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Microsoft SharePoint Blog
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SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop: June 2019

Mark-Kashman's avatar
Mark-Kashman
Icon for Microsoft rankMicrosoft
Jul 01, 2019

Welcome to June 2019 – you made it. And so glad to see you here. We’ve got a lot of change management info to share with you from this last month. This is the all-inclusive recap for all things SharePoint and related technology, plus the Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop: June 2019 podcast episode – a bonus monthly audible companion to help answer, "What's rolling out now for SharePoint and related technologies into Microsoft 365?"

 

To answer that question, listen and scroll below (info, links and screenshots galore) to stay informed on what features and updates arrived this past month - plus a few teasers of what's to come:

 

 

In this podcast episode, I, too, talk with Kaleem Rahman (LinkedIn), product manager on the Yammer engineering team who focuses on supporting customers, to better aid knowledge creation and consumption throughout their organization. We discuss the new Yammer Q&A capabilities, the design behind it and a few teasers of what will come next in this space. In the end, you’ll see why I marked all his answers as best response to my questions 😊.

 

Kaleem Rahman, product manager on the Yammer engineering team (Microsoft) [Intrazone guest].

All the features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Office 365 as of June 2019 (possibly early July 2019).

 

Hold on to something… here we go!

 

Inform and engage with dynamic employee experiences

Build your modern intranet on SharePoint in Office 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 and welcoming nature of your intranet.

 

Yammer Q&A features

Now it’s easy to categorize a Yammer post as a question. Denoted by unique styling, questions help people identify general discussions from those that require a response. Once the question is posted, the author or any group admin can also now mark the best response as a best answer. This makes knowledge more discoverable. The collective knowledge significantly improves when communities offer places where people can get questions answered.

 

You can post questions in a Yammer group, and the question poster or any group admin can mark the best answer to a question.

 

New Yammer files in Office 365 groups will be stored in SharePoint

Yammer is rolling out changes to file storage for files uploaded to Yammer in Office 365 connected Yammer groups. Formerly, all files uploaded to Yammer were stored in Yammer cloud storage. Once your organization gets these changes, all new files uploaded through Yammer in Office 365 connected Yammer groups will be stored in the group's default SharePoint document library. These files can still be accessed from within Yammer.

 

 

Organization assets

Digital assets can help you tell a more dynamic story, which is why SharePoint pages already support images and logos from web search, file upload, and site assets. Organization assets lets you register one or more document libraries via PowerShell as a special source for images, such as photos and logos, across all sites. The Organization assets libraries are available when you add images to page headers, galleries, or other web parts.

 

Once established, people can browse for organization assets by clicking “Your organization” when adding an image page and news headers, image/gallery web parts and more.

 

Record and upload videos with the Stream mobile app and share anywhere

Now you can upload existing videos from your camera roll or other online services like OneDrive, right from your mobile. And record new videos from within your mobile app in a secure, compliant way with the built-in video capture capability.

 

Upload and record videos from your mobile device straight into Microsoft Stream in Office 365 using the Stream mobile app.

 

SharePoint hub sites limit raised to 2000

SharePoint hub sites provide an important building block for your intranet. They are the "connective tissue" you use when organizing families of team sites and communication sites together. A hub site (most commonly created from a communication site) brings together numerous other sites, and now the number of hub sites you can create in your tenant has increased.

 

As announced at SPC19, the number of SharePoint hubs that you can create per tenant will go up from 100 to 2000.

 

 

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 powers teamwork – to better collaborate on proposals, projects, and campaigns throughout your organization – and is integrated with Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Yammer, Stream, Planner and much more.

 

Adobe Document Cloud now integrates with SharePoint and OneDrive

Adobe Acrobat, Adobe Document Cloud and Adobe Sign are standalone document applications in their own right, but because they deeply integrate across a number of Microsoft 365 products - the files continue to stay in SharePoint and OneDrive, you keep the benefits of unified management and governance for content.

 

Adobe Acrobat PDF web tools, accessible from SharePoint and OneDrive. With this integration, PDF files will remain in-place within Office 365 (in a person's OneDrive or in a SharePoint document library) - when viewing, sharing or editing; aka, single source of truth.

Adobe Document Cloud also now supports single sign-on with Azure Active Directory, dramatically simplifying log-in and avoiding the need to manage multiple account sign-in. That means you'll have the major capabilities to work with PDF files on the web and in the context of SharePoint, like inline commenting and drawing.

 

 

Microsoft Search comes to OneDrive

Microsoft Search is an intelligent, enterprise search experience from Microsoft that applies the artificial intelligence technology (AI) from Bing and deep personalized insights surfaced by the Microsoft Graph, to make search more effective for you, increasing productivity and saving you time, it’s just a click away, across all of your applications, your desktop, and your browser.

 

And now it comes to OneDrive. A new search box appears at the top of the page in the OneDrive suite header and provide a consistent place to access the search functionality making it easy to discover all files and folders.

 

Microsoft Search in OneDrive allows you to discover relevant information to help you get work done where you’re working through intelligent results and sophisticated refinement.

