Gobble, gobble - time to gobble up all the updates that landed for SharePoint and related tech in the month of November 2022.
Below and in the related podcast, you’ll find details about a load of great new offerings: Briefing email enhancements, a new praise compose experience, a new Viva admin experience, SharePoint tenant URL rename (GA), three new SharePoint site templates, updated management for site information, sign language via in Microsoft Teams, Editor using Context IQ in Word, and more. We also pulled audio from Cathy Dew, Senior product manager from the SharePoint team, to give share more behind the design and application of SharePoint site templates.
It's a stuffed edition, minus the tryptophan.
The Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop: November 2022
All features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Microsoft 365 as of November 2022 (possibly early December 2022).
Inform and engage with dynamic employee experiences
Build your intelligent intranet on SharePoint in Microsoft 365 and get the benefits of investing in business outcomes – reducing IT and development costs, increasing business speed and agility, and up-leveling the dynamic, personalized, and welcoming nature of your intranet.
Microsoft Viva: Briefing email enhancements
The Briefing email from Microsoft Viva helps users start their day on track by surfacing information to prepare for upcoming meetings, follow up on outstanding tasks as well as protect time for independent work. A few updates are coming to the daily briefing email to highlight suggested tasks from 1:1 Teams chats and to highlight key information from Viva Learning directly in your inbox.
Going forward, the briefing email will feature dynamic subject lines based on content available to specific users and will enable users to have a quick preview of values presented in emails directly from the subject line.
The service will now also suggest tasks from people's 1:1 Teams chat content, further allowing users to stay on top of their commitments, requests, and follow ups. For things like commitments and follow-ups: Something you promised or committed to do for someone else in a Teams 1:1 chat, something another person asked you to do in a Teams 1:1 chat, or a task that you've added to your To Do task list. And it can be actionable: Select ‘Done' or 'Remind me' after each item or click 'Delete' to remove the task from your list – all directly from within the briefing email.
And last, if you're a Viva Learning customer, you'll see related learning cards for assignment tracking - right from the briefing email, book time in calendar for learning and edit an existing booked time.
New praise compose experience in Teams and praise trends in Viva Insights
This is accessible through the messaging extension pinned to the Teams messaging bar or through the Viva Insights app in Teams - and it's getting a refresh to replace praise badges with emojis, introduce the ability to select gradient backgrounds. Additionally, in the Viva Insights app in Teams, praise trends are being introduced, privately surfacing analytics such as counts of praise sent and received, your top fans and top praises received.
- Roadmap ID 101161
- Learn more, plus additional help information.
New Viva admin experience in M365 Admin Center
The Viva collections experience now has a brand-new look where you can configure licenses, roles, and access individual app configuration pages. Admins will be able to deploy Viva from a common place within the Microsoft 365 admin center and find guidance on how best to configure their tenants.
Viva is now discoverable via search making it easier than ever to discover Viva apps within the Microsoft 365 admin center. Admins can also navigate to the experience via the setup tab, and then click on the Viva collection. From the new Viva suite setup page, you can see details about the Viva apps in your tenant, including plan type and the admins assigned with permissions to manage a specific app.
- Roadmap ID 93435
New Admin Capabilities in Viva Goals
As a global admin, you can control who can enable integrations by enabling/disabling user permissions to create and manage organizations in Viva Goals through organization creation permissions. We will also be launching new integrations for PowerBI, and Planner, MS SQL, Dynamics, Jira, Zapier, and Workplace.
To learn more about data integrations administration, please visit these pages:
- Viva Goals Integrations Administration Overview
- Restrict Organization Creation Permissions
- Roles and Permissions in Viva Goals
SharePoint Tenant URL Rename - General Availability
This capability is now generally available to organizations that have less than 10,000 total sites (including OneDrive and SharePoint sites).
We know you evolve your workspace, rebranding or expanding through acquisitions or reaching the global market by adding satellite locations. Specific to rebranding, you may want to rebrand your organization’s name, say from Contoso to Fabrikam, or you might have started off with a test name for your tenancy like ContosoQA.sharepoint.com and you wanted to rename to your tenancy’s name.
With the tenant rename capability, you will be able to have the SharePoint domain in all site URLs updated to the new name you choose and continue with that new name going forward.
