SharePoint pages and image editing updates in Office 365
Published Jan 09 2018 08:01 AM 65.6K Views
Microsoft

At Ignite 2017, we announced the next wave of innovation coming to SharePoint pages to provide faster time to creation, enhanced control of text and images, increased promotion options, commenting and likes, and visibility on how your content is doing. You are in control of your message. Create it and get it out there to raise awareness and engagement throughout your company.

 

We’re pleased to share that the below features and updates are rolling out to Targeted Release Office 365 customers. Expect them to appear within the coming days and weeks. And soon, beyond Targeted Release, they release to the full production environment. You can track release progress on the public Office 365 Roadmap; note this link is filtered on “SharePoint” items.

 

Let’s dive into the details.

 

Start from existing page

Don’t start from blank! If you have a series of pages you’ve created with a similar layout and design, you can now go to an existing page and use it as a quick start to create a whole new page – but with a head start. From an existing page, click New and then select Start with a copy of this page. The service will create the new page, and you simply jump into updating with new text, images and content updates, with layout, design and common text already in place. And per user feedback, pages (and news) have an improved canvas experience when adding and managing multi-column sections – it is more discoverable where and how you add a new section or web part – with less overlap of “+” buttons.

From a page or news article, click New > "Copy of this page" to start from an existing page.From a page or news article, click New > "Copy of this page" to start from an existing page.

Make your text appear more like you like – rich text editing (RTE) updates

One of the most important aspects of any effective page or news article is the text. And setting the right context alongside the multimedia aspects you pull in. We’ve heard you loud and clear that you want to have a greater set of options to make your message stand out. Wish granted!

 

When you add a Text web part, the embedded rich text editor now gives you greater control for how your text appears. From the inline simple command bar, you can adjust size, bold, underline and spacing. And the real, new, magic of the Text web part lies behind the ellipses on the right side of the simple command bar. Clicking the ellipses opens a broader set of choices – showing all options in the edit pane, like font style, colors and highlights, indent, strikethrough, and the ability to create and manage tables. You, too, can add a link – which now has a page picker experience to add existing SharePoint content quickly.

You can add more color and emphasis to your text within a Text web part, including table creation and editing.You can add more color and emphasis to your text within a Text web part, including table creation and editing.

Learn more about adding text to your page with the Text web part.

 

Image web part now allows editing and photos from Bing

You can easily add an image to a SharePoint page or news article, and now when you do, you can further edit (crop/zoom) it inline to fit the needs of your page/news and layout. You can pull in an image from online (powered by Bing) that are tagged as Creative Common license to enhance your pages and news. Once your images are on the page, you can edit them in line with simple gestures like adjusting the ratio and cropping.

Within an Image web part, tap on the image to bring up a selection of inline image editing tools.Within an Image web part, tap on the image to bring up a selection of inline image editing tools.

Learn more about using the Image web part.

 

Learn more about using web parts on pages and news; this article highlights all web parts that are in production for SharePoint in Office 365.

 

Further promote your pages and news

Beyond your core team, it’s important to then amplify and spread the word proactively about your important content. This is now a one-click action. From an existing page, click the Promote button and choose how you want to increase the reach and impact of your message. You can add a page (or news article) to the site navigation. Or post a page as news to have it automatically flow into the site’s home page, the SharePoint home news section and the SharePoint mobile app News tab. You can kick start an email to a person or group with a preview of the page and an optional message to your selected recipients. Or simply grab a link to the page. Note, the Post as News on this site button may be grayed out if the page you are wanting to promote is already a news article. Also, the first time you publish your page, you'll be prompted to help others find your page with the same promotion pane.

Clicking the Promote button at the top of the page (or news article) brings up the promotion pane to the right.Clicking the Promote button at the top of the page (or news article) brings up the promotion pane to the right.

Learn more about adding a page to a site and promoting it.

 

Page usage Likes, Views, Comments

Once your information is out there, you want to know how it’s doing. Like the Site usage page – which gives site owners a view on how their users are interacting within the site, we introduce a similar view on information at the individual page and news article level.

 

At the bottom of each SharePoint page or news article you’ll see a row of information that tells you how many people have liked your content, how many left comments and total number of views. When you hover over the liked section, you’ll see a list of colleagues who like your ideas. And when you click on comments (and you left commenting on), you’ll jump right into the section at the bottom of the page to read feedback and engage with your audience. It, too, is now possible to click the like icon on an individual comment.

Page usage information (Likes, Views and Comments) appear at the bottom of each page or news article.Page usage information (Likes, Views and Comments) appear at the bottom of each page or news article.

We are always open to feedback via UserVoice and continued dialog in the SharePoint community within 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

 

Note: you can now view the full, corresponding Microsoft Ignite 2017 breakout sessions:

65 Comments
Deleted
Not applicable

Saw these bits @Ignite. I don't remember seeing the Tables but that good to see.  Looking forward to these enhancements as we build out our new company Intranet based on Communication sites and a little bit of Teams.

