In the spirit of Halloween, the Ghost of Roadmap Past shall be your guide – helping you to avoid becoming a Roadmap Scrooge. It’s a Dickens of a blog, all to help get you up-to-speed on everything recently released out into Microsoft 365 for SharePoint and related tech– including a few Ebenezer Teasers from our friend, the Ghost of Roadmap Future.
October 2020 brought some great new offerings: SharePoint Syntex, Organization Chart web part, new IT controls for Microsoft Lists, Microsoft Lists – commenting, OneDrive widget for iPhone, Task in Teams GA, and more. Details and screenshots below, including our audible, “ghostly-spirited at times” companion: The Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop: October 2020 podcast episode – all to help answer, "What's rolling out now for SharePoint and related technologies into Microsoft 365?"
In the podcast episode, I chat with Harsh Agarwal (LinkedIn), program manager at Microsoft on the Microsoft Teams engineering team. I talked with Harsh about the new file sharing experience in Teams channels and chat and the broader notion of a consistent file sharing experience across Microsoft 365.
All features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Microsoft 365 as of October 2020 (possibly early November 2020).
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.
SharePoint Syntex
This is the first product to come from Project Cortex - a broader Microsoft 365 initiative, that applies advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to empower people with knowledge and expertise in the apps they use every day.
Syntex amplifies human expertise, automates content processing, and transforms content into knowledge. Syntex mainstreams machine teaching, enabling your experts to capture their knowledge about content in AI models they can build with no code.
Your experts train Syntex to understand content like they do, to recognize key information, and to tag content automatically. For example, a contract processing expert can teach the service to extract the contract’s value, along with the expiration date and key terms and conditions.
- Learn more: "Announcing SharePoint Syntex"
- Take a clickthrough demo and visit the main SharePoint Syntex resource center.
- Roadmap ID: 67134.
Organization Chart web part
Visibility on hierarchy answers many questions on who’s who and who knows what. This web part allows page authors to generate an organization chart based off of a specific individual - just type in their name. The page author will have the option to determine how many levels up this org chart goes, and as you navigate, you'll see who reports to who.
- Learn more about using web part on SharePoint pages.
- Extra credit if you want to add an org chart to a SharePoint space.
- Roadmap ID: 67131.
IT control setting for Microsoft Lists
Governance depends on who can do what and what they can do. Based on Microsoft 365 admin feedback, we added new IT capabilities, along with new documentation, on how you can better manage *Microsoft Lists* via #PowerShell.
This means you can:
- Control the creation of personal lists - a disable control, and
- Manage the built-in, ready-made templates - so that only the ones you wish to be available to your people will appear.
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 the 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.
New Teams file sharing experience
Share files on your terms. You can now create a shareable link for any file stored in Teams and directly set the appropriate permissions. Additionally, you can also set permissions for files stored in SharePoint or OneDrive while composing a private chat or starting a channel conversation.
The copied link can then be shared with others, by pasting it into a chat or channel. On pasting the plain lengthy link, this feature converts the link into a visual file chiclet/image. The sender can also set permissions on the file link that they are sharing, at the time of composing the message itself, so that the recipients do not run into access issues.
- Roadmap ID: 51230.
- Learn more.
Microsoft Lists - commenting
Have something to say? Say it. And say it in a native, natural way without breaking privacy or compliance policy. You will be able to add and delete comments on list items. Users can view all comments on a list item and filter between views that show comments or activity related to an item.
Note: comments follow the permission settings inherent in SharePoint and Microsoft Lists. Users with read-only permission can only view comments. Those with list edit permission can make comments as well as delete comments; editing comments is currently not possible.
A few FYI notes on "where and how are comments stored":
- Comments are stored in the schema for each list, which is based on the SharePoint storage platform.
- If you are using a classic list template, it will not have this commenting feature.
- Commenting on lists in Teams is not yet available; currently leverage Teams chat for lists in Teams.
- And last, comments are not indexed by Microsoft Search.
- Roadmap ID: 64169.
Related technology
OneDrive widget for iPhone
Now, when you run iOS14 on your device, you can add a OneDrive widget to your iPhone home screen. The widget displays your photo memories "on this day" across previous years. And, if you don't have any On This Day photos for today, you'll see your most recent photos that you've saved to the cloud.
Note: this feature is only available for personal OneDrive accounts (home and family).
- Learn more + tips and tricks.
- Roadmap ID: 57213.
Tasks in Microsoft Teams is now generally available
Tasks in Microsoft Teams desktop and web is now 100% rolled out to everyone with a Microsoft 365 subscription across all non-government tenants. Tasks in Teams lets you manage your team tasks from Planner and individual tasks from To Do in your hub for teamwork.
Note: We’re working to make Tasks in Teams available for our government cloud offerings, with GCC going live in the coming months. GCC High and DoD will follow that.
Embed Visio files, stored in OneDrive or SharePoint, into pages in Atlassian Confluence
We’re excited to announce our first-ever non-Microsoft integration for Visio with Atlassian Confluence, a remote-friendly team workspace.
Alongside embedding Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files, you can also easily add Visio diagrams to your Confluence pages - to then open them directly in a new browser tab - keeping the files where they are in Microsoft 365.
Your data remains secure—Confluence respects all privacy settings set in OneDrive and SharePoint, so no unauthorized users can access your content.
November 2020 ‘Ebenezer’ 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 that are sure to put Jacob Marley at bay…
- Teaser #1: My Feed web part [Roadmap ID: 67148]
- Teaser #2: SharePoint Site performance page [Roadmap ID: 66196]
… shhh, tell everyone – especially Tiny Tim Cratchit.
Helpful, ongoing change management resources
- "Stay on top of Office 365 changes"
- "Message center in Office 365"
- Install the Office 365 admin app; view Message Center posts and stay current with push notifications.
- Microsoft 365 public roadmap + pre-filtered URL for SharePoint, OneDrive, Yammer and Stream roadmap items.
- SharePoint Facebook | Twitter | SharePoint Community Blog | UserVoice
- OneDrive Facebook | Twitter | OneDrive Community Blog | UserVoice
- 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 – October 2020 (blog/podcast). We are open to your feedback in comments below to hear how both the Roadmap Pitstop podcast episodes and blogs can be improved over time.
Engage with us. Ask those questions that haunt you. 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 ghostly road’map, and thanks for listening and reading.
Happy Hallowed Eve,
Mark Kashman – senior roadmap ghost manager (SharePoint/Lists) | Microsoft)
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