 

On-hover file cards - inside Look for .docx file types

When you hover you mouse over a Word doc file name, you'll see the new File Card experience, and now you will see a 'Time to read' estimate. In addition, via 'At a glance' and alongside file activity information, you will be able to see key sentences from within the Word document - all before truly committing to opening it.

 

 

File cards show important, intelligent information like “Inside look” and activity highlights alongside name, views and more.

 

Configure OneDrive to automatically sync your SharePoint team site shared libraries

OneDrive team site automount is now rolling out. This feature offers administrators the ability to automatically connect and synchronize specific SharePoint team site document libraries as part of a OneDrive deployment. To help configure a team site to sync automatically, we’ve provided a new group policy (“Configure team site libraries to sync automatically”) for admins to deploy; to be clear, these are the document libraries within group-connected team sites that appear under the “Shared libraries” list within a person’s OneDrive user interface.

 

Specify SharePoint team site libraries to sync automatically the next time users sign in to the OneDrive sync client (OneDrive.exe).

 

SharePoint and Teams: you can now tell if a SharePoint document library folder is connected to Teams channel

It's easier to tell which folders within your library have an associated Teams channel - especially if you recently groupified and teamified a previous classic team site. That means the chat capability associated to it is visible and actionable right from within the SharePoint user interface. And SharePoint helps users understand that some actions, like delete or rename of a channel-connected folder, need to happen through the Teams app.

 

When a group-connected SharePoint team site is connected to Microsoft Teams, you will see a "Go to channel conversations" button indicating that the folder is connected to a Teams channel.

 

Related technology

Microsoft To-Do is now available on Mac for your daily task management needs. If you’ve already been using our app on Android, iOS, Windows, or web, then the Mac app will feel very familiar. Sign in and all your tasks will be waiting for you, ready to be checked off.

 

The Microsoft To-Do for Mac app joins iOS, Android, Windows and web.

 

July 2019 teasers

Psst, still here? Still reading? If so, here’s a few teasers of what’s to come to production next month…

 

  • Thing 1 - OneDrive sync client B2B sync across organizations. [roadmap ID: 33413]
  • Thing 2 - Direct links to individual PowerPoint slides [roadmap ID: 51537]

 

… shhh, tell everyone.

 

Helpful, ongoing change management resources

 

Thanks for tuning in and/or reading this episode/blog of the Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop – June 2019 (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.

 

Engage with us. 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 and reading.

 

Happy Summer monthing,

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

 

The Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop - June 2019 graphic showing some of the highlighted features released in June 2019.

 

Updated Jul 09, 2019
Version 4.0
Product Updates
  • ChrisWebbTech's avatar
    ChrisWebbTech
    MVP
    Jul 01, 2019

    Hey Mark-Kashman anyway you can give an update on what happened to Audience Targeting from the April pitstop? Seems it's a few months past time and curious if we can expect this soon or did something get discovered that's pushing it further back?

     

     

    Thanks!

  • Robin Sommo's avatar
    Robin Sommo
    Copper Contributor
    Jul 25, 2019

    Hello - I'm looking for an update on the availability of the preview feature that will permit the renaming of site URLs.  I read about it here: https://office365itpros.com/2019/05/02/sharepoint-online-rename-site-names/  The article seems to be saying that this will only work with sites listed in the SPO Active Sites list, which has become only site collections.  I need to know if it will be possible to do this for a subsite, so I can counsel my user on whether to rebuild their sites (losing all links to them) or wait for this new capability.  Thank you - Robin Sommo

  • DaithiG's avatar
    DaithiG
    Steel Contributor
    Jul 01, 2019

    OneDrive sync client B2B sync could be a game changer for us.

  • Jenny Bruce's avatar
    Jenny Bruce
    Iron Contributor
    Jul 02, 2019

    Hi Mark-Kashman 

     

    For Organization Assets, do you know where and when the 'how to' information for Powershell (or the script) will be published?

     

    My SharePoint Admin tells me she has not seen any new Powershell scripts/solutions that would allow her to register any of our document libraries as organisation assets.

    I just found the answer myself - documentation for Organization Assets was published 25 June 2019 in docs.microsoft.com.  For anyone else looking for this the article is Create an organization assets library

  • 4lexius4 world's avatar
    4lexius4 world
    Brass Contributor
    Jul 02, 2019

    Great news, what about new Home Sites? Can you please give an update? Same for organizational news (audience targeting)

    Thanks in advance.

  • KevinCrossman's avatar
    KevinCrossman
    MVP
    Jul 25, 2019
    robin Subsite URLs have been changable for years (in the site settings for each site), though as maybe you are hinting this does break inbound links to the site (and any subsites). I don't believe that the renaming of Site URLs (technically: site collections) would support subsites, because the SharePoint admin panel doesn't deal with them at all.
  • Robin Sommo's avatar
    Robin Sommo
    Copper Contributor
    Jul 26, 2019

    KevinCrossman 

    Hi Kevin, thank you for your response.  I am aware of the method for changing site urls without preserving existing links.  It was the preservation of links that interested me.  It's unfortunate that the new SharePoint admin panel, while being an improvement in so many ways, removes the ability to administer the thousands of individual sites in the site collections that were set up before the advent of SharePoint Online.