Today, at Microsoft Ignite we showed new innovations for content collaboration in the modern workplace. We showed how SharePoint and Microsoft 365 combine power and simplicity to meet your evolving business needs while ensuring ease of use for all. This balance is empowering organizations to better engage employees, teams to work together on content in new ways, and all employees to easily access and collaborate on files to get work done.
If you didn’t catch the session at Ignite or live streamed, I encourage you to read the highlights below and watch the session, soon available on-demand.
Employee engagement across your organization
SharePoint sites and pages let you share news, vision, knowledge, and services across the organization. At the SharePoint Virtual Summit this past May, we outlined our vision for SharePoint news to empower all communicators to create and distribute information to the right audiences, across the organization. Today, we showed new ways for you to create beautiful articles faster, including page designs and powerful new web parts, and news links that enable you to share any content, including external articles, as news. We also demonstrated new ways to deliver news using audience targeting, and to publish important articles with visual tags that designate organizational news.
Today, video is becoming the preferred medium to create compelling news, communications and training. Microsoft Stream, the intelligent video service in Microsoft 365, powers video experiences on SharePoint sites and live and on-demand events in Stream, Yammer and Microsoft Teams. The new Microsoft Stream mobile app lets you discover and engage with video across the organization, featuring offline viewing so you can catch up with video even in low- or no-bandwidth environments.
Over the last year, we’ve given customers the building blocks for beautiful, fast, natively mobile sites and pages. Today we unveiled our vision and roadmap for modern portals and digital employee experiences that are dynamic, personalized, social, and actionable. To help you easily create these experiences, we introduced new portal web parts, including personalized views of recent documents, recent sites, and personalized news. We introduced over a dozen features to make your sites and pages look amazing. We announced new mega-menu and site footer features, both of which rank among the most eagerly anticipated enhancements for SharePoint portals. And we showed the new Yammer conversations web part that you can use to engage your audience or build a community site that brings content and conversation together to foster open sharing and learning.
You can organize your intranet with hub sites, which we continue to enhance with events roll-up and hub join approvals. We’re increasing the number of hub sites in a tenant, to 100, and enabling you to manage hub sites more effectively in the new SharePoint Admin Center.
These upcoming features, along with the capabilities we’ve already released, will allow you to replace classic publishing sites and portals. You can plan, with confidence, to create compelling new digital employee experiences in SharePoint.
Flexible solutions for teamwork
We are bringing the full power of SharePoint to groups working in Microsoft Teams. Soon you’ll see a new files experience in Microsoft Teams that will grow to encompass the full capabilities of SharePoint document libraries. You'll be able to create custom views, pin files to the top, add and format custom columns, and gain insights into file activities. The new experience features the familiar files command bar, which, among other things, lets you sync files from Microsoft Teams to your PC or Mac.
Teams also need the power to create solutions for their diverse needs. To enable this, we showed how modern SharePoint pages now support part-to-part communications allowing you to easily build composite apps that can also be surfaced in Teams. Soon you'll be able to add a SharePoint list as a tab in Teams, so you can share data with your group, as well as custom solutions built as SharePoint Framework web parts. You’ll also be able to add Teams apps to SharePoint sites, bringing a breadth of apps to your intranet.
When you're working together on the intranet, in a SharePoint team site, new visual indicators of channel folders will let you know which folders are associated with channels in Teams. And you’ll be able to quickly navigate to Teams with a new link to Teams in the site navigation.
Finally, we're making it possible for you to connect any SharePoint team site to Teams. You can already connect a site to an Office 365 group. Now, with one more click from your site, you'll be able to create a team.
We'll continue to bring SharePoint and Teams closer together, because they're better together, and so that your group can work on the intranet, or in Microsoft Teams, without compromise.
Powerful file collaboration for everyone
Collaborating on files throughout your organization is essential to getting work done. Our customers value the power of our Office apps but would love us to simplify the user experience and make that power more accessible. As we disclosed in June and showed more of today, we’re introducing a beautiful new user experience for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneDrive that streamlines your work and sharpens your focus on what matters.
