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Continue reading Beyond Code Generation: How AI Is Reshaping Modern Software Delivery on SitePoint.

Claude Sonnet 5 developer decision guide. Sections: What changed from Sonnet 4.6 (agentic capabilities, tool use, longer output stability), Sonnet 5 vs Opus 4.8 vs DeepSeek V4 for coding tasks (decision matrix, not benchmark table), accessing Sonnet 5 via API (model ID: claude-sonnet-5, available on Claude API, Bedrock, Vertex AI), Claude Code integration (how Sonnet 5 performs as default CLI model), the August 31 pricing transition ($2/$10 intro → $3/$15 standard), and what ‘agentic’ means for your daily coding (real examples of Sonnet 5 autonomous workflow capabilities).

Continue reading Claude Sonnet 5: The Developer’s Guide to Anthropic’s New Default Model on SitePoint.

For this month's SharePoint showcase, we're zooming in on AI skills in SharePoint and real Microsoft use cases for Copilot in SharePoint. We're also introducing a new "Product Drops" standing section to recap all the new GA functionality across the platform each month. 

As always, would love to hear from you in the comments. Let's get into it! 

Start with the playbook: building AI skills that actually work

Before the new capabilities below, start with the thinking behind them. In a new companion post, our team distills what we've learned working with customers building real skills in Copilot in SharePoint — why some AI workflows take off and others stall after the demo. Three lessons stand out:

• Pick the right workflow. Most efforts succeed or fail here. A quick filter: is it worth building, is it content-centric, and is there a repeatable path to a known-good outcome? Proposal drafting, compliance checks, and vendor evaluation pass; one-off creative work doesn't.
• Build it the way work actually happens. Skills beat ad-hoc prompts the moment judgment needs to be consistent. Design around the handoff to the next person, set the human checkpoint first, and let site memory carry lessons forward.
• Make it stick. Skills survive when skipping them costs more than using them. Target high value and high volume workflows at starter scenarios.

→ Read the full post: Lessons from Building AI Skills in the Real World

How Microsoft uses Copilot in SharePoint, and how you can get started

Every month in the SharePoint Showcase we walk through new capabilities across SharePoint. This month we want to show you something different: how we use it.

As a complex company with over 200,000 employees, Microsoft has a massive data estate. We deeply understand the need for complex data estate management; the actions we take ourselves translate into the features we build.

Copilot in SharePoint delivers an agentic experience that helps teams create, organize, and act on content with AI. We introduced these capabilities at Microsoft Ignite 2025, and moved to an expanded public preview this month.

Here are 4 examples of where it’s making a difference for us, the numbers behind it, and exactly how you can get started.

Partner Incentives & Operations An employee-built solution automated the creation of retail partner offer letters for sales incentive campaigns. The automation improved finance and sales operations efficiency — saving roughly 6,000 hours — and improved Microsoft Partner organization interactions by 30%.

Microsoft Advertising AI-generated metadata tags made a sales-collateral site far easier to navigate, boosting content discovery by 75% and cutting the time to surface the right material from about two days to half a day. The result: less time searching, faster document processing and publishing, and more productive sellers.

Legal Frontline Support Auto-categorization of incoming emails into predefined categories streamlined the support process, with a 95% reduction in time spent on data tracking and a 15% reduction in follow-up cases. Power Platform automation supplied scripted replies to employees asking common legal questions.

Nuance Business Operations AI surfaced clauses and terms in contracts to speed reviews, accelerate deal processing, and strengthen data accuracy and legal compliance in customer subscription renewals. It saved two vendor resources annually and cut processing time per renewal cycle by 35%.

In their words

Two of our own teams on what changed in their day-to-day:

We have a team of legal professionals who provide legal counsel and guidance to internal product groups and engineering teams during product lifecycle, development and release planning (we call this team “CELA E+D”). A SharePoint orchestration initiative maintained over 10K contracts and legal documentation in a SharePoint "Data Lake" to enable this team to provide better support to E+D.

“By replacing ad-hoc storage with a structured, AI-ready repository, the team reduces duplicative legal work, improves time to answer for product groups, and increases trust in Copilot and Agent outputs.”

