Exciting news from the Microsoft Viva world landed this past month, plus several new creator experiences across the SharePoint team site landscape. Plus, some nice, related tech across Microsoft 365.
August 2022 brought tech goodness of all kinds: Viva Goals GA, Viva Engage GA, Viva Insights updates, Microsoft Lists - MSA Preview for iOS (beta), new SharePoint team site templates, new web parts and site theme, co-authoring encrypted documents on mobile, new OneDrive home experience, To Do in Outlook for Windows, and more.
We also hear from Ankur Madan and Sahil Baid discuss progress in the mobile Lists space, namely bringing access to the Lists - MSA Preview to the Lists iOS app, and more about overall progress to date and innovation for Lists on the Android platform.
![The Intrazone guests this month, left-to-right: Ankur Madan (Senior product manager - Microsoft) [guest] and Sahil Baid (Product manager – Microsoft) [guest].](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/402062i55B17FC5A9AAC24E/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999 "Ankur-Sahil_Lists-mobile_IZRP46-Aug-2022.jpg")
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All features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Microsoft 365 as of August 2022 (possibly early September 2022).
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Microsoft Viva Goals GA (8/1/2022)
Microsoft Viva Goals is a goal setting and management solution that aligns teams to your organization’s strategic priorities, driving results and a thriving business. Goals supports the OKR (Objectives and Key Results) goal-setting framework to create symmetry between the work teams are doing and an organization’s top business priorities.
Because Viva Goals is a part of Microsoft Viva, it integrates into the connected employee experience, empowering people and teams to be their best from anywhere, including seamless integration in Microsoft Teams.
- Roadmap ID: 82188.
- Learn more.
Viva Engage is now generally available (8/23/2022)
Engage is designed to help people and teams to be their best, have a voice, and feel included in the workplace. And for leaders, they have a new way to shape culture at their organizations by unlocking communication and engagement opportunities for everyone.
The tech FYI about Engage - it's built on the foundation of Yammer - that builds on the existing capabilities of the Communities app for Teams and Microsoft 365.
For leaders, Viva Engage is a place to share news and strategy, model culture, speak with employees, and weigh in on conversations. Features like virtual events, pinned conversations, and announcements with notifications across Teams, Outlook, and Viva Connections.
For employees, Viva Engage enables people to build communities and professional networks, share their work and perspective, and find answers to their questions. Features like storyline and stories, Best Answers, @mentions, and topics help drive participation and build communities and relationships amongst coworkers.
- Roadmap ID: 93409.
- Learn more. Mike's GA blog.
Microsoft Viva Insights App in Teams: UI Updates, Meeting Category Insights and End-User Opt Out
The Viva Insights app in Microsoft Teams is getting a lot of user interface updates - to simplify the experience. The Viva Insights web Home page, discoverable via insights.viva.office.com and the Microsoft 365 app launcher on Office.com, is also being updated to match the Viva Insights app in Teams.
The updated Home page will include an invitation to set up a personal focus plan. In the future, it will also include an invitation to set up quiet time to disconnect after-hours with mobile notifications from Teams and Outlook silenced. The Home page will continue to feature personal wellbeing experiences for tapping into moments of gratitude, reflection, and mindfulness and the option to enroll into virtual commute.
One area of improvement is within the Effective meetings tab -- now you'll see Meeting category insights. Meeting categories in Outlook allow users to easily tag, label, and group calendar events - those you use to help visually know what type of meeting is on your calendar. Meeting category insights will help users understand how they are allocating their time across these meeting categories. Users can view data for the last 3 months, the last 4 weeks, and the next 4 weeks.
Additionally, the MyAnalytics web dashboard will be updated to reflect the Viva Insights brand and be accessible via a link from the Viva Insights app in Teams.
Note: A new privacy setting will allow end users to opt out of Viva Insights Team application and will allow them to stop receiving personal insights across all surfaces.
Microsoft Lists - MSA Preview for iOS (Beta)
It’s time to liberate yourself from coordination chaos. Time to clear your brain space and get organized. In short, it’s time to try the Microsoft Lists – MSA Preview.