We’re also introducing simple new ways to work together. You’ll soon be able to add comments with @mentions to all file types in OneDrive including photos, CAD drawings, PDFs, and more. If they don’t already have permission to the document, we’ll help you share it, automatically. They’ll get an email notification with a link to the file so they can join in. And with Office documents, collaborators can work together in real-time with enhanced co-authoring across mobile, web, and desktop versions of Word, PowerPoint and Excel, possible only with Office 365 and only with your files in our cloud.
When you need to access files, there’s nothing simpler than OneDrive. OneDrive connects you to all your files in Office 365—your personal files, and the files shared with you—whether you’re on Windows, Mac, web, iOS or Android. OneDrive Files On-Demand in Windows 10 lets you view and open all your files inside File Explorer, including those from Microsoft Teams and SharePoint, without taking up space on your device. You can work offline and any changes you make are automatically uploaded the next time you connect. Today, we announced OneDrive Files On-Demand for Mac, for our consumer and commercial customers, unifying our OneDrive sync experience across both platforms.
Accelerate content collaboration with AI
We also showed upcoming capabilities that, along with our recent investments, combine the power of AI with content stored in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint to help you be more productive, make more informed decisions, and keep more secure. This included video and audio transcription services coming soon to OneDrive and SharePoint, scan and metadata capture with the OneDrive mobile app, as well as other features the make Microsoft 365 the smartest place to store your content. Additionally, we showed how workflows to enrich your data with AI or to route content for review and approval are easily automated using Microsoft Flow.
Deploy with confidence
Just as we are bringing power and simplicity to the end user experiences, we are doing the same for our admin and management experiences enabling IT Professionals to deploy these capabilities with confidence. We’re releasing a completely revamped SharePoint Admin Center that allow you to manage all sites, including group connected team sites, communication sites, and hub sites. We showed how hub site management supports multi-geo content, allowing your hub sites to aggregate content from across your organization while respecting the data governance needs you have in place.
We’re always looking for ways to help you safeguard your information with our trusted enterprise-grade compliance and security. With Files Restore for OneDrive, we help protect personal files from malicious attacks like ransomware, accidental end-user deletion, or file corruption. And protecting your user’s most important files has never been easier with the ability to move their Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders from their Windows device into OneDrive. Today, we announced similar protections for shared files in SharePoint with Files Restore for SharePoint, a complete self-service recovery solution that allows administrators restore files from any point in time during the last 30 days.
For our on-premises customers we announced SharePoint Server 2019 will be generally available this October, offering modern user experiences, support for the SharePoint Framework and OneDrive Files On-Demand, along with improved hybrid integration with Office 365. As these organizations continue their cloud journey to get the latest innovations and best security, at a lower TCO, they can take advantage of the free SharePoint Migration Tool that now allows you to move complete on-premises SharePoint sites in addition to data from libraries, lists and file shares.
Learn more
While I’m excited to share all this news with you, it’s just the tip of the iceberg for what to expect this week at Microsoft Ignite. You can learn more by watching the many of the Ignite sessions on-demand or by diving into these related posts in the Tech Community:
- Microsoft Search—cohesive search that intelligently helps you find, discover, command, and navigate
- OneDrive announcements at Ignite 2018
- SharePoint powers teamwork in Office 365 – Ignite 2018 announcements
- Build your modern intranet with SharePoint in Office 365 – Ignite 2018 announcements
- Celebrating 10 years and the future of Yammer
- What's new in Microsoft Stream - Ignite 2018 announcements
- What’s new in security, compliance, & administration for SharePoint & OneDrive from Microsoft Ignite
- Elevate organizational knowledge with Microsoft Content Services at Ignite 2018
- Reinventing SharePoint business process at Ignite 2018 - Ignite 2018 announcements
- Do more with SharePoint Development with new capabilities announced at Ignite
Lastly, I want to give a sincere thank you to our great customers and partners in the SharePoint community. I greatly appreciate your support, feedback, and enthusiasm from across the globe and I couldn’t be prouder to be part of the best community in technology! I look forward to connecting with you here at Ignite, in Copenhagen at the European SharePoint Conference, in Las Vegas at the SharePoint Conference North America, or at one of the many SharePoint Saturdays happening in a city near you.
-- Jeff Teper