Jaymee Torres, Senior Paralegal, Microsoft CELA E+D (SharePoint orchestration initiative)

Agent Launchpad is an internal user adoption campaign for Agent Extensibility, run by Microsoft Digital (MSD) with a SP site, Viva Engage community and a series of showcases, demos and user story sessions promoting custom Copilot Agents built by employees.

“We used the AI capabilities in SharePoint, paired with targeted SEO and metadata optimization, to improve how Copilot understands, ranks, and surfaces the Agent Launchpad site. As a result, Copilot responses are now more consistently pointing users to the right guidance when needed, reducing friction, improving time to value, and driving better adoption of AI tools across the organization.”

Cadie Kneip, Senior BPM, Microsoft Digital (Agent Launchpad)

How you can get started

Simply go to SharePoint Online to begin. You need one high-value library and one repeatable workflow. Here’s are some example paths you can follow:

1. Turn on metadata. Pick one high-value library, choose the Copilot button, and select Add autofill columns. Let Copilot tag what manual effort never finished. Then, ask Copilot in SharePoint to use the metadata to generate an HTML report summarizing the content of the document library for easy visibility to what’s there.
2. Make a site answerable. Enable Copilot in SharePoint chat (contextual Q&A) on an HR, Legal, or IT site so employees get cited answers instead of digging through pages.
3. Build a page with AI. Use Copilot in SharePoint to turn a prompt into a structured first draft.
4. Codify one workflow. Choose something repeatable and content-centric, build around the handoff, and design the human checkpoint first.
5. Mind your labels. Confirm sensitivity labels are applied so AI processes what it should while leaving Highly Confidential content untouched.

Get started with Copilot in SharePoint

• Adoption page: the home for everything Copilot in SharePoint
• Nominate your scenario: partner with the SharePoint product team to co-build your solution at no-cost (subject to selection – see link for full details).

Additional resources:

• Quick start guide: a step-by-step path to your first wins
• Intro video: a quick product overview to share with your team
• SharePoint skills: a blog on tips for incorporating skills into your AI workflows
• Get started with Copilot in SharePoint: see learn documentation about Copilot in SharePoint
• SharePoint Showcase landing page: every monthly post in one place

Product drops

Here's what's new in SharePoint this month, all now generally available:

Create a SharePoint News post from Copilot Pages: Once you've finished researching, creating, and collecting content in Copilot Pages, take it to a SharePoint News post with the press of the 'SharePoint' button under 'Create.' Roadmap 557566

AI news summary for SharePoint News in Teams: Access an AI-generated audio summary of SharePoint News posts in the SharePoint app for Teams (Viva Connections). Roadmap 562018

eSignature for Microsoft 365: recipient groups: Recipient groups let a signing slot be assigned to multiple people, so any one of them can fulfill the signing requirement on behalf of the group. Roadmap 560822

A reimagined SharePoint experience: A simpler, more intuitive SharePoint centered on discovering knowledge, publishing content, and building solutions. It sets the foundation for AI-assisted creation across the product, with updated information architecture and a cohesive design language for a clean, consistent experience across surfaces. Roadmap 547732

Updates to SharePoint home sites: A new resources web part, a new way to customize the SharePoint app (Viva Connections) for Teams desktop and mobile, and the ability to set up a home site in the SharePoint admin center. The Announcements web part and the new News web part layout will also become available in all sites. Roadmap 557983

Stay tuned every month for the SharePoint Showcase, where we share updates, best practices, and real-world examples of how SharePoint helps teams move faster, work smarter, and stay in control as AI reshapes work.

Starting today, Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 5 is available in Microsoft 365 Copilot—a new frontier model rolling out in Copilot Cowork and PowerPoint, built for agentic, multi-step work across everyday work: documents, spreadsheets, and presentation tasks.  

Anthropic describes Sonnet 5 as a more capable agentic Sonnet model, with performance close to that of Opus 4.8, but at lower prices¹ —bringing another capable option to Copilot for work that requires planning across steps, reasoning through context, and turning information into polished business artifacts.

Sonnet 5 joins a growing lineup of frontier models in Microsoft 365 Copilot, giving users the flexibility to choose the right model for their tasks, tuned for work and tailored to business needs, with the security, compliance, and privacy that you expect from Microsoft.

When combined with Work IQ, Copilot plans, builds, and creates artifacts grounded in the files, meetings, chats, and business data of your work. 