This month we’re introducing Microsoft Lists - MSA Preview access from your iOS device - via a beta version of the app installed through TestFlight; once installed, it brings the lightweight version of the Microsoft Lists app designed for small business and individual use in conjunction with your Microsoft account (MSA)… to you while you're on the go.
Download/install link to test the Lists beta app for iOS today: https://aka.ms/ListsiOSMSA
Note: The existing Microsoft Lists for iOS app does not yet support sign in with your Microsoft account; only the above beta available for testing today via TestFlight.
- Learn more about the Microsoft Lists - MSA Preview.
Teamwork updates across SharePoint team sites, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams
Microsoft 365 is designed to be a universal toolkit for teamwork – to give you the right tools for the right task, along with common services to help you seamlessly work across applications. SharePoint is an intelligent content service that powers teamwork – to better collaborate on proposals, projects, and campaigns throughout your organization – with integration across Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Yammer, Stream, Planner and much more.
New site templates for SharePoint team sites
We are introducing three new SharePoint team site templates so you can quickly create sites for your IT helpdesk, crisis communication team, and new employee onboarding team. These site templates expand what’s possible with content, pages, and web parts while helping you quickly get started building your own site.
Each template contains pre-populated content and web parts that are fully customizable to meet the needs of your organization:
- IT help desk – Resolve technical requests, track devices, and share training materials
- Crisis communication team – Centralize crisis communication, resources, and best practices
- New employee onboarding team – Guide new employees through your team’s onboarding process
- Roadmap ID 93423
New and updated SharePoint web parts, plus a new site theme
If you want to see some of the below in action, check out the latest video from Mike Tholfsen, “How to use the new Microsoft Teams 'Class Homepage'” – it puts a lot of ‘how to’ + visuals of the value of SharePoint in the context of Teams:
Assignments web part | Customers using Teams Assignments will be able to add the assignments web part to pages to provide students with a one-stop, personalized resource for all their class needs. The assignments web part can also be used on communication sites like a home site to display the upcoming assignments due across multiple classes.
Group calendar updates | The Group calendar web part is getting visual updates, an indicator informing users when a meeting is a recurring meeting, and the capability to join upcoming Teams meetings online.
Quick links in the toolbar | Users are now able to easily explore the different layouts available for the Quick links web part. We’re surfacing layouts as a dropdown option in the toolbar to make it easier for authors to get the look and feel they want.
Highlighted content web part | This dynamic web part now adheres better to a two-column section if you chose the ‘Compact’ layout - aka, the layout preference it retained.
Periwinkle site theme | When applied, this new site theme option brings a 'lavender blue' visual site theme to your SharePoint site. It adjusts to dark or high-contrast mode when viewed in Teams, too.
- Roadmap ID 93479.
Microsoft Purview | Information protection: Co-authoring encrypted documents on mobile devices (GA)
With this update, users will be able to collaborate seamlessly on documents encrypted with Microsoft Purview Information Protection from mobile devices (Android and iOS). This allows for greater flexibility and productivity on the go and supports hybrid and remote work scenarios.
This update compliments existing co-authoring support for Windows and Mac desktops and Office on the web.
- Learn more.
- Roadmap ID 98089
Related technology
OneDrive at 15 (Aug. 9th, 2022)
Happy belated 15th birthday, OneDrive. We celebrated OneDrive’s 15th lap around the sun AND to got a new OneDrive Home experience. The way-back machine churned a lot of innovation in the evolution from Windows Live Mesh, Grove.exe and SharePoint Workspaces, into SkyDrive and SkyDrive Pro, and land on OneDrive as we know it today. And today, the team has been hard at work redesigning the OneDrive Home experience to help you easily resume your work and catch up on what you missed while you were away – everything at-a-glance and easy to prioritize where to start working.
We’ve included some of the highlights for you to dig more into this exciting milestone:
- Unique episode of The Intrazone: "OneDrive turns 15!"
- "OneDrive turns 15!" - A brief history and introducing a new OneDrive Home experience | by Ankita Kirti (blog, customer video, podcast)
- Short "OneDrive turns 15!" video + screenshots of new OneDrive home experience
- New use and adoption blog for OneDrive in 2022, "15 reasons to love OneDrive"
To Do is now rolling out to Outlook for Windows
We’re excited to announce that To Do is rolling out to Outlook for Windows for the Current Channel users (starting with Current Channel version 2207). With this release, you can use the To Do app right from Outlook for Windows to plan your work and commitments effectively and stay focused on the tasks at hand.
