Blog Post

Microsoft SharePoint Blog

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Use SharePoint web parts to showcase data from inside and outside Office 365

Microsoft

Feb 20, 2018

Increase the impact of your communications by including live, up-to-date information and content from inside and outside of Office 365 throughout your intranet – on your sites, on your pages and within your news articles.

We’re pleased to announce that many of the web parts we shared at Microsoft Ignite are rolling out now into the Office 365 production environment, plus a few important updates. Expect to see these within your page authoring toolbox within the next few weeks:

NEW
- Planner – display tasks and progress from your team plans
- Twitter – highlight individual tweets and full feeds
- Office 365 Connectors – embed information from 3^rd party services like Bitbucket, JIRA, and RSS
- Kindle Instant Preview – reference an important Kindle book with one-click to preview or buy
UPDATED
- Power BI - embed interactive Power BI reports directly into SharePoint
- Image - offers automatic alt-text suggestions with the help of intelligent image analysis

The full, expanded SharePoint page authoring toolbox, showing all available web parts.

SharePoint web parts are building blocks for your site pages and news articles – which you configure to bolster your message and encourage engagement. You can highlight files, videos, images, maps, lists, Yammer discussions and more. Just click the + sign and pick the right web parts.

Let’s dive into the details of what’s new.

Planner

Put this task into your next Plan: Try the new Planner web part. Planner provides a simple, visual way to organize teamwork – your tasks, deadlines and progress – all organized as you work together. Now, you can bring your plans directly into SharePoint team sites. You can add them to any page – especially the home page. Or a news article – like a weekly status update with assignments and progress clearly visible, and always up to date no matter when someone catches up on the team news.

The Planner web part in 'charts' mode on the home page of a SharePoint team site

Planner boards bring progress to life. The embedded Planner web part displays tasks by buckets – like “To do” or “In Progress” – plus the unique buckets you create. It’s easy to view, add and edit tasks without leaving the context of your work.

The Planner web part in 'boards' mode on the home page of a SharePoint team site.

You can add a plan in seconds. Put the Planner web part where you need it, select an existing plan from the drop-down menu, and choose whether you want it to be more overview (Charts) or the buckets of individual tasks in a Kanban view (Boards).

Learn more about how to bring your Planner plans into SharePoint.

Office 365 Connectors

The single source of truth can come from many sources; information is best delivered live, referenced from its original source. And we know not all relevant information is maintained within the intranet. The right external data enhances and augments your message and keeps it fresh.

When you use an Office 365 Connector, you bring in information from third-party services like Asana, Bitbucket, Jira, GitHub, Stack Overflow and more – with more becoming available over time.

The Office 365 Connectors web part, after clicking "See all."

Note: Connectors within SharePoint are only available for use within group-connected SharePoint team sites. Also, you can add even more Office 365 Connectors to bring in interactive content from more apps and services to keep your team members current; just choose the O365 Connectors web part, and then click the Add button.

Learn more how to use the Office 365 Connector web part.

Twitter

If you really want to keep your pages and news articles up-to-the-minute, highlight live tweets and feeds from Twitter handles, curated collections or via a search widget. Put what’s being said externally right alongside the context of what you are working on internally.

The Twitter web part showing the @SharePoint feed alongside an image and a video.

Site members will now be able to showcase Twitter feeds and individual tweets right inside SharePoint pages and news. It simple to add the Twitter web part within the layout, and then plug in the desired Twitter address, individual tweet links, curated collections, or search widgets.

Learn more how to bring Twitter tweets into SharePoint.

Kindle instant preview

One of the best parts of a good podcast these days are the book recommendations typically at the end of the show. With the Kindle instant preview web part, you can reference a book you want to recommend or promote. Your readers can then easily PREVIEW the book using the Kindle Instant Preview web part or go straight to BUY.

Kindle instant preview embedded within a SharePoint news article.

Search for the Kindle book you want to share, click the Embed link within the sharing options, grab the HTML code and paste it into the Kindle instant preview edit pane.

Learn more about embedding Kindle instant previews.

Use all SharePoint web parts as the list continues to grow and web parts get updated

We continuously update existing web parts, and bring new, useful ones your way – like the recent, fully-released Power BI report web part – allowing you to embed interactive Power BI reports directly into SharePoint. Another example is the recent update to the Image web part that offers automatic alt-text suggestions with the help of intelligent image analysis – to help make your message more accessible to all.

Learn more about using ALL web parts on pages and news articles; this ‘how to’ highlights all SharePoint web parts that are in production in Office 365.

We are always open to feedback via UserVoice and continued dialog in the SharePoint community in the Microsoft Tech Community —and we always have an eye on tweets to @SharePoint. Let us know.

—Mark Kashman, senior product manager for the SharePoint team

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How can I expect the new and updated web parts to roll out to Office 365 customers?

A: New and updated web parts will begin to roll out to Targeted Release customers two weeks from the time of posting and will be completed within 3-4 weeks. We are targeting end of February 2018 for complete worldwide roll out.

