Aura: My SharePoint Hackathon Entry and the Best Excuse I Ever Had

Honestly? The hackathon came at the right time.

I spend a lot of my days doing the work that makes SharePoint actually function for organizations. Metadata strategy, information architecture, governance, the stuff that is not always flashy but makes everything else possible. It is work I love, but it lives mostly in the practical lane. Client needs, timelines, what is realistic, and so on.

The hackathon gave me an opportunity to get out of that lane for a little while.

So I took the things I do every day and asked a different question. Not "what does this client need" but "what could this actually become?" That question is where Aura came from.



What I built

Aura is an AI-ready SharePoint knowledge hub built around user intent rather than content categories. Instead of the usual "here is a library, good luck" approach that a lot SharePoint sites end up becoming, Aura guides users through four paths: Ask, Understand, Resolve, and Act. You land on the site knowing where to go based on what you are actually trying to do, which sounds simple and is, but getting there required being pretty deliberate about every design decision underneath it.




The part I have been waiting to build

I have been talking about metadata for longer than I’d care to admit. I have sat in a lot of rooms making the case for it, drawn a lot of diagrams explaining why it matters, and watched a lot of organizations skip it and then wonder why nobody can find anything. So getting to build a metadata model that was not just practical but genuinely visionary, and then layer AI autofill on top of it, was its own kind of fun.

Aura uses structured fields across its knowledge libraries including topic, content type, owner, review cycle, skill level, and freshness signals. AI autofill then generates a Summary field and an AI Confidence Rating tied to how current the content is. The result is a library that users can actually scan and trust, and that Copilot can actually reason over without returning results that make everyone question their life choices.



Playing with the new SharePoint capabilities was genuinely fun

Getting to push the newer SharePoint and AI features in a creative direction rather than a purely functional one reminded me why I got into this work in the first place. The AI-assisted page creation, the autofill, the way the pieces fit together when the content model is solid underneath, it all clicked in a way that felt exciting rather than just useful.

It is all out of the box

I have nothing against custom development. There are incredibly talented developers doing brilliant things with SharePoint Framework and I have a lot of respect for that work. You should check out the other hackathon entries-some amazing work. But not every organization can support it, staff it, or maintain it long term. My lens is almost always OOTB because it has to work for everyone. Everything in Aura is built on modern SharePoint out of the box, which means anyone can replicate the pattern easily.

The pattern travels

I built Aura around a Copilot knowledge scenario but the design works for onboarding, operations, policy, department hubs, service delivery, really any situation where people need a guided experience instead of a site that technically has everything but feels like searching for something in someone else's junk drawer.

Go watch it

My husband Bryan Ward and I built this together, which made the chaos and fun parts feel very on brand for us. I think it shows what SharePoint can become when you stop treating it like a filing cabinet and start treating it like the foundation it actually is.

Full video walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_zYGg23kgw

Microsoft is hosting a live awards ceremony to announce the top three submissions across all hackathon categories, along with some special community awards. If you want to tune in and see who takes it, you can find the details here: Celebrating Creativity: Awards Ceremony

If nothing else I hope it gives you some ideas for what is possible right now, with the tools you already have, when you let yourself to think Out of the Box 😉.

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