The SharePoint team has been hard at work with great new updates rolled out in December 2018. This is the comprehensive recap for all things SharePoint, plus the Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop: December 2018 episode – a bonus monthly companion podcast to help answer, "What's rolling out now for SharePoint and related technologies into Office 365?" It's all about supporting good change management based on feedback from you, our listeners/readers - so thank you.
Listen and scroll below (info, links and screenshots) to stay informed on how the SharePoint team finished 2018 - plus a few teasers of what's to come in 2019:
In this podcast episode, I, too, talk with Sean Squires (LinkedIn | Twitter), senior program manager on the SharePoint engineering team, who focuses on all things site designs – when you want to take a programmatic templating approach to using and managing SharePoint.
All the features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Office 365 as of December 2018 (possibly early January 2019 to give realistic wiggle room). Office 365 users -- start your engines!
Page templates (formerly disclosed as "page designs" during Ignite 2018). [Correction: this feature is delayed. Our apologies for the mistake both here in the blog and within the related podcast episode. We will remove this text once it has launched.]; Roadmap ID 33136
View and apply site designs from within a SharePoint site. Moving beyond PowerShell and enabling access from within the user interface (UI). Site owners can access the site design panel to see site designs that have been applied or are available to the site owner who is logged on to apply to their site.
Customize the title region for each page. Modern SharePoint pages and news articles will now have more options to customize the title region of each page, with four layouts, two alignment choices, text badges above the title, the ability to change the displayed author, and show or hide the published date. Own the title and the rest will follow. Make it your own.
Modern pages support section backgrounds – this makes it easier to see the distinct sections and adds visual variety throughout the page. Create additional visual design and clarity as a user scrolls through your content. Now you can add colors from your site’s theme (neutral, soft & strong) to the background of your page sections or leave them white as they are by default.
News – pinning. Within the News web part for SharePoint sites, you can now decide what order the news appears in when viewers land on the page highlighting news articles. Now you will be able to highlight high-value content more easily knowing it is most and/or first visible among the breadth of news being published within a site.
Personalized web parts - Give a personalized experience to your site and page visitors – so they see the content that is theirs and meant for them to experience. When using personalized web parts, people will see their recent sites, their recent documents and news tailored for them. When you add a personalized web part to the page, it is aware of who is signed in and gives them a unique, relevant experience to the content and information you are promoting to them.
Microsoft Stream webpart update – When you embed a Stream channel, you can now sort by trending, date, views and likes - plus its playback is now supported within the SharePoint mobile app - BOOM stream that on the go!
Learn more about using web parts on SharePoint pages in Office 365. Learn more about building your modern intranet on SharePoint in Office 365.
Sharing links that block download. Users will be able to share a link to Office documents that blocks recipients from downloading copies, yet still allows them to view the document in Office Online via a Web browser. In Link Settings - choose "block download" for view-only links.
OneDrive Fluent UI. OneDrive is going Fluent. The OneDrive UI is not only cleaner, but more helpful with things like showing Recommended files, file cards for a deeper look into a file on-hover, activity and lifecycle feedback/indicators about comments/edits/@mentions, and last but not least - the Fluent update will bring the full-fidelity of shared libraries into OneDrive – the common experience of working with files across Office 365.
Yammer group files in Office 365 connected groups will now be stored in SharePoint. Yammer is rolling out changes to file storage for Yammer files in Office 365 connected groups. Formerly, all Yammer files were stored in Yammer cloud storage. Once your organization gets these changes, all new Yammer files for connected groups will be stored in SharePoint but will still accessed from within Yammer. As part of this change, all existing files stored in Yammer for connected groups are made read-only. This means that instead of editing a file, you'll need to download and re-upload the file, and edit the newly uploaded version.
Permanently docked "social bar" (aka, Content Bar) at the bottom of pages – contains the page Likes, Comments, Views and Save for Later – will now be permanently docked above the comments of a page or news article. This makes for a cleaner, more consistent experience while reading and acting on a SharePoint page or news article.
Create a reminder using Microsoft Flow on lists and libraries when using a date column. You can enter the number of days in advance for the reminder, based on the selected date column. Based on your selection, you’ll get an email from Microsoft Flow for any items or documents ‘x’ days in advance of the selected data column value. And here is a roadmap Flow for you: Remind reader to listen to the Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop: December 2018 episode. ;) We’ll remind/tweet you in a few days (from @SharePoint) …
Column formatting. Choose the color schemes for SharePoint list and document library columns with simple inline formatting edit pane. Custom formatting lets you add conditional coloring based on column values for choice, date and Boolean columns, without scripting. You can apply a pre-built template, or you can adjust the colors manually if desired.