You can ‘To Do’ things like:
- View your flagged emails from Outlook in To Do
- View assigned tasks in a single place
- Plan your day with My Day
Users with an eligible Microsoft 365 subscription and user license for the Microsoft To Do app will be able to quickly access To Do alongside the main Outlook functions such as email and calendar which are now displayed vertically to the left of the folder pane. You can check what subscriptions you are licensed for in your account information. Log in to www.office.com, click on your profile picture in the top-right corner, click View account, and select Subscriptions.
Tell us what you think here or over on Twitter or Facebook.
IPv6 is now the default for SharePoint in Microsoft 365, to ensure seamless customer and user experiences over the Internet from any location, from any device
Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) is the most recent version of the Internet Protocol (IP), the communications protocol that provides an identification and location system for computers on networks and routes traffic across the Internet. IPv6 helps deal with the long-anticipated problem of IPv4 address exhaustion, and is intended to replace IPv4.
SharePoint will begin enabling IPv6 by default for all SharePoint tenant URLs endpoints. The scope of this change includes all URLs under *.sharepoint.com including <tenant>.sharepoint.com and <tenant>-my.sharepoint.com. When the change is complete SharePoint will begin advertising both AAAA and A DNS records allowing clients to connect either via IPv4 or IPv6.
Microsoft 365 services can be successfully used from both IPv6 dual stack and IPv6-only devices. In fact, we have an increasing number of customers, from consumers to large enterprises, who are moving towards greater adoption of IPv6.
Note: For most customers, IPv4 won't completely disappear from their digital landscape, so we aren't planning to require IPv6 or to de-prioritize IPv4 in any Microsoft 365 features or services.
- For additional information please visit the IPv6 support in Microsoft 365 service article
September 2022 teasers
Psst, still here? Still scrolling the page looking for more roadmap goodness? If so, here is a few teasers of what’s to come to production next month…
- Teaser #1: Add, update, or delete images in Microsoft Lists via Power Apps [Roadmap ID: 98119]
- Teaser #2: Quiet Time Settings in Viva, Teams, and Outlook [Roadmap ID: 85627]
… shhh, tell everyone.
Helpful, ongoing change management resources
- Upcoming events + on-demand workshop:
- HR Tech (Sept.13-16.2022; Vegas - Mandalay Bay)
- Microsoft Power Platform Conference (Sept.20-22.2022; Orlando, FL)
- European Cloud Summit (Sept.26-28; Mainz, GE)
- 365 EduCon - Chicago (Sept.26-30; Chicago, IL)
- Teams 10x (Virtual Summit; Sept.28-29, 2022)
- Microsoft Ignite (Oct.12-14, 2022; virtual + SCC + six regional "spotlights")
- North American Cloud Summit (Oct.12-14; Branson, MO)
- South Coast Summit (Oct.14-15, 2022; Ageas Bowl, Southampton, UK)
- Microsoft Lists workshop [now available on-demand]
- "Stay on top of Office 365 changes"
- "Message center in Office 365"
- Install the Office 365 admin app; view Message Center posts and stay current with push notifications.
- Microsoft 365 public roadmap + pre-filtered URL for SharePoint, OneDrive, Yammer and Stream roadmap items.
- SharePoint Facebook | Twitter | SharePoint community blog | Feedback
- Follow me to catch news and interesting SharePoint things: @mkashman; warning, occasional bad puns may fly in a tweet or two here and there.
Thanks for tuning in and/or reading this episode/blog of the Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop – August 2022. We are open to your feedback in the comments below to hear how both the Roadmap Pitstop podcast episodes and blogs can be improved over time.
Engage with us. Ask those questions. Push us where you want and need to get the best information and insights. We are here to put both our and your best change management foot forward.
Stay safe out there on the road’map, and thanks for listening and reading.
I appreciate your time,
Mark Kashman – senior product manager (SharePoint/Lists) | Microsoft)