Get started today 

Claude Sonnet 5 is now rolling out to Copilot Cowork and Copilot in PowerPoint. Admins can manage access to Claude Sonnet 5 based on their organization’s policies and readiness. 

Availability may vary by region and tenant configuration; refer to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap and the Microsoft 365 Copilot release notes for the latest rollout status.  

¹ For more details on the model, see Anthropic’s announcement of Claude Sonnet 5.

Less than two days after PlayStation confirmed physical game discs are going away, GitHub decided to bring one back. The Microsoft-owned code hosting platform posted on X that it would now let developers order a burned CD of their public GitHub repo, “physically yours, forever,” and linked out to a Microsoft Forms page to collect shipping details. While other companies also mocked Sony’s decision this week, GitHub is the only one that went this far, but is it too far?

GitHub’s CD offer is a joke, but it’s real and doesn’t last that long.

GitHub’s X post reads, “We heard you. And we agree. In light of recent developments in physical media, GitHub is proud to announce that you can now obtain your public repo on CD-ROM. Keep it. Lend it to friends. Pass it on to your children. Your code is physically yours, forever. Until you lose it, let’s be real.” It links to gh.io/cd, which opens a Microsoft Forms page titled “GitHub Presents Your Code, On a CD.”

The whole thing is an elaborate joke aimed at Sony, the same kind of gag Domino’s UK and KFC Spain ran with fake “digital only” pizza and chicken announcements this week. Except GitHub’s version comes with a real intake form asking for a GitHub username, a public repo URL, shipping address, and phone number.

GitHub CDs are only for a 1000 “eligible submissions”

The Microsoft 365 form confirms this is a short, capped run. Signing up does not guarantee a disc, since only the first 1,000 eligible submissions get one, and only one CD per person is allowed.

GitHub says shipping could take a few weeks, and availability depends on the recipient’s country or region, so even if you rushed to fill the form, by the time the CD arrives, the joke would be long forgotten.

The offer window is short too, running from July 2 to July 6, 2026, four days total. On the privacy side, GitHub says it only uses the submitted name, email, phone number, and address to ship the disc, does not use that data for anything else, and deletes it once the CD ships.

The form itself asks for eight pieces of information: a GitHub username, the full URL of the public repo to burn, a confirmation checkbox that the submitter owns that repo and grants GitHub permission to press it, full name, email, country, shipping address, and phone number for carriers that require it on international orders.

Standard shipping fields, nothing unusual, aside from the fact that a Fortune 500 subsidiary is running it as a four-day joke.

GitHub CD tweet was amusing to some and borderline annoying to others

GitHub’s post had already crossed a million views within hours, and the replies split into two camps. One side found it funny. Developer Ruslan Khairullin called the X post’s closing line, about code being “physically yours, forever, until you lose it,” the best line GitHub has ever shipped.

Some users leaned into nostalgia, joking about listening to their repos on a Walkman or filing a request for punch cards and floppy disks instead.

The other side was not amused, and their complaints trace back to GitHub’s own reliability record of logging 257 incidents between May 2025 and April 2026, with 48 of them classified as major outages, largely driven by AI-generated commits and Actions that run overwhelming infrastructure that was not built for that load.

Developer Robert Hurst called the tweet a bad PR move that “wastes everyone’s time” while GitHub’s own problems go unaddressed.

In case you are wondering, like a few users who asked Grok, CD-Rs typically hold up for 10 to 30 years, which is not exactly forever, but who’s counting!

But we shouldn’t forget GitHub’s parent company, Microsoft, whose own Xbox division is reportedly weighing a disc-less next.

A CD giveaway is a strange flex when the entire industry is bleeding cash on AI

Cloud storage was supposed to be the answer to all of this. No discs to lose, or shelves to dust. Everything backed up and accessible from anywhere. Then AI happened, and everything got expensive.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are on pace to spend close to $700 billion combined on AI infrastructure this year alone.

Even as it jokes about CD-ROM, GitHub itself is suffering from scaling problems, since AI agent activity on the platform reportedly demands 30 times the load human developers ever generated.

Considering this, a four-day offer to burn 1,000 CDs costs GitHub almost nothing and says something true almost by accident.

Physical media never went away because people are nostalgic for jewel cases. It stuck around because a disc on a shelf does not care what a company’s quarterly earnings call looked like. Sony’s decision made that point already. GitHub just decided to package it into a joke before the joke stopped being funny.