Published Feb 20, 2018

Version 1.0

Product Updates

Mark-Kashman

Microsoft

Joined June 24, 2016

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13 Comments

Nate Forsyth
Copper Contributor
Nov 25, 2018
In follow up, the work-around we went with was to manually add the Web parts we required to a page, use PnP to retrieve the properties, which of course included the internal GUID of the Web Part (Planner in our scenario). I then realised that you can use the GUID in place of the instance for the component parameter when using Add-PnPClientSideWebPart, as specified within the comments in AddClientSideWebPart.cs
[Parameter(Mandatory = true, HelpMessage = "Specifies the component instance or Id to add.", ParameterSetName = ParameterSet_DEFAULT3RDPARTY)]
[Parameter(Mandatory = true, HelpMessage = "Specifies the component instance or Id to add.", ParameterSetName = ParameterSet_POSITIONED3RDPARTY)] public ClientSideComponentPipeBind Component;
Nate Forsyth
Copper Contributor
Nov 19, 2018
I am encountering the same issue as Ali Raza; the OfficeDevPnP.Core.Pages.DefaultClientSideWebParts enumeration documentation hasn't been updated to include the new Web Parts, and there is no indication as to what the internal name of the Planner Web Part is (that I can find).

Here's the latest version of the docs:
OfficeDevPnP.Core.Pages.DefaultClientSideWebParts documentation

There's also no mention of the Planner Web Part within the PnP source code at:
DefaultClientSideWebParts.cs
Fernando Melo
Brass Contributor
May 09, 2018
I am confused by this statement.
Connectors within SharePoint are only available for use within group-connected SharePoint team sites"
I created a modern team site from the new SHarePoint Admin center. THere is an office 365 group associated with it, however,
i cannot find nor add the 365 connector webpart. The site acts like a normal modern team site, but i am positive there is a group associated with it.
Is there something else i need to know?
WHat i have noticed is that creating a Team Channel creates the group, which creates the site and THEN and only THEN does the connectore webpart show up.
anyone else see this?
is there a powershell command i can run?
Ali Raza
Copper Contributor
Apr 25, 2018
Nice Addition. I have a question regarding addition of planner webpart through pnp
Add-PnPClientSideWebPart -Page $SitePage -DefaultWebPartType “Planner” -Section 1-Column 1 -Order 1
Getting Following error:
Cannot bind parameter 'DefaultWebPartType'. Cannot convert value "Planner" to type "OfficeDevPnP.Core.Pages.DefaultClientSideWebParts". Error: "Unable to match the identifier name Planner to a valid enumerator name. Specify one of the following enumerator names and try again:
ThirdParty, ContentRollup, BingMap, ContentEmbed, DocumentEmbed, Image, ImageGallery, LinkPreview, NewsFeed, NewsReel, PowerBIReportEmbed, QuickChart, SiteActivity, VideoEmbed, YammerEmbed, Events, GroupCalendar, Hero, List, PageTitle, People, QuickLinks, CustomMessageRegion, Divider, MicrosoftForms, Spacer"

Planner webpart not available in enumerator "OfficeDevPnP.Core.Pages.DefaultClientSideWebParts".
Can anyone help me regarding this? When it ill be available to add it as and PnPClientSideWebpart
Bart Bouwhuis
Copper Contributor
Mar 23, 2018
"Connectors within SharePoint are only available for use within group-connected SharePoint team sites"

When (if ever) will the connectors become available within other site templates e.g. the new communication site?
David Leveille
Steel Contributor
Mar 06, 2018
Nice add, David Toussaint. Shouldn't there be a Lithium web part? After all this MSTC runs on Lithium.
David Toussaint
Copper Contributor
Mar 06, 2018
Hi Mark,

I´d like to add another useful Connector that´s somehow missing in your overview.

The SharePoint Online Connector enables the connection of SharePoint Online and Confluence. This way you may embed Confluence pages or blog articles into SharePoint and SharePoint documents or lists into Confluence. Through bidirectional synchronization, the content is always up-to-date and even comments are shared on both platforms.

The app is also available for SharePoint on Premises.

Kind regards,

David Toussaint

Communardo Products GmbH
David Leveille
Steel Contributor
Mar 05, 2018
This is a fantastic way to present Planner data to users outside your organization (until Planner supports that in the future). Thanks, Mark-Kashman!
Brent McKay
Copper Contributor
Mar 01, 2018
Very good.

But a site or page that allows anonymous access links would be great for one off communications, wider audience engagement, Company profile and for government employees who don't want to start a Microsoft account or join your organization but need to see and share something with others from within their own domain. If the external user is a government employee, for example@town.state.gov.whatever and opens a link sent to that email address from a computer on that domain, and the domain is already approved by your organisation for view access, it would be easier to collaborate with those people.

And the more people who can experience SharePoint the better it is for Microsoft 365 Business.
Geoffrey Bronner
Steel Contributor
Feb 21, 2018
Wasn't there a new Yammer we part coming also?

[Parameter(Mandatory = true, HelpMessage = \"Specifies the component instance or Id to add.\", ParameterSetName = ParameterSet_DEFAULT3RDPARTY)]
[Parameter(Mandatory = true, HelpMessage = \"Specifies the component instance or Id to add.\", ParameterSetName = ParameterSet_POSITIONED3RDPARTY)]\npublic ClientSideComponentPipeBind Component;