Iron Contributor

Nice stuff. Keep going, we like it.

 

What is missing is a way to embed an image within a text block. At least, make it available for an hyperlink.

Bronze Contributor
Love those updates. Received everything in late December (except the page statistics) and was wondering when the release would be announced. This week we got the "Create News" button on SharePoint Home as well. Love that one too.
Steel Contributor

These are all great updates and make it even harder to justify the costs of third-party 'customised' intranets.

Brass Contributor
Great updates. With Promote News, is there a way to demote a news to it original state if there is a problem with the content or is not ready?
Brass Contributor

Awesome news, the new functionality in the RTE is cool. Is it possible to apply styling to the tables? It would be great if you could do something like different cell colours, banding etc. 

Microsoft

Hi @Benoit Fournier - I've now heard this feedback three time in the last two weeks. Adding it to my roll up feedback back to my eng peers. We support links, you can sequence Text web part > Image web part > Text web part; but I know what you'd prefer. Cheers, Mark.

Microsoft

Hi @Asish Padhy - we've heard this from a few early adopters, and brought it up as feedback in our pre-release sync - not a blocker for Targeted Release, and certainly one for us to consider. Thanks for articulating here. More coming for news soon, and future iterations rely on user preferences. - Mark.

Microsoft

Hi @James Brennan - not at this time. Tables are funny beasts, and a high-priority to get right during copy/paste & creation inline. We're focused first on formatting, mobile resilience, and edit-ability. Lists and Excel Online still might be better solutions for outcomes where column formatting or cell color variance is required. More here on column formatting for SharePoint lists: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Column-formatting-1f927342-2bed-4745-b727-ff8b7ff96b22. - Mark.

Mark,

Thanks for the update.

 

I know we need walk before we run, but it's pretty common for web-based rich-text editors to provide some styling options (like auto-zebra banding) or an option to manually set the background color for a table cell.  The SharePoint Wiki Pages being one example...  I don't think SharePoint Lists or Excel are good options when what you're trying to do is simply present a nicely formatted table on your page.

Brass Contributor
Thanks @Mark Kashman. Another quick query on the news component, is there a way to disable the Promote News functionality?

We'd also be interested in disabling the Create News link on SharePoint home, and to either remove or reposition the News section on SP home.

 

I think Communications Sites are really well done, and I think it's a great service offering. But, in our company we have another platform for the Comms Sites use case, and having them around only complicates our end-users to understand and comprehend what SharePoint is and what it supposed to be used for. We want people to create O365 Group connected sites, but sometimes they click on the wrong thing in the Create Site panel (the "Team Site" nomenclature (for creating an O365 Group connected site) is also confusing because these sites aren't the "Classic" Team Sites that we've used for many years -- people know that "Team Sites" aren't O365 Group Connected.  "Group Sites" would be a so much more beneficial term for these sites.

Brass Contributor

@Mark Kashman, thanks Mark for the response. It would be great in the next iteration if some simple styles were available for a table as a SharePoint list is going to be overkill for some quick and simple tabular information and Excel Online will make tabular data look like a spreadsheet rather than just a table of information. 

Glad to see the image web part get some love.  I had a client that really struggled with this last month and now I think they should be able to get images to look the way they want now.

Steel Contributor

Great News. Regarding promotions, I would think a rather obvious alternative should be the possibility to promote (share) a page and/or an article to a Yammer group. Will we get this feature, @Mark Kashman?

Copper Contributor

Thanks for the tip! There are some programs that run on SharePoint to make an intranet that do drag and drop for you, enabling rich text without knowing more information: https://www.elevatepoint.com/intranet-platform/ 

Iron Contributor

Will the "Likes, Views and Comments" links appear for existing pages or just for new pages/articles? I look for it daily in my tenants but I still do not see it.  

 

@Mark Kashman I see the other features of this post but not this new footer. 

Deleted
Not applicable

Can the Web Search option be disabled from the insert images dialogues? Creative Commons licensing appears to have multiple tiers of options some of which are "free for non commercial use." Unless the images provided in that search are all guaranteed for free use? 

Copper Contributor

All these nice and fancy features are becoming useless as we are not able to get rid of that huge header with image and Title. Everything else looks cool.

Iron Contributor

@Suresh Rajana it is possible to remove the image from the header, which then makes the header much smaller.

Iron Contributor

Looks great!  Has anyone seen the Likes/Comments/Views feature show up in their tenant?

 

Thanks

Copper Contributor

@Craig Arnoldt even then the title takes lot of space. Waiting for the option to customize layouts.

Brass Contributor

 @Benoit Fournier@Joe McGowan, I'm also unable to see the Likes/Comments/Views feature on my pages.

