The reimagined SharePoint experience – what developers need to know

If you have been following the Microsoft 365 roadmap lately, you probably caught the news: SharePoint is getting a full visual and structural overhaul. Not a minor facelift. A proper rethink of how people interact with SharePoint, from the ground up.

My first reaction was a mix of “finally” and “wait, what happens to my web parts?” If you are a SharePoint developer or architect, you are probably feeling the same thing right now.

Here is what is actually changing, what it means for your existing customizations, and where the Copilot license line is drawn.

Three core jobs: Discover, Publish, Build

The biggest change is how SharePoint now organizes itself. The old app bar and start page are gone. The redesigned app bar groups everything around three user jobs:

Discover replaces the traditional start page. Personalized site cards, news feeds, people, favorites, recent items. Basically your intelligent landing pad.

Publish is a single hub for creating and managing pages and news posts. Templates, analytics, and eventually full Amplify campaign management live here.

Build is where you create and manage sites, lists, libraries, and (this is the big one) AI agents.

There is also still a Home node for your intranet entry point with global navigation, and a OneDrive shortcut. But the mental model has shifted from “sites and pages” to “what are you trying to do right now?” Microsoft reported a 99% keep rate from preview users. That is a surprisingly strong signal.

Flexible sections: the canvas SharePoint always wanted to be

Flexible sections have actually been rolling out since early 2025, but they are now a core part of the new experience and much more prominent in the authoring flow.

The idea: instead of rigid column layouts, you get a 12-cell two dimensional grid per section. Web parts can be placed anywhere on that grid, resized freely, and overlapped. You can layer elements on top of each other, add section backgrounds, and control how content stacks on mobile.

There are some constraints. Card based web parts like Quick Links, People, or Hero only support four width options (full width, one-third, half, and two-thirds). But non-card web parts like Text, Image, and File and Media can be resized to any width on the grid.

For developers, this matters because your custom SPFx web parts now live in a much more flexible layout context. If your web part assumed it would always sit in a neat column, you will want to test how it behaves when resized to unexpected dimensions or overlapped with another element.

AI sections: natural language meets page design

This is where the Copilot integration gets tangible for content authors. With AI sections, you can describe what you want in plain English, something like “add a section highlighting our Q1 results with a chart and summary,” and SharePoint will generate the content and suggest a layout.

It goes deeper than page creation though. The AI capabilities cover sites, pages, libraries, lists, and structured documents:

For sites, you describe your needs and SharePoint generates a structured plan with sites, pages, lists, and libraries. You can iterate on it conversationally. For pages, you draft, refine, and reorganize content directly on the canvas, ask for tone adjustments, summaries, or section restructuring. Libraries get automatic metadata extraction, column application, and file organization without manual tagging. Lists support full CRUD operations through natural language, and you can populate from files, evolve schemas, and create forms. And for structured documents, you can convert Word documents into fillable templates where AI detects the fields for you.

Behind the scenes, this orchestrates dozens of tools through an iterative reasoning process. Organizations can also define custom AI skills that act as guardrails, so generated solutions follow your standards for structure, metadata, and document creation.

One thing worth flagging: the initial rollout uses Anthropic’s Claude for some of the advanced capabilities. Depending on your region, your organization may need to opt in to allow Anthropic as a sub-processor. Microsoft has acknowledged this creates barriers and committed to addressing limitations before general availability. Keep that on your radar if you are in a regulated industry.

31 new page templates

The template gallery gets a big upgrade. Thirty-one new modern templates are launching between March and April 2026, with improved browsing, filtering, and search. You can access them from multiple entry points: Site Settings, Site Contents, onboarding prompts, and even the Stream app.

This is less of a developer concern and more of an adoption thing, but it is worth knowing because it changes the baseline expectation for what a SharePoint page should look like. When business users have access to polished templates, the bar for custom solutions goes up.

The SharePoint Admin Agent

For admins, there is an AI companion in the SharePoint admin center. The SharePoint Admin Agent does proactive governance with a few specific skills.

It does permission analysis, identifying tenant-wide permissions and flagging oversharing risks with remediation guidance. It handles site lifecycle management, surfacing inactive, ownerless, or high risk sites and suggesting cleanup actions. And it does storage monitoring, tracking storage trends across sites and identifying opportunities to free up space, including PAYGO onboarding support.

