SharePoint: Top 5️⃣ new, useful features of 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣5️⃣
An opinion piece: "What they are" and "Why I like 'em" (with hints of "why I think they'll be useful to you").
They say sharing is caring, and in 2025, SharePoint cared a lot—to give us useful, innovative features. This list focuses on new tech that arrived in 2025 AND fits the category of most useful; with a slight bias from your author here about the ones I actually use most (or oft recommend) in my day-to-day personal use and consultative guidance.
So, grab your favorite beverage and let me scroll-walk you down through my top five SharePoint features of 2025—the ones that made me think “that helps!” And in the pace of change, choosing five was tough. So, the article rounds out at the end with honorable mentions, a few related tech winners from OneDrive and Teams, and yes, a moment of silence for products and services we lost this past year. #RIP
If you don’t Share (your top five list), what’s the Point?!? Grab a seat—we’re countin’ ‘em down. 🪩
#5️⃣ | Preview mode for SharePoint pages and news
What it is | It’s time to remove the guess work. Preview mode lets creators get a better sense about how their page or news post will appear to their readers across devices—and even in the Outlook inbox. It gives you time to tweak how things look and flow, on a desktop, mobile screen, or formatted in email.
Why I like it | This one is a no brainer, imo. Preview Mode not only shows you the look, it also highlights the guardrails. You see how SharePoint will adapt across devices and email. SharePoint knows itself well. And it’s nice to see it helping us predict the outcome before hitting send.
#4️⃣ | Editorial Card web part
What it is | The Editorial card web part helps your content stand out and resonate. You can highlight a new campaign, whitepaper, a group of people — with flare. You have lots of layout choices, levels of text, imagery, and actionable buttons/text. And it’s a big part of making your comms, your SharePoint pages and news, beautiful. 🤌
Why I like it | This is pure editor’s choice. Most often, you are both writer and editor of your comms. And the Editorial Card web part makes you look good. It’s simple information presentation — in a visual way that feels professional, without needing a master’s degree in UX design.
#3️⃣ | SharePoint Quick Steps
What it is | Doing something manual once is okay. Manual it twice without automation? Well, that’s like leaving metadata on the table. SharePoint Quick Steps put a little quick in your steps for repetitive tasks; get multi-step actions done in a single, custom click. From list or library items, do things like start an email, send a Teams chat, set a value — keeping the context of the content within the value of the flow. Yep, Quick Steps are backed by Power Automate, so they are real flows flowing for you.
Why I like it | It helps speed things up, with accuracy, without missing a step or mis-tapping a keystroke. Once programmed, it just does what it does, in One. Quick. Step. And they use the already-common sentence-builder experience, like in Lists and SharePoint rules.
#2️⃣ | Approval workflows for lists and libraries
What it is | A toggle that adds the ability to have a functioning approval/reject workflow tied to a list item or file. They are built-in and easy to use and connect to the broader Teams Approvals app - The hub for approvals across apps and services. Select your content, set your approvers, and let SharePoint handle the rest.
Why I like it | It started with Lists and expanded to document libraries, with good user experience consistency. It removes the barrier to entry, making a review and approval process an easy-to-implement review and approval process. And it keeps everyone in the approval loop with status updates along the way.
To get started: Click on the Automate drop down > Configure Approvals > Toggle Enable Approvals (on any list of library).
#1️⃣ | Flexible sections
What it is | It’s a new section type when building out your pages. And it blends well with structuring or un-structuring the content of your SharePoint pages and news. We are no longer stuck to three columns across. Rather, this section type gives you a canvas (technically 12 columns) with greater flexibility to move things around, resize them (yes, resize SharePoint web parts), and overlap things to your designer-hearts content.
Why I like it | They take a second to get used to, and no, I wouldn’t recommend using them as your only and forever-more section layout type. There are still good-structure reasons and room to use one-three column types. And it’s always nice for your readers to break it up a bit; let variance be one of your communication strengths. Flexible sections give you choice, among choices we have and have seen expand — as SharePoint becomes a core communicator’s tool.
And now a few quick-hit lists for the year’s runners-up, two related techs, and a few tears for those 2025 RIPs.
5️⃣ Runners-Up
SharePoint: FAQ web part
SharePoint agents; incl. Knowledge Agent (thanks, Vlad Catrinescu for the great video)
SharePoint Advance Management (SAM) included in Microsoft 365 Copilot
Forms in document libraries (thanks, Laura Rogers for the great article)
BONUS | 2️⃣ each from related tech: OneDrive and Teams
OneDrive ☁️
Hero link - Each file gets one persistent URL that you update and manage with required/preferred permissions anytime. Gone are the days of multiple links or dead links. It’s one link and you manage the access it grants.
Copilot agents in OneDrive - Turn your OneDrive folder(s) into sources for custom AI assistants. AKA, helpers grounded on your personal work files to help answer questions and create content based on your work, over time.
Microsoft Teams 👥
Activity in other accounts and organizations - View and respond to activity across multiple tenants without switching accounts. This speeds up chat triage simply by popping up an Activity window cross-tenant chats in their own window.
Facilitator in Microsoft Teams meetings - Takes notes that everyone can co-author, manages the time and agenda, and surface relevant information from the web or the conversation itself. It takes notes really well. And you can ask it questions along the way - like a smart meeting assistant that’s always listening. NOTE: Don’t forget to start Facilitator or it’s really not that helpful 😏.
#RIP | Sad to lose ☠️
Before we close out the year, let’s take a moment of silence for the features and apps we lost; they may be gone, but our finger-clicking-muscle memory that remembers where they were in the M365 app launcher will last forever.
Viva Topics | Retired February 22, 2025.
OneNote for Windows 10 | Retired October 14, 2025.
Microsoft Lists mobile apps | Retired mid-November 2025.
Viva Goals | Retired December 31, 2025.
Transitioning notifications from SharePoint Alerts to Power Automate.
For all the above in 2025, and all that 2026 is for sure to bring, a final, BIG kudos to the SharePoint team for tweaking, innovating, listening, and plugging away at this platform/app that sells itself year after year.
I wish thee well. Have yourself a merry little happy holidays year-ender! Time to relax knowing you’re all caught up and ready for next year’s onslaught of top new tech (after topping off with some good rest after Dec. 31, 2025). 🥳➡️😴
See you in 2026, Mark “sharer of top five” Kashman
👋🏻___🧔🏻♂️___👍🏻