 365 A3 and A5 faculty reached general availability, starting on Jan. 1, 2024. A 300-seat minimum requirement was similarly removed for these Academic licensees.

Sales of Copilot Pro, a new product for individual users, wereannounced in January. Copilot Pro adds some Copilot for Microsoft 365-type AI capabilities, such as data protection for queries, Web search and Office apps integrations, and a model customization capability to build "Copilot GPTs" to Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions.

The Copilot apps for iOS and Android phones reached general availability, as announced in January.

Microsoft Viva Updates

Touted as an "employee experience platform," Microsoft Viva is effectively the HR-oriented companion to Microsoft 365. Microsoft offers multiple Viva applications, or "components," which surface within the Microsoft Teams collaboration app. At Ignite last year, Microsoftspotlighted two new capabilities coming to specific Viva components this year:

• Integration between Viva Goals and Viva Engage is expected to occur in the first half of 2024. Viva Engage is Microsoft's social networking-like component that replaced the Yammer Communities app. Its integration with Viva Goals will, according to Microsoft, "bring mission, alignment and results into communities and conversation by helping customers build communities around goals, view goal progress from Viva Goals directly in Viva Engage and create divisional communities within Viva Engage designed to help leaders better communicate top-down interactions and initiatives, including delivering praise based on goal progress and achievement."
• Viva Amplify-to-Viva Engage publishing is expected to reach the private preview stage in Q1 2024. Publishing is pretty basic for Viva Amplify, which reached general availability last year. Organizations use Viva Amplify to review internal communications before they get distributed to readers, and to track the reads after messages get sent.

Microsoft Mesh

Microsoft Mesh had itsdebut in 2021 when it was called "Mesh for Microsoft Teams." It lets organizations conduct online meetings in simulated spaces using avatars. At its Ignite event last fall, Microsoft indicated that Mesh will become generally available inJanuary 2024, and it will let users create "custom immersive spaces" for their organizations, with relatively little coding.

Mesh, though, will be arriving even as Microsoft hascut back on its "mixed reality" development efforts more generally. The cutbacks were notable enough that Microsoftearly last year gave assurances about its commitments to Mesh, the Dynamics 365 Guides and Remote Assist apps, and HoloLens 2, Microsoft's mixed reality headset. Some mixed reality cutbacks continued, though. In December, Microsoft indicated that it wasremoving its Mixed Reality apps from Windows, used for gaming.

Microsoft Teams Capabilities

Microsoft Teams is a collaboration service available in Microsoft 365 productivity suite products that emerged from an earlier Skype for Business messaging and videoconferencing service. Microsoftannounced late last year that it had released "new Teams" replacement apps, which were generally available for Windows and Mac devices. The company later updated that announcement to tell subscribers that they will get moved to the new Teams in April 2024. "After March 31, 2024, any classic Teams users that haven't updated to new Teams, will be automatically updated to new Teams," the update indicated. The new Teams is very similar to the classic version, but it has speed and performance improvements, support for MSIX packaging and enhanced security for things like cross-site scripting attacks. Microsoft's new product additions all now go to the new Teams product version.

Teams remains the centerpiece of Microsoft's enterprise software portfolio, with 320 million monthly active users and counting. Microsoft releases multiple new features for Teams monthly. Here are some notable coming features, although about 90 new Teams features are slated for general availability in 2024, pera search of the Microsoft 365 Roadmap page:

• Immersive spaces (expected January 2024) works with Microsoft Mesh technology to let users create "metaverse" environments in which to hold Teams meetings.
• Enhancements to Copilot in Teams(availability TBD) will include live meeting summarization, the ability to create visualizations of meeting highlights in Microsoft Whiteboard, and the ability to create meeting notes that users can then share, edit and collaborate around. Copilot in Teams isdescribed by Microsoft as being already available. It seems to be based on Copilot for Microsoft 365, and requires having that license.
• Voice isolation (expected Q1 2024) will use AI to filter unwanted noises in a Teams meeting or call.
• Teams chat and channel improvements (expected January 2024) will include the ability forward chat messages, create profile pictures for individual group chats, integration with Loop in Teams channels and more customizability. New channel management capabilities, including the ability to archive channels, are also on the way.
• More keyboard shortcuts(expected January 2024) will let users, for example, change their availability status or reply to their last received message with a few keystrokes.
• Shared channel improvements (expected January 2024) will help facilitate meetings with people outside the user's organization.

Microsoft also promised user interface tweaks this year inthis announcement.

Dynamics 365

For several years now, Microsoft has issued twice-a-year updates to its Dynamics 365 CRM platform, the first being dubbed "Release Wave 1" and the second "Release Wave 2." For 2024, Release Wave 1 is slated to becomegenerally available on April 1 (though qualified customers will get Early Access to the new features starting Feb. 5).

At Ignite last fall, Microsoft detailed several Dynamics 365 features that were being developed, with some in the preview stage. Presumably, these features, listed below, will appear in their final (or near-final) forms as part of Release Wave 1:

• Copilot integration with Dynamics 365 Field Service to enable natural-language querying.
• Integration between Dynamics 365 Field Service,Dynamics 365 Finance andDynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to provide users with faster access to revenue and inventory data.
• Expanded Copilot capabilities in Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Customer Insights. Microsoftnoted in January that "the ability to generate content ideas, query customer data using natural language, and create customer segments and journeys using next-generation AI" would preview in Q1, with general availability in Q3, for Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
• Theexpanded preview of Copilot in Dynamics 365 Guides, which combines Microsoft's AI and mixed reality technologies to enable factory floor workers, for example, to visualize and troubleshoot mechanical problems using real-time data.

