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SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop: June 2022

Mark-Kashman's avatar
Mark-Kashman
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Jun 30, 2022

Are you on vacation? Did you just finish your fiscal year close – sell, sell, close, close, close? Or kickin’ it doing your normal thing month to month?

 

Beyond prepping for Microsoft Inspire next month, we saw June 2022 bring a lot of new tech to Microsoft 365 - lots of SharePoint and related tech goodness: The LGBTQ+ Employee Resource Group site template in time for this year’s Pride month, Viva Topics in Teams chat, inline playback of videos in Hero web part, updated site logo management, multilingual UI when editing team sites, rename Add to OneDrive Shortcuts, OneDrive: Pin and unpin shared libraries, Planner cards in team site activity feed, SPS'2013 Workflows migration assessment tool, Teams chat with self, and more.

 

We also hear from Adam Ford (Principal design manager - OneDrive and SharePoint) - his insights about the focus on user experience (UX) - especially in SharePoint pages and how they appear in Microsoft Teams. So, design yourself a little listening time for this new episode of The Intrazone.

 

The Intrazone guest this month: Adam Ford - Principal design manager – OneDrive and SharePoint (Microsoft).

 

The Intrazone by Microsoft

Subscribe to The Intrazone podcast

 

All features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Microsoft 365 as of June 2022 (possibly early July 2022).

 

Inform and engage with dynamic employee experiences

Build your intelligent intranet on SharePoint in Microsoft 365 and get the benefits of investing in business outcomes – reducing IT and development costs, increasing business speed and agility, and up-leveling the dynamic, personalized, and welcoming nature of your intranet.

 

Celebrating Pride Month (June 2022) | The LGBTQ+ Employee Resource Group site template

Across the globe we see the celebration of wonderful cultural moments. In living up to our mission statement – “to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,” we here at Microsoft provide solutions to empower organizations to celebrate these cultural moments with their employees throughout the year. 

 

Full-screen view of the main home page from the LGBTQ+ Employee Resource Group site template once deployed as a site within your tenant.

Once you deploy the site from the Look Book, you find it has:

    • A Home page filled with inspiration to make this site your own.
    • A unique page template so you can create news and pages quickly.
    • A pre-populated News web part
    • And a pre-populated Events web part - with real, related events and ready to add your own

 

I deployed this site template from the Look Book site to my demo tenant and appreciated the default mission statement that appears on the home page read: "... fostering career development, advancing equality, celebrating diversity, ..." and that it has a beautiful pride enhanced @ContosoInc logo. It's a well-designed site that exemplifies that mission statement - put it to use in your own intranet.

 

Viva Topics in Microsoft Teams chat

Share your knowledge with a simple hashtag in your chats. Viva Topics in Teams allows people to mention topics in their chat conversations so that others in the conversation can easily learn more about a topic by hovering over the topic name and viewing the topic card - and returning immediately to the chat at hand. Note: You must have a Viva Topics license to do this.

 

Hover over a Viva Topics highlight (hashtag) within a Teams chat to share knowledge - revealing the Topics card.

Mention topics by typing the # character and choosing a topic from the topic picker - refining as you type ahead. Once a topic is selected, users can post the message - the hashtag'ged topic becomes active once you send your message or reply.

 

Recipients with Viva Topics licenses will see the selected topic's name as highlighted text and will be able to hover over it to dive into the details of the topic: such as the alternate names for the topic, descriptions, associated people, and resources (documents, sites, and more).

 

SharePoint: Inline playback of videos in Hero web part

Like Viva Topics, the focus is to keep you in the flow of work - aka, not taking you to a page or site beyond where you were already engaged. When you create a Communication site, the Hero web part is included on your page by default. It is pre-populated with default content that you change to display your own images, text, pages, links, documents, or videos.

 

When you add a video to a Hero web part on a communications site, it now plays inline (no longer launching out to the video's Stream page).

And to help keep that engagement with your content and communications, when someone clicks to play a video in the Hero web part section of a SharePoint site, the video will now play inline. No launch out of your established context, watch inline, return, browse, and continue to scroll through the other contents of the page uninterrupted.

 

That makes the Hero web part more heroic - esp. in the burgeoning SharePoint-powered metadataverse.

 

SharePoint page improvements (times two)

First, more Control vertical section reflow | Currently the vertical section in pages goes to the bottom of the page when viewed on smaller screens. We’re adding the ability for page authors to control this reflow and choose whether the vertical section goes to the top or bottom of the screen when the screen is condensed to a smaller size.

 

When you click to edit a vertical column, you'll now see a new option to have the vertical column appear on the top or bottom when the full page resizes to a single column on smaller devices or low resolutions.