If you have ever spent hours auditing SharePoint permissions or hunting down abandoned sites, you know how painful that work is. This is the kind of thing that should have been automated years ago.

The catch: it requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license. More on that in a moment.

Impact on existing web parts and SPFx customizations

This is the question every SharePoint developer is asking. Short answer: your existing SPFx web parts and extensions continue to work.

The new experience applies a neutral color palette across all SharePoint surfaces, and that includes SPFx placeholders. Microsoft describes it as “elevating content forward” by reducing visual noise and bringing clearer structure. In practice, the chrome around your web parts will look different, but your web parts themselves should render as before.

That said, I would strongly recommend testing your solutions once the preview rolls out to your tenant. A few things to watch for:

Your web part’s layout behavior in flexible sections. If it has hard coded widths or assumes a specific column structure, test it in the new grid based layout. Theming and color consistency, since the neutral palette might clash with custom styles designed to match the old theme. And app bar interactions, because if your solution relies on the old app bar structure or navigation patterns, you will want to verify everything still works with the new navigation nodes.

On the SPFx roadmap side, the February 2026 update focuses on stability and tooling improvements. SPFx 1.23 (March 2026) will open-source the templates and tooling for creating SPFx solutions. SPFx 1.23.1 (April 2026) brings a new open-sourced SPFx CLI as a preview, replacing the Yeoman generator. And SPFx 1.24 (June 2026) introduces navigation customizers for SPFx component overrides.

None of these are breaking changes. The message from the SPFx team is “stability, security, and predictable evolution.” That is reassuring, but it also means there is no special new API surface for deeply integrating with the AI features yet.

The Copilot license gate

Here is what requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and what does not.

Available to everyone without a Copilot license: the redesigned app bar and navigation, the Discover, Publish, and Build experiences (basic functionality), the neutral theme and visual refresh, the template gallery and content publishing tools, flexible sections and the new layout capabilities.

Requires a Microsoft 365 Copilot license: all AI assisted creation features (natural language site, page, list, and library generation), AI sections and content generation, the SharePoint Admin Agent, custom AI skills and agentic building capabilities.

This split matters. The visual refresh and structural improvements ship to everyone. The AI stuff is behind the Copilot paywall. For organizations that have not rolled out Copilot licenses broadly, you still get a noticeably better SharePoint experience. But the part where you describe what you want and SharePoint builds it for you, that requires the license.

One more licensing detail: if your organization has a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and at least one user is assigned to it, SharePoint administrators automatically get access to the SharePoint Advanced Management features required for Copilot deployment.

What this means for custom development going forward

So where does this leave us? The reimagined SharePoint experience looks good, and the AI building capabilities will change how organizations create and manage content. But for developers, it is more nuanced than the marketing suggests.

The good news: SPFx is not going anywhere. Microsoft continues to invest in the framework, and existing customizations are compatible with the new experience. The open sourcing of SPFx tooling is a positive signal for the ecosystem.

The harder question is about the long term role of custom development when AI can generate sites, pages, lists, and libraries from a natural language description. If a business user can describe what they need and get a working solution in minutes, where does the custom developer fit?

I think the answer is the same as it has always been: custom development fills the gaps that out of the box cannot. Complex business logic, deep integrations, highly specific UX requirements. Those are not going away. If anything, as the baseline experience gets better, the custom solutions that organizations actually need will be more sophisticated, not simpler.

For now, enable the preview in your dev tenant, test your existing solutions, and start thinking about how your custom web parts behave in a world of flexible sections and AI generated layouts. The rollout timeline is tight: public preview from March 3rd, targeted release in late April, and general availability in May 2026.

SharePoint just turned 25. I did not expect to be this interested in a SharePoint redesign in 2026, but here we are.

Read more

• Microsoft Tech Community: Introducing new agentic building in SharePoint and more updates – the official announcement by Adam Harmetz covering the three core jobs, AI sections, and the SharePoint Admin Agent
• Microsoft 365 Dev Blog: SharePoint Framework (SPFx) roadmap update – February 2026 – Vesa Juvonen’s update on SPFx 1.23, open-source tooling, and the new CLI preview
• Microsoft Learn: The new SharePoint experience – admin and deployment documentation for the reimagined experience