I wonder if it's something that needs to be enabled? Would appreciate some clarification on this @Mark Kashman

Iron Contributor

 I would also love to see the new Site Usage page.  At the moment, I only see Site Visits and New Items.

Microsoft

Hi @Benoit Fournier - yes, you're not crazy. The team is very close to releasing the page usage information feature, aka, views/comments/likes at the bottom of each news article or page. You should've received a message center post if you are an admin, or know that they are coming soon. Looping in @Alyssa Danesh for additional insight or if you have feedback as you start to use it.

 

Thanks,

Mark 

Microsoft

Hi @Suresh Rajana - if you don't add an image, while in edit mode of the page, hover over the title area and click on the "x" in the upper-left of the title region. When you do this, it collapses the area to only take up the space of your text, removing the assumption that you want an image, even the default one that remains if you don't have a custom one.

 

Hope that helps,

Mark

Brass Contributor

Hi, I really hate to rain on everyone's parade and perhaps I'm missing something but the RTE currently provided for SharePoint online appears woefully simplistic/inadequate. We need comprehensive table and text formatting and the ability to get to HTML when we need to. I'm trying to migrate our Intranet  to O365 but these features appear to be missing? I've had them in current systems for more than 15 years. All I can see at present is bullets, indent and insert a table but no real formatting options for colums/rows/headers/total rows etc. Pasting from Word doesn't work like some of the ignite videos - it puts it all in approx. 150px on left

Please tell me I'm missing something? Grateful for any tips for this newbie - thank you

PS Even this comments facility has a HTML edit feature :) 

Bronze Contributor

@Debra Currie you're not missing anything. That is the current state of the Text Editor. I wouldn't get my hopes up high on HTML editing though. Because as soon as they let people tinker with HTML, all Mobile and App compatibility will be broken, and it's Microsoft who will get the blame, even the the user produced something that cannot be displayed on mobile. 

 

So, for now we'll have to to wait for controls that have been vetted to properly work on all platforms.

Microsoft

Thanks @Ivan Unger for your response. @Debra Currie - as Ivan mentioned in his reply above, experience simplicity and what user can override within RTE is planned such that we can enhance text readability on Mobile, keep color site theme consistent, as well as offer accessible experiences to ALL users. Being able to edit HTML is not something we plan to support yet, not until we can help content author create content by informing them of inaccessible elements/ colors, optimization for mobile and overall site theme/ colors consistency.

 

Here's all the functionality within RTE, that you should already have apart from table styles and alignment (rolling out soon) - @James Brennan@Kevin Crossman - FYI as you asked about some basic styling for tables. @Debra Currie - If there is a text formatting option that you think is missing but highly used, please let us know and we will look into your suggestion. Please leave feedback here as well as tell us via user voice.  

 

RTE.png 

 

 

 

Iron Contributor

@Benoit Fournier @Mohammad Housaini

 

Just received this in my Message Center today.  It should be here very soon for Target Release.

 

New feature: SharePoint Online Social Bar
MC131052
Stay Informed
Published On : February 27, 2018
The Social Bar is a new Office 365 feature. This feature is scheduled to roll out to Targeted Release customers later this week, and it will be available for all organizations on April 1, 2018. This message is associated with Office 365 Roadmap ID: 23708.
 
How does this affect me?
The Social Bar will appear on all modern SharePoint Online pages with the exception of the home page of a site. It will give your users the ability to like a page, see the number of views, likes, and comments on a page, and see the people who have liked a page. This visibility will be available to anyone that has been granted access to view the page. This feature will be launched default on. As administrator, if you wish to disable Social Bar for your organization, you can do so with the following PowerShell command:
 
To disable Social Bar on a tenant level: Set-SPOTenant -SocialBarOnSitePagesDisabled $true
To disable social bar on a site level (for https://prepspo.spgrid.com site): Set-SPOSite -Identity https://prepspo.spgrid.com -SocialBarOnSitePagesDisabled $true
Brass Contributor

When is Hub going to be ready for Targeted Release customers?

@Sohail Tariq

>If there is a text formatting option that you think is missing but highly used

 

Monospaced / "code" formatting

Brass Contributor

@Sohail Tariq, that's awesome thanks for the update. 

 

James. 

Copper Contributor

This is great news.

 

What's up with the logo in the navigation? Is that something which is coming up?

2018-03-08 08_26_02-SharePoint pages and image editing updates in Office 365.jpg

Bronze Contributor

the logo is probably part of a "Hub Site"

Brass Contributor

You can change the logo in Site Information - Under the logo click Change and then upload the image you want.


 

Microsoft

@Vince Marino - we're working on hub sites Targeted Release very soon. The message center post went out last week as a heads up to Office 365 admins.