The post Microsoft GitHub is burning free CDs of your public code to troll PlayStation, and XBOX should take notes appeared first on Windows Latest

Gunnar Fischer: From Staying in Your Line to The Connected Product Owner—Two Patterns Every Scrum Master Should Recognize

The Great Product Owner: The Connected PO Who Makes Information Flow

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

"This Product Owner didn't need to be the smartest person in the room, but everybody knew, okay, this is a really smart guy." - Gunnar Fischer

The best Product Owner Gunnar ever worked with was what he calls the connected PO. This person had a deep professional network—inside the company and with the customer—and could talk to anyone: a colleague, the client, a brand-new team member they were onboarding. They were socially sharp without being shallow. They could disagree clearly, even harshly, and then turn around and say, "now let's talk about something else," with kindness. When this PO said no, it was a no people respected; when they said yes, it was a yes people trusted, because everyone knew the PO could push back. The praise behind their back matched the praise in the room. They had a private life, too—not married to the job, which made them a more well-rounded human. But the specifically Product Owner skill Gunnar names is this: they could look at the product across different time horizons—what does it need to do in one month, three months, one year—and they kept juggling functionality, contracts, customer situation, and economic reality at the same time. Their technical background helped, but they understood the line: "It's not my job to be the technically most savvy guy, but I'm willing to share my knowledge with everybody." As Gunnar puts it, the difference between a subject matter expert and a Product Owner is that the Product Owner makes the information flow.

Self-reflection Question: Does your Product Owner make information flow across the team, the customer, and management—or are they hoarding context as the "expert"?

The Bad Product Owner: The Stay-in-Your-Line, Accept-Your-Fate PO

Read the full Show Notes and search through the world's largest audio library on Agile and Scrum directly on the Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast website: http://bit.ly/SMTP_ShowNotes.

"You manage the backlog, you do the customer calls, you write the user stories—but you were not involved in any of the bigger decisions." - Gunnar Fischer

The anti-pattern Gunnar sees most often isn't malice—it's resignation. Most Product Owners aren't given the access or the permissions they need to be successful, and so they accept their fate. They manage the backlog, take the customer calls, write the user stories, sometimes talk to management—but they aren't part of the bigger decisions: ROI on a feature, whether to build it at all, the product vision a year out. Management keeps those decisions to itself, and the accept-your-fate PO doesn't challenge that arrangement. They stay in their line. They don't push back when sales drops in an urgent request that ruins the plan. They don't challenge the developers when an estimate feels wrong. They become very protective of the things they can control—their privileges, their processes, the artifacts—and when the bad times come, they get thrown under the bus. Gunnar's diagnosis is direct: the role of a great PO is to have constructive, respectful disagreements at every level—with the client, with management, with the team—and to be okay disappointing people. "Once you see that people go down to the mechanics, then it's a really bad smell, I would say." Saying yes to everything doesn't make you safe; it makes you replaceable.

In this segment, we refer to Geoff Watts' Scrum Mastery and its line about the great Scrum Master being dispensable and wanted—a frame that applies to Product Owners just as well.

Self-reflection Question: Where in the past month did your Product Owner say "yes" when the right answer was a respectful "no, not yet"?

[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

🔥In the ruthless world of fintech, success isn't just about innovation—it's about coaching!🔥

Angela thought she was just there to coach a team. But now, she's caught in the middle of a corporate espionage drama that could make or break the future of digital banking. Can she help the team regain their mojo and outwit their rivals, or will the competition crush their ambitions? As alliances shift and the pressure builds, one thing becomes clear: this isn't just about the product—it's about the people.

🚨 Will Angela's coaching be enough? Find out in Shift: From Product to People—the gripping story of high-stakes innovation and corporate intrigue.

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[The Scrum Master Toolbox Podcast Recommends]

About Gunnar Fischer

Gunnar is the leader of the Chocolate Guild. Agile practitioner with a software developer background and a strong interest in people, intercultural contacts and the bigger picture. Gunnar's purpose is to teach and to learn, to grow as a person and to support others who want the same.

You can link with Gunnar Fischer on LinkedIn.

You can also read Gunnar's writing on his blog, Leader of the Chocolate Guild.