Earlier this year, we unveiled a new cloud-first, mobile-first vision and roadmap for SharePoint, along with innovations that empower people, teams and organizations to intelligently discover, share and collaborate on content from anywhere and on any device. Today we’re pleased to announce the roll out of modern lists to SharePoint Online along with one-click integration of PowerApps and Flow. These enhancements will begin rolling out to Office 365 First Release customers the first week in August 2016.
What’s New with SharePoint Lists
SharePoint lists provide a powerful way for people to collaborate on structured data directly from their team site, helping teams organize content from investment account onboarding details, to field service requests, and even softball team t-shirt sizes. Over ten million custom lists are already in use across Office 365. You can learn more about the general use of SharePoint lists on our support site.
Now, we’re delivering a modern lists experience that looks great and is responsive, accessible, and easy to use on any device. Modern list experiences will be automatically available to all existing classic SharePoint Online lists. You can:
- Improve ease of use by empowering users to add columns to lists and sort, filter, and group data in place
- Elevate data quality by viewing and editing all item details in the information panel without leaving the list itself
- Improve productivity by bulk editing list items with Quick Edit
- Automate simple business processes with versions, approvals, and alerts
- Enrich static information with rich data types including people, images, and Managed Metadata tags
Modern lists with the information panel
And modern lists look great in the SharePoint mobile app, making every location and every device a first class component of business processes.
Editing list items in SharePoint mobile browser
Integrating PowerApps and Microsoft Flow
Customers regularly exchange data between SharePoint lists and other systems to support business processes. These scenarios become more powerful through deep integration of Microsoft Flow with SharePoint lists. Flow automates workflow and data exchange between SharePoint and a variety of Microsoft and third-party services. Now, you can create and launch Flows directly from a SharePoint list, and store and modify that data within SharePoint.
With PowerApps, you can connect, create and share business apps on any device in minutes. You can build efficient mobile forms and apps directly from a SharePoint list, without needing to write code. PowerApps and Flow share a common connector framework that allows you to weave in dozens of data sources on-premises and in the cloud, including Exchange, SQL, Dynamics, Salesforce, Google, Mail Chimp, Twitter, Wunderlist and more.
Building a PowerApp from a modern SharePoint list
Automatically build a new Flow from SharePoint
Microsoft Flow and PowerApps are currently in public preview. To learn more about PowerApps and Microsoft Flow integration, see video (https://youtu.be/x8tgKBXmmPg?t=7m16s)
Modern and Classic Experience
Almost all classic lists will automatically inherit the new modern interface. Modern lists support themes, navigation, and custom buttons that were created in classic mode. We monitor the compatibility of customizations every time a user visits a list. If we see a compatibility blocker, like an unsupported browser or JSLink customizations, the list reverts automatically to the classic experience. Users can choose to revert to the classic experience at any time, and classic experience as default at the list, site, site collection or tenant level. And rest assured, we have no plans to remove classic mode anytime soon. Classic mode supports your customizations today, and tomorrow. Looking forward, we're going to continue to develop rich customization scenarios for modern experiences along with the SharePoint Framework.
What’s next
The initial rollout of modern lists to First Release will be in early August 2016. After that, we will add PowerApps and Flow to the command bar. With Office 365 groups all receiving full Team Sites soon, even more users than ever will have access to our business app tools. We will have even more to show at Microsoft Ignite this fall in Atlanta.
Early preview of modern lists
We recognize that customers want to validate these modern experiences for potential impact to users, training, customizations, or third-party solutions. Starting today, we are providing an early preview of Modern Lists ahead of First Release, and we look forward to your feedback.
To preview modern lists:
- Navigate to a list in SharePoint Online.
- In the URL bar, add TryNewExperience=true as a query string parameter. Query string parameters are values listed after the address in the URL. A question mark separates the address from query string parameters.
- If there are other query string parameters in the URL, add &TryNewExperience=true [ampersand prefix]
- If there are no other query string parameters, add ?TryNewExperience=true [question mark prefix]
- When you have finished previewing the modern experience, close the browser to reset to classic experience. For some browsers, you may need to clear session cookies to return to the classic experience.
As part of digital transformation, one of our ambitions is to reinvent productivity and business process. We think that modern lists, along with PowerApps and Flow, unlock new collaborative scenarios in Office 365. We look forward to hearing about your successes and how we can continue to improve SharePoint lists. Join the conversation at sharepoint.uservoice.com or here. Thanks.
- Chris McNulty, senior product manager
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