 

We’re glad to see you’re excited for the coming SharePoint hub sites. Everything we have to date is in this disclosure blog post (which also links to a webinar we gave around the same time): https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Blog/SharePoint-hub-sites-new-in-Office-365/ba-p/1....

 

And soon we’ll have an updated “launch” blog to announce Targeted Release, new documentation for how to set up and configure them, plus a webinar to showcase it along with a broader intranet planning and strategy with Sue Hanley, Sam Marshal and myself on Mar.28.2018, “Intranet Strategy & Planning with SharePoint Hub Sites & Office 365”: https://collab365.community/events/intranet-sharepoint-hub-sites-office-365/.

 

Lots to come, and we’ll soon be very engaged with answering any open questions during an AMA on Mar.23.2018 within the SharePoint portion of the MS Tech Community: http://office.com/sharepoint/community

 

Thanks,
Mark

Iron Contributor

@Mark Kashman Thanks Mark, for all the great additional details.  

How are Likes & Comments going to be handled for exited users?  In the past SharePoint has retained and displayed their user name in all listings, is this still going to be the case with these social features? 

Thanks, and great job for the SP team!

Iron Contributor

@Debra Currie, I agree, I was disappointed to not be able to modify the HTML in a page.  We currently have a lot of current pages where html was used and there will be a lot of html I will need to strip out and use OOTB functionality to migrate pages online.  But, I totally agree with @Ivan Unger, I see why MS did this.  As soon as we go and update and mess with the HTML in a page, all the sudden, chances of breaking OOTB functionality especially with mobile will increase.

 

The suspense is killing me waiting for social Bar...soon I hope!

Brass Contributor

I could not found a way to disable the like feature similar to the comment feature on single pages /news. Is this feature planned? I created already a uservoice for this: https://sharepoint.uservoice.com/forums/329214-sites-and-collaboration/suggestions/33717559-possibil...

Microsoft
Hi @Michael Böhm, Presently, you are only able to turn off page likes at the tenant and site levels. See instructions here: - Tenant: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-online/set-spotenant?view=sharepoint-p... - Site: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/sharepoint-online/set-sposite?view=sharepoint-ps Re: page-level toggle - this is not planned at the moment & I do not have an ETA. Noted your feedback. Thanks!
Copper Contributor

Hello,

 

Just launched the company's Intranet using Modern Sites. The Usage section always shows 0. I am excited to be able to see page views for the intranet with this new feature. 

 

What I am wondering though is, will I be able to have page views only be visible to admins or specific permission groups? That would be the only form of analytics I would be able to have, as page Usage isn't working and I just found out that I can't use Google analytics either. I don't want everyone to see the number of page views.

Iron Contributor

@Mark Kashman I only see the page usage info on the bottom of a "news post." I don't see this on the bottom of a modern page. Will it eventually be available for both, or will it only be an option if you post using the "news post" template?

Microsoft

Hi @Katrin Weixel - it should be there for both. Is there any difference with how much activity the page or news has seen. If one hasn't had a lot of activity, the page information may not show if it has no data to reveal. I'll track it down and let me know.

Iron Contributor

@Mark Kashman - Thanks! I kid you not, a couple hours after I posted my comment, I started seeing the feature in my tenant. LOL! So, nevermind! I see the option now on regular modern pages as well. Thank you!

Copper Contributor

@Katrin Weixel and @Mark Kashman,

 

I am only anle to see the News views on the bottom of the New Webpart of each article title. I cannot see Likes, Views for Home pages or other site pages. 

 

People definitely visit the home page because I have a GPO that makes the Intranet their home page and also for new tabs. 

 

Is it possible that this is not out for my tenant yet? I have Enterprise E3. 

Microsoft
@Guillermo Greco: likes & views won't exist on the homepage, but it should on other modern pages! Would it be possible for you to create a new page and check if the bar shows at the bottom?
Copper Contributor

@Debjani Mitra I just created a new page and the only thing at the bottom is the comments section and the Feedback link on the bottom right corner. There is nothing else..... this is frustrating. Screenshot below: noViewsNoLikes.JPG

Copper Contributor

@Debjani Mitra

Update! 

 

While that social bar is still not visible on my SharePoint, I just discovered that I can get the views of all pages (including the home.aspx page) by hovering over the 'more options' (three dots) button of a page in the sitepages folder in Site Contents. What it tells you is almost everything I wanted to know: number of views and number of viewers. I just wish it would tell me specifically who viewed them so I know who the non-viewers are lol, but this works for me! I am happy! See screenshot below:

viewsAndLikes.JPG

 

 

Microsoft
@Guillermo Greco a question - just checking - are you part of the TR circle of tenants? The social bar has been released to 100% of TR tenants and 50% of Prod tenants. If you are a prod tenant (not in the 50%) that may explain why your are not seeing the bar yet. Re: viewer names - we don't have plans of exposing viewer identity to end users :)
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