Location column for SharePoint lists in Office 365. Add rich location data from Bing Maps. You can then filter sort and search by any aspect of the location data (city, state, address, etc). The data gets added automatically across automatic columns of your choice; just type in the name of a place or business, select the columns of info you are interested and all the data flows in to your list. Also, you can now drag and drop columns to reorder them left to right, or vice versa. Might this be GPS (Groovily Positioning SharePoint)? We think so ;).
Scan items into OneDrive and add custom metadata. We are also adding new functionality to the capture experience on iOS and Android so that when saving a scanned document or image to a site document library, users will be able to add metadata on that document or image. The metadata will be uploaded – along with the document or image – to the selected document library. This capability helps unlock potential new uses cases and workflows right from your phone.
The new SharePoint admin center in Office 365 is now 100% available to all admins worldwide. This gives all Office 365 admins the ability to set the new experience as the default SharePoint admin center experience. The update draws heavily on our modern principles. And it’s not just a pretty user interface lift. The SharePoint admin center update includes: managing group-connected sites, options to manage and configure hub sites and associated sites, a simplified configuration of sharing controls that are more aligned to the OneDrive sharing controls, options to allow for configuring default site creation properties, adjust policies (access control page), progress indicators, greater reliability, and more. Manage more, manage easier. And did we already say it just looks nicer?
Control access from unmanaged devices - as a SharePoint or Global admin in Office 365. You can block or limit access to SharePoint and OneDrive content from unmanaged devices. Limiting access allows users to remain productive while addressing the risk of accidental data loss on unmanaged devices. Users on unmanaged devices will have browser-only access with no ability to download, print, or sync files. They also won't be able to access content through apps, including the Microsoft Office desktop apps. When you limit access, you can choose to allow or block editing files in the browser.
PnP Tenant Templates (Like the SharePoint Starter Kit; PnP = Patterns and Practices). Helps provision complex solutions and structures within your Office 365 environment (your tenant). PnP Tenant templates, XML-based manifests that can be used to define tenant level structures like sites, site collections, SPFx solutions, permissions, themes, Site Designs and Site Scripts.
Client-side Object Model (CSOM) - minimal updates to the CSOM API surface for .NET client apps for SharePoint in Office 365. SharePoint Online Management Shell has also been updated. In all, this release helps as you programmatically work with content on SharePoint sites - specifically: comments on files, some tenant wide properties and commands, plus a few Project Client specific properties and methods.
SharePoint in Office 365 moves to React 16. For modern pages and custom elements that use the SharePoint Framework solutions (like custom web parts and page extensions) – we now support the latest React update. No impact if you were using React 15. A single page could have React 15 & 16 side-by-side without impact.
Next steps "tips and tricks.” You’ll see a new megaphone icon in the header of SharePoint sites. When you hover over it, SharePoint will help you learn how to do and try actions based on the context of what you are doing and where you are doing it from. Consider this inline help and guidance from within SharePoint. Oh if Clippy had a megaphone… ;).
OneDrive help articles are now on docs.microsoft.com (documentation for IT, end users and developers). It's a cleaner and faster experience and broken into four main areas: Plan deploy and manage, Hybrid deployment, End user training, and Dev resources. https://docs.microsoft.com/onedrive
Microsoft Teams "Adoption Hub" https://aka.ms/TeamsAdoption - helps simplify the deployment and adoption process for Microsoft Teams. The hub is broken down into three stages: Start, Experiment and Scale. Includes "Day in the Life" training sheets, an overall service adoption project plan, example personas and helpdesk guidance to name a few.
Reminder emails - When someone shares a file with you, OneDrive sharing will send you an email with a link. It tracks whether this link is clicked within 7 days. If this link is not clicked within 7 days, the service sends a Reminder email to that same recipient.
News - audience targeting - design more targeted experiences for how people do or do not see news within the News web parts you configure.
Thanks for tuning in and/or reading this episode/blog of the Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop - December 2018 (blog/podcast). We’re open to your feedback in comments below to hear how both the Roadmap Pitstop podcast episodes and blogs can be improved over time.
We had a lot to share and more to come next year - happiest of new years to you and yours. Please stay engaged. Ask questions. Push us where you want and need to get the best information and insights. We're here to put both our and your best change management foot forward.
Stay safe out there on the roadmap -- and thanks for listening.
Happy now and future trails,
Mark
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