Release Wave 2 is expected to arrive in early October.

Microsoft Fabric Capabilities

Microsoft's "all-in-one analytics solution," Fabric, consists of multiple data platform tools and reachedgeneral availability in November. It's set to get a raft of new features and enhancements throughout the first half of 2024, such as integration with Copilot (which iscurrently in preview). In January,Microsoft explained that the Copilot in Fabric preview "includes Copilot for Power BI, Data Factory and Data Science & Data Engineering," which were made broadly available. During Ignite 2023, Microsoft CEOSatya Nadella indicated that multiple Copilots for Fabric would arrive "by the end of March 2024."

The below Fabric components are all currently in public preview, with improvements slated for each:

Synapse Data Engineering

• Public preview of Spark autotune (expected Q1 2024)
• Dynamic lineage of data engineering items (expected Q1 2024)
• Public preview of Lakehouse data security (expected Q2 2024)
• Schema support for Lakehouse (expected Q2 2024)
• High concurrency in pipelines (expected Q2 2024)
• Policy management (expected Q2 2024)
• General availability of Environments (expected Q2 2024)
• Public preview of Notebooks in an app (expected Q2 2024)

Synapse Data Warehouse

• Public preview of Fabric mirroring (expected Q1 2024)

Synapse Data Science

• AutoML hyperparameter tuning with FLAML (expected Q1 2024)
• General availability of Semantic Link (expected Q2 2024)
• ML Model endpoints (expected Q2 2024)
• CI/CD support for data science items (expected Q2 2024)
• Integration with monitoring hub (expected Q2 2024)

Data Factory

• Data Factory Git integration for data pipelines (expected Q1 2024)
• Enhancements to output destinations in Dataflow Gen2 (expected Q1 2024)
• Incremental refresh support in Dataflow Gen2 (expected Q1 2024)
• Fast copy support in Dataflow Gen2 (expected Q1 2024)
• Data source identity management (expected Q1 2024)
• Get data experience improvements (expected Q1 2024)
• On-premises data gateway support added to data pipelines (expected Q1 2024)
• Enabling customers to parameterize their connections (expected Q1 2024)
• Data Factory Git integration for dataflows (expected Q2 2024)

Microsoft also is planning an integration with Microsoft Purview, its data governance solution, at some point.

Outlook Updates

Microsoft released what it called the "new Outlook for Windows 11"last September for individuals, as well as enterprise users getting Microsoft 365 enterprise channel releases. This release was deemed an "enterprise ready" release, by which Microsoft meant that it was a preview with the word, "preview," removed. The new Outlook shares a codebase with the existing Outlook on the Web app. Microsoft's development team explained that the new Outlook was built, in part, to simplify the product's codebase across platforms. However, as a consequence, some classic Outlook capabilities won't be available. In particular, COM add-in support is getting removed. The new Outlook instead will use Web add-ins.

Starting in early 2024, the new appwill begin shipping as the default e-mail solution on new Windows 11 devices running version 23H2 or higher, replacing the Mail and Calendar apps.

Microsoft's planned updates for the refreshed Outlook app willhappen throughout the year. Some notable coming enhancements include:

• Conditional formatting (expected January 2024).
• The ability to record and insert Stream videos directly from the new Outlook (expected January 2024).
• Integration with Teams search-based message extensions (expected January 2024).
• Offline support (expected January 2024).
• The ability to watch embedded Stream videos from within an Outlook e-mail (expected February 2024).
• Access to Teams meeting chats from within Outlook (expected February 2024).
• A cleaner interface to manage folders (expected March 2024).
• A "follow" RSVP option for meeting invitations (expected June 2024).
• The ability to open the To Do app from within Outlook (expected July 2024).

The new Outlook has generated some controversy. Its development team hadsuggested in September of last year that it would take about two years for it to have the feature equivalence of the classic Outlook, although Microsoft ended up releasing it to organizations in that same month. On top of possibly having thinned features, the new Outlook apparently will compromise user privacy for ad money. Geneva-based Proton, which makes privacy-focused software,noted this year that the new Outlook will send user data to 772 external parties, and would permit Microsoft to read e-mails.

Microsoft 365 Backup

The newMicrosoft 365 Backup solution has been available asa paid preview since December. It's expected to start rolling out in the first half of 2024, per aMicrosoft blog from Ignite. At launch, the service will let users back up data from their SharePoint, OneDrive and Exchange environments. The ability to back up "other Microsoft 365 sources, such as Teams chat," will follow the general availability release, according to Microsoft.

Microsoft 365 Archive

Microsoft 365 Archive is designed to provide "cold" storage for SharePoint sites and it is currently released at the paid preview stage. Future general availability hasn't been indicated as yet. Microsoft 365 Archive, like its kindred product, Microsoft 365 Backup, is based on Microsoft Syntex (which was renamed"SharePoint Premium"). Microsoft described speed, metadata and storage cost savings benefits for Microsoft 365 Archive inthis document, but it listed some limitations with the preview, as well.

Kurt Mackie and David Ramel contributed to this report.