New web parts coming to SharePoint – August 2019
Published Aug 28 2019 06:51 PM 57.4K Views
Microsoft

Pages deliver great content and news to your organization.  We’ve heard your feedback for more ways to create rich, beautiful experiences through SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.  In addition to our out-of-the-box page templates, you can easily add interactivity and automation with SharePoint web parts.  Here are our latest updates starting targeted release in summer 2019.

 

Button & Call to Action 

The Button and Call to Action web parts allow you to engage page viewers through guided experiences. For example, you can provide focused text on a button.  Clicking it brings viewers to their next content experience.  Furthermore, with the Call to Action web part you can add explanatory text or even a background image to further draw viewers’ attention.

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World Clock & Weather updates  

We’re also adding a World Clock web part and updating the Weather web part. You can now add individual cities/locations, or a group of locations to a web part.

 

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Hero gets secondary call-to-action link for large tiles 

In the hero web part, you’ve asked us for two links on larger tiles. The primary link connects to content, while the secondary link can help with other initiatives, such as employee engagement and discussion.

 

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At Microsoft, we already use a similar method to encourage employees to discuss internal content on Yammer, while we leverage LinkedIn Elevate to enable employees to share and discuss public content on social media (LinkedIn, Twitter, etc.).

 

LinkedIn Elevate lets an organization curate external news articles to internal employees.  As staff use Elevate to promote articles to their channels, the organization can marshal a much broader team of “posters” to amplify select content, and track impact and engagement through centralized reporting.

 

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News gets hero tiles as a layout 

As more readers see the Hero web part (it’s the default for communication sites), many have asked for similar layouts for the News part.  Done and done. 

 

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Highlighted Content with custom query filtering 

The Highlighted Content web part is a great multi-gadget tool for modern pages. It lets you filter for selected sets of documents by time or relevance.  Now, using the new custom query filtering option for Highlighted Content, you can now craft CAML or KQL to display precise sets of content.  You even have the option to combine multiple CAML or KQL filters together using AND, OR, and NOT operators.  For example, you can filter for document types, authors or other custom metadata across any sites in your tenant.

 

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Email roll-ups of missed SharePoint news posts

SharePoint can send you emails rolling up recent unread news posts.  You can click on each news post in the email separately.  Clicking on the "See more news" button takes you to your SharePoint start page, where you can access your complete news feed.

To stop receiving emails for missed news posts, simply click on the Unsubscribe link in the footer.

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Conclusion

Thanks again for all your feedback here on TechCommunity and on UserVoice.  We’ll keep more features coming soon.

12 Comments
Copper Contributor

Thanks @Chris McNulty for the articles, Cant wait to start leveraging these new functionalities. Ability to have the Hero webpart display news is a big plus to us.

Brass Contributor

Three words: MODERN MONTHLY CALENDAR! https://sharepoint.uservoice.com/forums/329214-sites-and-collaboration/suggestions/19329577-modern-c...

 

Sharepoint is a business tool, not a frontpage website designer that would need fancy hero elements spreading across half of the site or sparkling call to actions buttons! The whole Sharepoint thing is going waaaay to much into form instead of functionality!

Brass Contributor

Beautiful!!! I saw a demo of some of these features at SharePoint Fest Seattle last week. So exciting! Any chance any of these are planning to come to SharePoint Server 2019 on-premise?? 

Copper Contributor

@allyazz  The features being rolled out need some careful planning when leveraging them on the intranet. One of the principals I have learnt through the experience of designing intranets is that clients always need to see as much content as possible on the first screen without any scroll, for that a hero webpart will be an overkill. The vertical section is a good fit fo that.  

 

The Hero webpart is best suited for communication sites when Announcing the rollout of new products(niche-specific content). 

 

Above all, Designing components that are mobile-ready has caused this major change in SharePoint design approach

Brass Contributor

I agree with @allyazz , in the past few months we have seen a lot of new/enhanced functionality which is more form than content. There are still so many things you could do in Classic SharePoint in which you can not in Modern SharePoint. SharePoint is first and foremost a portal solution, business process and document management tool, at least that is how we ourselves and our customers use it.

 

I would like to see more of cross functional web parts in SharePoint for other Office 365 services, such as Planner, Flow, PowerApps. Current web parts for these services are still very limited and in the first version.

 

That said, looking forward for more advanced out of the box functionality from SharePoint.

Steel Contributor

Would like to echo the comments about a Modern Calendar. Even the ability to add more custom fields to the Event web part

Steel Contributor

How does the "Email roll up of missed SharePoint news posts" work? Will it be setup atomically for users? Do they need to turn it on? How do we know if our tenant has it?

Iron Contributor

Agree with @David Gorman  that we need more information about how end users can 'sign up' to get an email roll up of their missed news posts.
I don't have hero for my News at this time. 

I think there are some issues picking locations in the Weather web part - if I try to select the Cocos (Keeling) Islands (an Australian island in the Indian Ocean), it keeps flipping me to either an island in the Caribbean or somewhere in the States.  I can select Cocos Keeling Island in the World clock web part, but it took a couple of goes to select the correct locations.

Note that both World clock and Weather are missing the Australian Antarctic bases Mawson, Davis and Casey

Iron Contributor

Agree with above posters as to hoping the steps as to how to end users sign up to get the email roll up of missed news posts to begin with will be provided. 

As new features for SharePoint roll out, we are often struggling to keep track of when they show up in our tenant, as the instructions to access them are not clearly provided (like anchors). 

Steel Contributor

Agreed. It would be nice if there was a notification to admins on new changes, not changes that apply to your tenant but could be over a two month period.

Copper Contributor

Nice improvement , can't wait to implement them 

Copper Contributor

Are the buttons and calls-to-action features fully formed yet? They seem extremely limited.

I can't control the size of the image, text.  It's always bold text?

 

Am I not getting something about this?

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