And second, we are making more room for page editing in Microsoft Teams | Last year, we enabled the ability to author SharePoint pages directly in Teams. With this latest change, when editing the page, users will get a full screen experience, making it easier for users to edit their pages. Expand (the page) and focus while you work; heck, even whistle while you work.

 

Updated site logo management in SharePoint

We're centralizing the management of your site logo. To update or manage your site logo, you will now exclusively visit the Header panel under the 'Change the Look' settings. Site owners will be able to navigate to the 'Header' panel from the 'Change the Look' settings, and then scroll to the bottom of the panel where the site logo options will be located. 

 

Control all header options within the 'Change the Look' settings.

Consolidation is often the root of less upheaval. Wanna change the look of your site, well - It's now all there in one place.

 

Teamwork updates across SharePoint team sites, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams

Microsoft 365 is designed to be a universal toolkit for teamwork – to give you the right tools for the right task, along with common services to help you seamlessly work across applications. SharePoint is an intelligent content service that powers teamwork – to better collaborate on proposals, projects, and campaigns throughout your organization – with integration across Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Yammer, Stream, Planner and much more.

 

Streamlining the SharePoint multilingual user interface when editing team sites

This new release includes other improvements to the navigation and site title editing experience for users whose preferred language differs from the site’s default language. Think of this update as improved guidance and readability when taking advantage of the multilingual feature across communication sites and now team sites.

 

Here's a summary of changes:

  • Additional language information is available when editors update navigational labels, site descriptions, footers, and the site's name.
  • The new language information displays even if multilingual settings have not been enabled for the site.
  • When editors change site content that is not in their preferred language, it will modify the label instead of creating a translation.
  • Additional information appears in tool tips next to the content that’s being edited to confirm the language.

 

Note: Translations for site content can only be created when multilingual settings have been enabled.

 

 

Rename Add to OneDrive Shortcuts in OneDrive Web

People will be able to rename a shortcut within their OneDrive. You can rename the shortcut by selecting the shortcut and clicking the "Rename" command in the command bar or the context menu. When they rename the shortcut, the name change will be only reflected for the shortcut as opposed to at the shortcut’s source. The shortcut’s new name will be updated across all endpoints and products where the shortcut is shown. 

 

Rename a shortcut you added to OneDrive - to best organize without impacting the destination folder in its original location.

 

Pin and unpin shared libraries for quick access

We’re consistently working to improve how you organize and access what you need in OneDrive. This is one thing you can thank Adam and the team for as they worked with the OneDrive team to improve how you manage the list of places you've recently accessed or opened a file from.

 

Pin and unpin shared libraries within the Quick access panel in OneDrive to better organize your work.

You can pin these places so you can easily and predictably get back to what you’ve been working on. Pin, pin, pin for the win win win!

 

Planner cards now appear within the SharePoint team site activity feed

Now, when a team member assigns a task to you within a plan, beyond the Planner user interface, a card will show up on your site activity feed if you are within two days of the due date. Timely tasks are visible when you need to see them.

 

When a task in Planner nears its due date, it will appear to your view in the team site activity feed.

As Hannibal Smith might say, "I love it when a plan comes together (in the SharePoint activity feed)." A-Team references never get old, or is it an A-Team reference never ceases to expose how old I am? 😉

 

SharePoint 2013 Workflows migration assessment tool

The SharePoint 2013 Workflows platform was introduced 10 years ago. Since then, Microsoft has evolved workflow orchestration to not only encompass SharePoint, but all the productivity services you use within Microsoft 365 and extend to third parties. Today, Power Automate is THE Microsoft solution for workflow orchestration. It connects to all Microsoft 365 services and over 220 other external services to let an enterprise build custom workflows in a more robust, modern way.

 

To help those in need of transition, we've developed a new, open-source Microsoft 365 Assessment tool - available to help you identify and evaluate your existing use of SharePoint 2013 workflows within your tenant and generating a Power BI report to help plan your migration of 2013 workflows to a modern workflow orchestration service.

 

Over time, it is our goal to minimize the reliance on older workflow technology, as you've seen us do for SharePoint 2010 workflows, and now for remaining SharePoint 2013 workflows.

 

Review the related documentation:

 

Related technology

Teams chat with self 

Talk to yourself on purpose, with a purpose. That purpose being now that people can chat with themselves.

 

All the same chat functionality that works when chatting with others will work for the individual chatting with themselves. They will be able to start a chat with themselves by typing their full name in the To field when creating a new chat. Pin that to the top of your chat and chat with yourself any time you wish.

