What a September to remember. The question is: do you remember September? ;)
This month brought some great new tech: Manage duration of external guests’ access, Microsoft Search plus Power BI, an updated list creation experience in SharePoint, Microsoft Lists calendar and gallery views, Quick Edit becomes “Edit in grid view," Yammer reactions, and more. Details and screenshots below, including our audible companion: The Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop: September 2020 podcast episode – all to help answer, "What's rolling out now for SharePoint and related technologies into Microsoft 365?"
In the podcast episode, I chat with Ankita Kirti (LinkedIn | Twitter), product marketing manager at Microsoft who leads OneDrive marketing and is one of the co-hosts on the most excellent show, Sync Up. Ankita and I spoke about the newly released feature, “Add to OneDrive”, plus focused on four Ignite 2020 announcements that span both OneDrive and SharePoint.
![Ankita Kirti, product marketing manager (OneDrive / Microsoft) – taken during a Sync Up recording pre-COVID [Intrazone guest]](https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/223426iB8AAFEA46AD0E263/image-size/medium?v=v2&px=400 "IZ-RP-23_001_AnkitaKirti_SyncUp-profile-in-studio.jpg")
All features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Microsoft 365 as of September 2020 (possibly early October 2020).
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.
‘Ghosting’ web parts for SharePoint for page authors
Approximately one month before Halloween… [read in ghost voice] when you are in page edit mode and you choose to move a web part from one portion of the page to another, you'll now see a ghosting effect of the web part you grabbed, as a reminder of what you're moving. [end ghost voice read].
Just a nice apparition of your content to make it easier and clearer as your creating and organizing your SharePoint pages. Drag. Drop. Boo! There it is.
Expiring external guests’ access to SharePoint and OneDrive documents
In order to better manage sharing, Microsoft 365 admins will be able to create a policy to revoke guest access to SharePoint sites and individual OneDrives after a defined period of time. With this policy, you can limit guest user access; thus, guests who are no longer active partners will not retain indefinite access to documents and files.
SharePoint site administrators will receive e-mail notifications advising of upcoming guest user access expirations. Note: this policy is not retroactive; it does not apply to guests who already have access to sites, documents, and files before this setting is applied. After a guest loses access to a site, any user with the ability to share content externally can re-invite the guest to each document or item as needed.
Results from Power BI coming to Microsoft Search in SharePoint and Office.com
Data visualization is a key content type when using search to determine questions and weigh outcomes. We’re updating Microsoft Search in SharePoint and Office.com to include results from Power BI. This means search results will show Power BI reports, dashboards, and workspaces, which can be important content to be discovered.
Note: Microsoft Search administrators can disable this feature in Microsoft Search settings through the Microsoft 365 admin center.
- Microsoft 365 Roadmap ID 67103.
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.
SharePoint sites gets the new "create list" experience
SharePoint lists take a big step in the evolution to Microsoft Lists. And you need do nothing but enjoy the update. You will now be able to create lists from eight built-in templates from SharePoint sites (from the Site contents page or from the “New” menu on the home page). Existing list creation flows will be visually refreshed to align with the updates that users are already seeing as part of the Microsoft Lists app in Microsoft 365 and when creating Lists in Microsoft Teams.
Resources:
- List templates in Microsoft 365: this article details all the templates available for list creation.
- Create a list from a template: this article details the process of creating a list from a template.
- Create a list in SharePoint: this article shows the visual updates that will come with this feature rollout.
- Roadmap ID: 67137
Microsoft Lists - calendar view
Create a new, visual list view – especially when items have important dates to track. Calendar view is a helpful addition alongside other views you create to represent and track information.
- Learn more how to Create, change, or delete a view of a list or library" - includes a Create a view section that shows the steps to create a calendar view.
- Roadmap ID: 64167
Microsoft Lists - gallery view
Grid view is great. Calendar view is dandy and date driven. And now, Gallery view, a gorgeous new way to visualize rows of information as individual, dynamic, configurable cards – especially engaging when your list items have associated images.
- Roadmap ID: 57304
Learn more how to create, change, or delete a view of a list or library.
