New SharePoint Experience in Microsoft 365: Smarter, Faster, AI-Ready

Summary Starting March 3, 2026, Microsoft is introducing a completely reimagined SharePoint experience in Microsoft 365, designed to make collaboration smarter, faster, and more intuitive. The new experience features a redesigned app bar categorized into three core jobs – Discover, Publish, and Build along with AI-powered tools and a neutral theme.

SharePoint has always been at the center of collaboration in Microsoft 365 – powering intranets, document management, communication sites, business solutions, and more. Over the years, Microsoft has continuously refined SharePoint with features like Knowledge Agent and SharePoint Premium, making it more intuitive, scalable, and secure.

Now, Microsoft is introducing a major refresh: The New SharePoint Experience. 🚀

In this blog, we’ll explore what the new SharePoint experience brings to the table and how it reshapes the way users work and collaborate.

The reimagined SharePoint experience is visually refreshed and reorganized for clarity and simplicity. It features a redesigned app bar, AI-powered tools, and a neutral theme. Access to the AI-assisted features requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. This experience is currently in Preview.

Microsoft will roll out the new SharePoint experience in phases:

• Public Preview: March 3 2026 → Mid-March 2026
• Targeted Release: Late April 2026 → Early May 2026
• General Availability (Worldwide, GCC, GCC High, DoD): Early May 2026 → Late May 2026

To try the new SharePoint experience, it needs to be manually enabled by a SharePoint or Global Administrator in the SharePoint admin center. To enable the new SharePoint experience,

1. Go to the SharePoint admin center.
2. Navigate to Settings → SharePoint → New SharePoint Experience.
3. Tick the checkbox for “Enable the new SharePoint experience.”
4. Click Save.

Once enabled, this experience will be available by default to all users in your organization. Users will notice a “New SharePoint” toggle at the bottom of the app bar when they open SharePoint. During the preview period, they can switch back to the previous app bar anytime by turning off the New SharePoint toggle.

The new SharePoint experience introduces the following improvements:

• Redesigned app bar
• Neutral theme experience
• AI-assisted capabilities

In the old app bar experience, navigation was presented in a more unified layout without clearly separated, task-focused categories. The new experience introduces a modern, centralized app bar with 5 navigation sections – Home, Discover, Publish, Build, and OneDrive.

The icons displayed depend on whether global navigation has been configured for your tenant:

• If global navigation is configured, the first icon represents your Home site.
• If global navigation is not configured, the first icon will be Discover.

Each icon leads to a dedicated experience:

🌐 Home

The redesigned app bar includes a Home tab, which displays global navigation with the appropriate logo and name when enabled.

From here, users can access company-wide resources, news, and important updates.

🔎 Discover

Discover replaces the traditional SharePoint start page. In the Discover experience, users can quickly find relevant updates and content without spending time searching. It includes built-in AI capabilities to help personalized surface and relevant information:

• Overview – Displays recent updates across sites, recently visited sites, and activity from coworkers in one consolidated view.
• Sites – Shows your recent, favorite, and suggested sites for quick access.
• News – Highlights news posts published across your organization.
• People – Surfaces updates and activity from coworkers.
• Favorites – Lists files, pages, and news posts you have marked as favorites.
• Recent Items – Provides quick access to content you recently opened or edited.

📝 Publish

The Publish experience provides a single place to create, manage, and publish pages & news posts.

• Overview – Create pages and news posts using ready-made templates and view recent publishing activity and analytics in one place. The Overview page also includes Jump Back In, letting you quickly continue editing recently worked-on drafts.
• Pages– See all the pages you’ve created along with your favorite pages.
• News Posts – Access news posts you’ve published and the ones you’ve marked as favorites.
• Campaigns – Access campaign-style communications powered by Amplify. Selecting a campaign takes you into Amplify, where you can create new publications and manage ongoing campaigns.
• Analytics – View metrics like unique viewers and engagement for pages and news posts.
• Quick Actions – Quickly act on items from the Recent or item tables.

📢 In addition, SharePoint is also introducing 31 brand-new modern templates designed to make creating Pages and News posts faster and easier. The updated gallery offers improved browsing, filtering, and search capabilities, plus more entry points from Site Settings, Site Contents, onboarding prompts, and the Stream app. This update is enabled by default and rolling out from March to April 2026.

⚙️ Build

The Build experience brings creation, management, and AI-assisted actions into one place, making it easier to create and manage solutions.

From this page, you can create sites, lists, document libraries, and AI-powered agents. The Build page also shows sites, lists, document libraries, or agents that you own. It also displays items you have recently accessed or modified.

The new experience improves SharePoint’s theme in the following ways:

• Refined interface across pages, news, libraries, and lists – Core areas now have a cleaner and more consistent look. This makes it easier to move between different sections without confusion.
• Unified neutral look: SharePoint now has a consistent, neutral theme across the product for a cleaner appearance.
• Consistent UI palette: Applies a neutral color palette across all SharePoint surfaces, including SPFx placeholders.
• Cleaner layouts – Pages feel less crowded and more structured. This helps users focus better while reading or managing content.

Note: Site-level branding remains unchanged, preserving your organization’s unique identity.

With this update, the new SharePoint experience supports AI-powered tools that make content creation, page management, and collaboration faster and smarter. These capabilities provide foundational support for future AI-assisted creation scenarios in SharePoint Online such as:

• AI-assisted content creation: Generate ideas, draft pages, or improve existing content more efficiently.
• Smarter management: Use AI to help organize, edit, and optimize SharePoint pages and news posts.
• Future-ready: Lays the groundwork for advanced AI features in upcoming updates.

Closing Thoughts

The New SharePoint Experience marks a significant step forward in making SharePoint more intuitive, organized, and user-friendly. With a refreshed design, smarter navigation, AI-assisted capabilities, it helps users work more efficiently and stay connected to what matters most.

It’s not just a refresh; it’s a smarter, task-focused SharePoint experience made for you.