SharePoint mobile app updates – find and discover people, content, and answers while on the go
Published Aug 28 2018 09:00 AM 24.4K Views
Microsoft

SharePoint brings the power of AI direct to your mobile device – to unlock discover-ability, provide smoother navigation and cleaner aesthetics. In the in-between moments at work, save time and prioritize without hunting through the ever-growing quantities of information. Cut to the chase – find and discover people, content and answers while on the go.

 

We are excited to release a new design of the SharePoint mobile app – one based on your feedback. The goal is to help you get to the content you care about via the new Find tab – with fewer taps. Plus, this update brings an improved news layout and quick access to recent content.

 

The Find tab, coming to the SharePoint mobile app, uses AI to help you find people, content, and answers to your questions while on the go. Left-to-right: 1) the Find tab on an iPhone, 2) the Find tab on an iPhone after scrolling, and 3) the Find tab showing search results on an Android device after typing “Design guidelines” and tapping the search icon.The Find tab, coming to the SharePoint mobile app, uses AI to help you find people, content, and answers to your questions while on the go. Left-to-right: 1) the Find tab on an iPhone, 2) the Find tab on an iPhone after scrolling, and 3) the Find tab showing search results on an Android device after typing “Design guidelines” and tapping the search icon.

Keeping connected on the go – Find what you need

AI builds an understanding of what you work on, how you work, and how your colleagues’ work relates to you. We bring this power and intelligence to you at your fingertips.

 

A new Find tab – what was three tabs is now one, and it’s gotten some super powers infused with AI. The new Find tab is one tap into expertise and knowledge across your organization. It brings a best-in-class mobile search experience, with an intelligent understanding of you and what you most need at any given time. The new Find tab collapses Sites, Links, People and Search into one, streamlined experience. It, too, is where you will find quick answers, sites, people and more – in an efficient, tailored flow of what you’re looking for, even before you go looking.

 

From the moment you tap into the Find tab – even before you start typing in keywords, names or phrases – you’ll see quick access to sites and people you were recently working on and with, across your devices. Scroll through the experience and see recommendations of recent files, and people that have been identified as relevant to you. And when you perform a search, the results refine as you type. Search history and popular queries throughout your organization make it easy to find things. The power of the new Find tab transforms search into quick access and action.

 

On the left, the new SharePoint mobile app Find tab as seen on an iPad, and on the right, the home page experience when you click into a SharePoint team site.On the left, the new SharePoint mobile app Find tab as seen on an iPad, and on the right, the home page experience when you click into a SharePoint team site.

 

Beyond the Find tab, the SharePoint mobile app allows you to:

  • Browse your sites, files, people and more to get back to what you were working on 
  • Access your personalized view of team sites, communication sites, and news posts 
  • Tap on a person to get to their contact card and see who they work with and what they are working on
  • Create news posts on the go and share your updates, reports, status, and experiences with your team
  • Receive notifications when people around you publish news articles and engage on ones you’ve published.

 

Updated views on several experiences within the SharePoint mobile app. From left-to-right: the Me tab on an Android device, 2) the News tab an Android device, and 3) a SharePoint team site on an iPhone.Updated views on several experiences within the SharePoint mobile app. From left-to-right: the Me tab on an Android device, 2) the News tab an Android device, and 3) a SharePoint team site on an iPhone.

 

In all, this is our most significant SharePoint mobile apps update. We’ve simplified most everything to help you focus on the tasks you’ve told us help you engage your colleagues and get work done daily. Make your productivity on the go fast and simple – get the SharePoint mobile app today. And then learn more on how to set up and use the SharePoint mobile apps; support documentation will get fully updated during rollout.

 

Note: complete rollout of the updated design will take several weeks, and at this stage, the updated design is only applicable when accessing SharePoint in Office 365. The apps still support SharePoint Server on-premises; however, you would not see the new Find tab experience when you are accessing SharePoint from on-premises.  

