Creating new column types in modern SharePoint lists and libraries

First half of calendar year 2018 is our target.

These new hub sites look great. When are they likely to start appearing on tenancies? Can we get access to them for beta testing at all?

Hi all, 

Thank you for your feedback.  We hear you.

You're right that our focus over the past year has been to make it easy for small teams to get started with SharePoint and build simple information architectures and content management schemes for their teams to work smarter.  Aside from labels, we have not done a lot in the past year to enable better information governance management across a division or organization.  

We agree that it's really valuable to be able to manage content structure and governance across multiple sites.  Hub sites, a new Intranet building block that we announced at Ignite this year, will make it possible to manage navigation links, theme, and logo across all sites in the hub.  We're evaluating more site elements that should be configurable across sites in a hub: content types, metadata, views, templates, etc.  

Does this make sense, and do you agree that this is a sensible direction?  Keep in mind that the plan for hub sites is still being developed - nothing is set in stone.  But managing settings and structure across teams is definitely top of mind for us right now.

I've got to concur with most on this thread, it appears that SharePoint Online is being updated to solely support dynamic collaboration for small project teams with little (Read no) consideration for any form of corporate information architecture, metadata standards, classification, security, indeed any good practice Enteprise Information Management practices. It's like the bad old days where IT installed SharePoint and then anyone in the organisation could create their own sites, add everyone to the Owners group, create more sites, create more Owners, more sites, more libraries, more lists, more columns, etc. etc. We need to learn from history otherwise we are doomed to repeat it.

I'm trying to implement governance across our Office 365 environment, we are a small government agency circa 180 users, we need to provide a solution to allow teams to work together and break down our siloes, but we need to do it in a good practice way, so that we can meet our legal and regulatory requirements, ensure minimum security classification is applied, use standard enterprise taxonomies, content types, columns, so we can use standard business Workflows, provide oversight and so forth. Everything I've seen from SharePoint Online seems to be focussed on ad-hoc project teams, not corporate content management for medium to large organisations, this needs to change. At the moment it's like trying to herd cats.

Who in Microsoft can I communicate this glaring gap in the strategy too?

I see no reason not to empower users. I have always worked with two streams in office 365. A corporate stream that is controlled and is built using site columns, content types and the like and the user stream that allows them to build and configure their office 365 group sites as they see fit. It's great Microsoft is giving users more power with these new columns, flows etc.

If you use Powershell to control your tenancy then it takes no time at all to fix any user column issues.

Jim Duncan, a while back I created some PnP PowerShell script  to upgrade list columns to site columns. If there is any interest then I could look into making this do the job for all lists in all sites.

I would have to do some more testing with it but then I could share it within the PnP PowerShell project on GitHub 

I like this functionality for quick demonstrations and prototyping, but what's missing to make this truly useful from a global/enterprise Information Architecture perspective is:

1. Suggest existing Site Columns of the selected data type
2. When a new column actually is created, automatically remove spaces and other characters from the Internal name of the new column
   1. Same for the URL of new Lists and Libraries
3. Ability to 'promote' List Columns to Site Columns
4. Ability to 'promote' List Item schema to a Content Type

I'm more interested in how you did those icons seeing as that functionality to do it via calculated fields has now been removed?

I would compare building intranets with building a house. Do we really want to empower users doing anything?

yes it is great if I can build my own house. But I need some training in electricity, water and basic construction for a good result.

of course I can build a shed, but if I want to build a house I would get an expert in.

The same happens with building sites in SharePoint. Anybody can create a list and this is great! But when looking at the bigger picture it doesn't really work getting a user to build a whole an intranet unless you keep the requirments limited. Yes, the basic bits will be there but adding an extention to what I have got, might not be that easy if the foundations are not right