Quick edit --> "Edit in grid view"
Today, when users bulk edit list items in a list or a document library, they select the Quick edit button in the top action bar. We are renaming this button Edit in grid view.
The newly renamed button provides the same experience, making it easy to quickly update list items in bulk within grid view.
- Roadmap ID: 67136
Updated Choice, Person, and Yes/No column experiences
Microsoft and SharePoint Lists are getting new field editors and renderers to better refine and present your information with updated and engaging design.
Items with a Person column will appear using the new "pill" design format when a person's photo is displayed. Select one or more people to add to a Person column quickly, and the entry will display an updated look.
Items within a Choice column will support single, multi-choice, and manual fill as you add items. You'll see updated formatting right away and can update and remove choice fields and formatting selections previously applied.
Items with a Yes/no column will appear with a check mark when the value is selected.
Learn more about list and library column types and options.
Related technology
Message Center sync to Microsoft Planner, now Generally Available
Lots of information arrives in the Message Center, and you need to decide whether to act on it or not. And if an action is needed, who performs that action, and how do you track that task to completion? Or maybe you want to make a note of something and tag it for later. You can do all of this and more when you sync your Message Center to Microsoft Planner.
To help you navigate the myriad of information that arrives in the Message Center, to help you decide whether or not to act on that information, and to help you manage change and not content, we’ve introduced the ability to sync Message Center posts to Microsoft Planner. This feature is now generally available to all customers worldwide!
This is designed to help you triage message center posts, to assign them for action and accountability, allowing you to spend time managing content, instead of change.
- Learn more.
- Roadmap ID: 63317
Yammer Reactions
You can now express yourself through gratitude and celebration, laughter, and sadness-just like in real life. This gives you more ways to respond or express your feelings in the conversations you care most about, while gaining insight about how others feel about your content and conversations.
You can now ‘love’ a post that deeply resonates with you, or ‘celebrate’ a personal or professional milestone. With ‘thank’, you can express your appreciation towards a person or a situation, helping build a sense of gratitude within your communities. ’Sad’ would let you express compassion in difficult times, or express sadness over a situation when words fail you. We hope these reactions add a little bit of delight, and help you feel more connected to your Yammer communities. We will continue to listen and learn from your feedback so you can be your most expressive self on Yammer.
- Learn more.
- Roadmap ID: 64931
A few highlights from the Microsoft Ignite 2020 SharePoint and OneDrive disclosures
We are moving faster than ever to bring you Microsoft 365, delivering a broader set of features than when we launched Office 365 in 2011. First, we provide collaboration services with Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, and Microsoft Lists. Second, we provide employee engagement and communication services through SharePoint, Microsoft Stream, and Yammer. And third, we connect people to knowledge and expertise through Microsoft Search and Project Cortex. All these tools are part of an integrated experience and platform.
Below is a highlights reel of some of the Microsoft Ignite 2020 announcements across OneDrive and SharePoint:
- Home site app for Microsoft Teams
- Offline mode for lists – “Project Nucleus”
- Microsoft Stream is coming to the SharePoint files platform = external sharing for videos and a whole host of consistent capabilities for search, analytics, compliance, and developer extensibility - all benefits for your company video portal
- SharePoint Syntex - aka, the first product to come out of Project Cortex; this being the advanced AI and machine teaching that will amplify human expertise, automate content processing, and transform content into knowledge.
- Microsoft Search results experience in Microsoft Teams
- News boost in SharePoint to prioritize important news and announcements in Microsoft 365
You can read a summary of these and more in Jeff Teper's Ignite disclosure blog titled, "Collaboration, communication and knowledge sharing with Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Project Cortex."
September 2020 teasers
Psst, still here? Still scrolling the page looking for the rolled out goodness? If so, here is a few teasers of what’s to come to production next month…
- Teaser #1: Organization Chart web part [Roadmap ID: 67131]
- Teaser #2: New file sharing experience for Microsoft Teams [Roadmap ID: 51230]
… shhh, tell everyone.
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 – September 2020 (blog/podcast). 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 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.
Cheers and thanks,
Mark Kashman – senior product manager (SharePoint/Lists) | Microsoft)