 

Dive into on-demand resources from the two related events to learn more about this SharePoint mobile app update

To learn more about the updated SharePoint mobile app, please review the related events originally held live and now on-demand with related resources:

 

  • AMA | “SharePoint mobile apps AMA” within the Microsoft Tech Community - the SharePoint mobile product team was online for an hour of Q&A and feedback. No question was too big, and they all fit into the intranet in your pocket.
    • Held Thursday, August 30th, 2018 from 9am – 10am PT (5pm – 6pm UTC)
    • Review the entire AMA event Q&A [FREE]

 

  • WEBINAR | “SharePoint mobile app - Smart AI design update” – Microsoft introduces a new design for the SharePoint mobile app based on your feedback. See the new design and built in AI in action for yourself. We showcased the updated SharePoint mobile app, to show you how you can find and discover the content you care about: sites, people, files, news – all with fewer taps and more AI smarts powering the experience. Nate Clinton and Mark Kashman shareed and demo'ed all things SharePoint mobile.

 

Thanks,

Mark Kashman, senior product manager – SharePoint

 

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Q: When can I expect to see the updated SharePoint mobile app on my device?

A: You will begin to see this change very soon for both iOS and Android. Note: this change will be introduced gradually. You may not see this feature yet or it may look different than what is described before rollout is complete by mid-September 2018.

 

Q: Will I see the new Find tab experience when I connect to a SharePoint Server on-premises?

A: Not currently. When you connect to SharePoint Server on-premises (2013 or higher), the SharePoint mobile app will default to the previous Search tab experience.

26 Comments
Brass Contributor

The article only mention iOS and Android.  Are there any plans for a Windows 10 UWP app?  It would very helpful, specially for Surface Pro users.

Brass Contributor

Looking forward to both events. Great work Mark & Team.

Brass Contributor

Any plans to make on premise users happy and use this new redesigned app? :)

Brass Contributor

I am sorry, but I am not sure I like what I am seeing. Simplification is nice, but oversimplification is not. Not sure when the Sites button was removed, but sites are a natural building block fo the Sharepoint. And it got removed. In opposition - how useful is the News button? How many of your sites are going to use News? Few percents? I know we can get to Sites using Find capability, but design wise, that is not a natural solution for many users. It also contradicts the Sharepoint central website in terms of O365, which is all about Sites, not News. And even more - OneDrive app contains a Sites button - go figure. I am really disappointed for Sites button being removed.

Microsoft

Thanks for the great feedback all!  @Petr Krenželok …  we designed the new experience to primarily get you to your content you care about quickly.  With sites, we've put it front and center in the Find tab knowing that it is still a key aspect of your SharePoint experience, and then we've also made it easier to get the specific content directly from the "..." menu next to each site; through the people section; through the files section; and also through the "more sites" screen, that will have followed sites and more frequent sites.  That, along with search, we believe will get you to your content fast.  We realize it's a bit of a change, so I'm eager to hear what you think about it once you've had some time to play with it a bit.  Thanks, and keep the feedback coming!

Bronze Contributor

@Petr Krenželok, I think you are going to hear more announcements about organizational news at Ignite at the end of September.

Copper Contributor

Any plan to redesign for Windows 10 Mobile app?

Brass Contributor

@Eric DavisWe've designed our own News app for SP 2010 back then, along with translation workflows, so that news could be posted on foreign branches, etc. So yes, news can be a nice thing to have. But not on a per-site basis. Most enterprises are not companies in a sense of MS, IBM or other big guys, where search across the company is essential I know all my colleagues and don't need to search who does what. But - we have apps like invoice approval, sites, which don't need any kind of News. But ppl need to get to them. Why should they go via a Search button facility? I still think, that Sites button should stay on the front page, along the News, if you wish so - there is enough of space there for both. I wonder if there was enough of feedback from corporate / customer environments, or was it just internal MS decision. I still can't believe what I am seeing and how much of fanfare such a bad design decision actually gets ...

Copper Contributor

@Nate Clinton, I don't know why you're so quick to dismiss the comments from @Petr Krenželok. You know what they say, "if you've seen one SharePoint implementation, you've seen one". How do you know what the user cares about? Companies use SharePoint in so many different ways for so many purposes... I've worked with dozens of SharePoint clients, most who use SharePoint for data and integration and workflow purposes, and Find is rarely used. Especially on a cell phone, why make users go through that hassle? Maybe if prior to presenting the menu, it actually looked into the statistics on Items, News, Tasks, Libraries etc. and gave the fastest paths to those based on actual and most recent usage - much like a database optimizer - that would be very helpful.