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 the 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 SharePoint site templates - including a new one for Microsoft Syntex users
We are introducing 3 new SharePoint site templates dedicated to helping you create sites for your HR department, to showcase Events, and a template powered by Microsoft Syntex to do contract management.
With our new HR and Events templates, you will be able to build sites that highlight and showcase your content and share this information broadly with your organization.
- The HR site brings together all the information your employees need to navigate the complexities of employment and benefits.
- Our new Event template includes many great layout suggestions and will highlight any upcoming event you are planning.
With the Microsoft Syntex powered contracts management template you can learn more about how Syntex works and be able to get started right away. This template also comes with a prebuilt tutorial and some established models designed to help your team get started with Microsoft Syntex.
Templates save you a lot of time, target specific scenarios, and help train you in the art of the possible. They are highly configurable post-deployment, and there is a great, growing collection of templates for team sites and communication sites. Have a need, grab a template and go go go.
- Learn more.
- Roadmap ID 102380
SharePoint admin center: Streamlining management of site information across Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups
SharePoint is updating the site detail panel to include Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups information. Admins that have permissions to SharePoint, Teams and Groups admin centers can now manage all related attributes (membership, group name, description, etc.) from a single site detail panel in the SharePoint admin center 'Active Sites' tab.
Note: SharePoint admins with SharePoint only permissions will have read-only access to the new attributes.
- Roadmap ID 100053
Related technology
Sign Language View for Microsoft Teams
We are introducing a new Sign Language experience in Teams Meetings to help meeting participants who use sign language to prioritize interpreters and other sign language users so that they remain visible in in a static, central location on the meeting stage, with higher video quality.
Specific sign language users inside the organization that you work with regularly – such as regular interpreters – can be prioritized across all meetings by adding them to a prioritized signer list under Settings > Accessibility in the Teams app.
Sign language view is a personal, user-level setting, and is visible only for those who have turned it on. It will not be shown to the rest of the meeting participants. The feature is presently available only on Teams Desktop.
- Roadmap ID 99452.
- Learn more.
Editor Using Context IQ: Inline Search Within Documents in Word for the Web
Editor using Context IQ allows users to easily search for and insert entities like People, Files, Viva Topics, or Loops in documents in Word for the Web while staying in flow. When users type the “@“ key, a menu will appear that allows them to search for, filter, and insert entities that exist across their M365 account.
- Roadmap ID 103098
- Learn more.
Users Can Upload Documents from OneDrive for Business in E-sign in Approvals
Users can upload documents directly from OneDrive for Business and request E-signatures when a new approval request is created. If users receive an e-signature request, they can also cancel and decline the request.
- Roadmap ID 99971
- Learn more.
Outlook for Windows: Cloud Signatures Coming Soon
These enhancements change where the signature data is stored from per-device to per-account. This means the same set of signatures will be available on any Windows (Microsoft 365) or Web version of Outlook, and you will no longer need to reconfigure your signatures when getting a new device.
- Roadmap ID 60371
- Learn more.
Register for the 2022 Yammer & Viva Engage Festival (Dec. 7th)
We are excited to be partnering with SWOOP Analytics to host our 2022 Yammer and Viva Engage Festival on December 7th! This event is for our customers to learn from each other and hear how to build culture and community in your own organizations. If you are launching and not sure where to begin or are curious to hear what’s on the roadmap for Viva Engage, there are sessions for you.
December 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: Viva Topics brings new integrations with Yammer [Roadmap ID: 72184]
- Teaser #2: Microsoft Lists: Calendar week view [Roadmap ID: 100504]
… shhh, tell everyone – especially those calendar crazed peers of yours.
Helpful, ongoing change management resources
- "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 | UserVoice
- OneDrive Facebook | Twitter | OneDrive Community Blog | UserVoice
- 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 – November 2022. We are open to your feedback in comments below to hear how both the Roadmap Pitstop podcast episodes and blogs can be improved over time.
Engage with us. Ask those questions that haunt you. 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 ghostly road’map, and thanks for listening and reading.
Thanks for your time,
Mark Kashman – senior product manager (SharePoint/Lists) | Microsoft)