 

Use Teams chat with self to send yourself reminders, quick 'back of napkin planning', and access between devices - even start a Loop component with yourself to keep track of those silly ideas of yours until they're ready to share.

And as our community Loop expert Darrell Webster put it: "You will be able to create a Microsoft Loop on your own. You can use the Loop for personal notes. Or prepare a Loop for collaboration with a group, then add share the Loop link in the group chat." Pretty cool observations, Darrell. Thanks for looping us all in on that one in Twitter – and as you see above, I tested this by creating a bulleted list Loop component with myself to enumerate a few silly SharePoint planning ideas.

 

Outlook on the Web | Inline Suggestions from Viva Insights appear while composing an email or meeting invitation

Inline suggestions in Outlook are brief data and AI-driven notifications that appear in Outlook while you are reading or composing an email or meeting invitation. These are inline useful suggestions, tips, and best practices around managing emails and organizing meetings - to help you reclaim focus hours and build better collaboration habits.

 

Get suggestions and insights as you write and reply to emails and meeting invitations.

Be on the lookout for Outlook on the web suggesting you to:

  • Delay delivery accounting for respective time zones.
  • Remember outstanding tasks.
  • Plan your time away.
  • Shorten a meeting to buffer and save time.
  • Track email open rate.

 

We can all learn more about how to do email and meetings better - and why not learn from Outlook thanks to recent innovation integration with Viva Insights.

  • Roadmap ID: 93350
  • Learn more:

 

"Class Action" | A podcast documentary series about the next generation of lawyers

I'm pleased to share this new show: It's hosted by Katie S. Phang from MSNBC, and is produced by our very own Intrazone producer, Lisa Gray and co-creator, Kevin Huffman.

 

"Class Action" is a new, immersive documentary show about the next generation of lawyers disentangling the complexities of American law. Throughout the 12-part series, we track a diverse cast of outstanding law students who are battling it out in mock trial competitions across the country. It is a new podcast offering, focusing on the trials (literally) and tribulations of what it's like to prepare for litigation through the world of mock trial competitions.

 

"Class Action" | A podcast documentary series about the next generation of lawyers. [ClassActionPod.com]

I've listened to the first few episodes and am hooked on hearing behind-the-scenes of what makes trial lawyers tick! Especially noting the value of fair representation showing that a prepared lawyer is one that people - everyone - can count on. Go behind the scenes with St. Mary's University, Dillard University, Brooklyn Law School, and the University of South Dakota into the depths of law to understand #MockTrial #LawSchool #TheLawyerLife and #EqualJustice.qualJustice

 

July 2022 teasers

Psst, still here? Still scrolling the page looking for more roadmap goodness? If so, here is a few teasers of what’s to come to production next month…

 

  • Teaser #1: Create Power Automate flows from built-in Microsoft Lists templates [Roadmap ID: 88906] 
  • Teaser #2: Microsoft Lists: Commenting (iOS) [Roadmap ID: 70705]
  •  

… shhh, tell everyone.

 

Helpful, ongoing change management resources

  • Follow me to catch news and interesting SharePoint things: @mkashman; warning, occasional bad puns may fly in a tweet or two here and there.

 

Thanks for tuning in and/or reading this episode/blog of the Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop – June 2022. We are open to your feedback in the comments below to hear how both the Roadmap Pitstop podcast episodes and blogs can be improved over time.

 

Engage with us. Ask those questions. Push us where you want and need to get the best information and insights. We are here to put both our and your best change management foot forward.

 

Stay safe out there on the road’map, and thanks for listening and reading.

 

I appreciate your time,

Mark Kashman – senior product manager (SharePoint/Lists) | Microsoft)

 

The Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop – June 2022 graphic showing some of the highlighted release features.

Updated Jul 01, 2022
Version 2.0
The Intrazone
  • chmasud's avatar
    chmasud
    Copper Contributor
    Jul 01, 2022

    The best one for me is the reflow control over the vertical section. However, I do see the update in my tenant but the section is still going to the bottom, no matter what option I select. Any thought ?

  • Mark-Kashman's avatar
    Mark-Kashman
    Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
    Jun 30, 2022

    Marijn Somers Hmm, I'll check-in with my Outlook peers and take action. Thanks for letting me know about this recent change you highlight :unamused:. - Mark 

  • Mark-Kashman's avatar
    Mark-Kashman
    Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
    Jul 01, 2022

    Hi chmasud - it may be a timing issue. Looping in Melito who is closes on our end and can weigh in with insights about what you're seeing in for reflow of your vertical section on a SharePoint page. Melissa, FYI to chmasud's comment above (7/1/2022 at 9:21am). Thanks, Mark