Microsoft

Hi @Eric Berkowitz... definitely not dismissing Petr's feedback.  You are totally right on when you say that everyone uses SharePoint a bit differently.  We've tried to develop a set of experiences that provide the most to the largest set of users, while still ensuring that we have great experiences for the various workloads like files, lists, sites, etc.  We'll continuously update and adjust as we learn more about what people think of the new layout.  We did do quite a bit of research with customers on the new experience prior to releasing, and we'll continue to do that (along with collecting data, and collecting feedback like this) to ensure we bring you all the best possible SharePoint experience on mobile.  Thanks!

Iron Contributor

@Mark Kashman Hi, I'm just watching the Teams event recording now. Can I ask, how many users did it broadcast to when it was live? And now that it's a recording, do you still get viewer stats?

Copper Contributor

Is ADFS supported?

Microsoft

Hi @Matthias Z'Brun… currently we support NTLM and FBA for on-prem.  Thanks!

Copper Contributor

@Nate Clinton: Did you know if it's planned to support ADFS soon?

Microsoft

@Matthias Z'Brun… it's planned, but I don't have a timeline currently.

Copper Contributor

One update I would really like to see for the SharePoint App is for support for List Lookup columns which currently don't work on the Mobile App.

We have found clients that wish to use the SharePoint Mobile App for basic CRUD applications but have been unable to because of the lack of support for SharePoint List Lookup columns.

Is this something that can be looked into?

Microsoft

Hi @Lachlan Bowden, we are definitely looking at ways to improve the list experience.  Are there specific types of lookup columns you are interested in (some are more complex for us to do on mobile than others)?

 

Thanks!
Nate

Copper Contributor

Hi Nate - thanks for the reply.

I think ideally it would be good to see an identical experience between SharePoint on the browser and on the App. 

 

One use case we have had is for nurses using a sharepoint list - 'patients' to select a hospital from a parent list - 'hospital'. In this case each hospital item has individual permissions set so the nurses can only select from a hospital that they are have read permissions on. On the browser it works perfectly but for the app the lookup column is inactive.

 

But for the general list experience in SharePoint it would also be nice to see some other improvements in how columns can be used - one thing that I can think of is to use lookup columns in calculated columns. These are the sorts of changes that would go a long way to make SharePoint a stronger tool for record management. I still find in project work we run into occasional limitations in SharePoints lists that necessitates awkward workarounds.

 

Microsoft

Got it @Lachlan Bowden... thanks for the feedback/details!

 

Nate

Copper Contributor

@Nate Clinton

 

Thanks Nate

If you are still following this another nice feature to see in SharePoint would be to have a new default permission "contribute without delete" for record management scenarios (the permissions would be identical to contribute but without delete). Whilst it isn't too difficult to create custom permissions this one is common enough so it would be nice to have this as a straight-out-of-the-box feature to save the hassle of having to break permission inheritance.

 

 

Microsoft

Got it, thanks @Lachlan Bowden!

Microsoft

Hi @Abraham John & @Daniel Velez - thanks for similar feedback and questions about a Windows mobile experience. We have mapped our development priorities with what we see in the marketplace, and for now have moved away from deeper investment in our app that solely focuses on the Windows 10 mobile phone (Windows mobile phone devices); thus main focus on iOS and Android. Also, we can appreciate a more app-like experience on laptop - especially touch-oriented Windows machines like Surfaces. It's an area of review how we improve our mobile story across a variety of devices and form factors with equal weight on Web and mobile development. Keep the feedback coming and we'll keep adding it to the wave of want - if you know what I mean. Thanks, Mark.

Microsoft

Hi @DazzaR - we had a peek of 230 people live during the webinar. And since, we've had a little over twice as many people consume it on-demand - most within the first few weeks. Thanks, Mark.

Microsoft

Hi @Lachlan Bowden - this is a feature you can enable on a document library - where people can continue to work on document, but not be able to delete them. This is a part of our legal holds (eDiscovery) offering. Looping in @Bill Baer who is our SME in this area should you have any follow up questions. Thanks, Mark.

Iron Contributor

Hi Mark.  I have a question.  If you set up a list view to be the only public view and make it the standard default mobile view, then set your list to filter by a person field that is equal to [Me], why does the default mobile view in this app show every list item instead of being the filtered view?

Microsoft

@John Warner... I replied to the email you sent separately to see if we can figure out what's going on.  Thanks!

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‎Sep 05 2018 04:45 PM
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