The intelligent intranet powered by Microsoft 365 – Microsoft Ignite 2019 announcements

Microsoft

Nov 04, 2019

Over the past three years ago, SharePoint has been on a journey to reinvent the intelligent intranet across browsers, devices and in the mobile app, to allow organizations to work across teams and siloes to harness collective knowledge. Along this journey we have been excited to learn from customers both how they are moving to the cloud with SharePoint and also to hear how we can continue to innovate to deliver new value. Our focus has been on responding to that feedback and many of the announcement we are making are based on that.

One customer that has been on that journey with us is Arla Foods, an international dairy cooperative employing over 19,000 people across 105 countries.

Arla Foods needed the tools to support their diverse workforce. The solution needed to be mobile ready and focuses on self-service to foster collaboration among employees, streamline the co-op’s operations, and position the company for the future.

After learning more about Microsoft 365 and SharePoint last year at Ignite, Arla Foods made the decision to build an intelligent intranet. Torben Fabrin, Senior Vice President and CIO at Arla Foods said about their efforts, “we’ve empowered our employees to find news and services on an intelligent intranet, accessible on all devices, while reducing our operational costs.”

It was my pleasure to host Arla Foods on stage at Microsoft Ignite this year and it’s stories like theirs that inspire us to continue to press forward in our mission to empower everyone to reach their full potential.

Let’s dive in the announcements we have made it Microsoft Ignite 2019 that you helped inspire. These enhancements will roll out at various times in the months ahead. You can follow the public roadmap for more details on specific items.

SharePoint home sites rolling out

SharePoint home sites give you an intelligent, integrated employee experience—a landing page—for your organization. We’ve gotten great feedback from you about home sites since we previewed them at the SharePoint Conference this year and we have been working closely with early adopter customers. We are happy to share that we are beginning the global rollout of SharePoint home sites.

SharePoint home sites–a personalized landing experience for your organization.

New hub capabilities

Hubs connect and organize sites based on organizational attributes such as project, department, division, or region. Based on your feedback we are enhancing hubs in these key areas:

Hub permissions enable you to centralize the management of access to associated sites.
Hub analytics provides rich, hub-wide usage insights spanning total visitors, page views, popular content and more.
Associated hubs enable search and discovery experiences across hubs and makes it easier to curate navigation between them.
Audience targeting on hub navigation allows targeting navigation items based on a persons Azure Active Directory groups, such as job role or office location.

Additional branding abilities

You want your intranet to reflect your companies’ brand. SharePoint empowers you to do that today, but we are farther enhancing your ability to brand your intranet and sites.

SharePoint mobile app co-branding so that you can easily add your organization’s branding which will be featured in the SharePoint Mobile app.
SharePoint mobile app to support organization’s custom branding through logo image, app theme colors for top navigation bar, text and accent color etc. for a co-branded mobile Intranet app experience for employees.
Additional site footer capabilities with a new extended layout option that supports background color choices and ability to organize a footer links.
Additional header options including a new Shy header that provides you the ability to reduce
the size of the site header, the ability to hide the site title, and the option to add a site logo thumbnail for your sites.
Microsoft Fluent Design System which brings the fundamentals of principled design, innovation in technology, and customer needs together as one, and delivers simplicity and coherence through a shared, open design system across platforms.
SharePoint Teal default theme converts the existing blue default theme to Teal to complete the transition to the new SharePoint brand colors on new and existing classic and modern communication and non-group connected team sites.
Make any classic site, a modern communication site. Classic team sites that are not modern group connected or have the classic publishing feature enabled, can now get a communication site experience. More details here.

Updated SharePoint look book

We are humbled by the response to the SharePoint look book since we released it last year. It has been gratifying to hear your stories of how it inspired you and helped create beautiful sites in your organization. We have released a new look book, at https://lookbook.microsoft.com/, with even more samples. Best of all, if you are a site admin, you can now add the design you are looking to your tenant with one click.

Visit https://lookbook.microsoft.com today to get inspired.

Audience Targeting for Navigation

We have heard the excitement from you for the new audience targeting features coming in SharePoint to target news and other information to relevant people. We will take this farther to allow you to audience target navigation items, such as in the mega menu, based on the same Azure Active Directory groups.

Updates to page, news, and web parts

Customers, like Arla Foods, the VELUX Group, or Klockner & Co, have told us of their success at removing custom code from their intranet by using the modern, out of box capabilities of SharePoint. We continue to focus on enhancements to let you do more natively.

Image resizing which gives you the ability to adjust the sizes of images your add to your pages and news posts.
Page difference visualization and version history for pages and news posts which enables content authors to visually see what changes have been made across different versions.
News filtering across sites with managed metadata.
Yammer conversations web part (v2) which gives people the ability to ask questions, mark and discover best answers, and compose with rich text and post praises. It’s also has improved performance and is updated with a new Yammer design that is rolling out.
‘My feed’ web part that intelligently brings together relevant documents, news, activities and other content that is personalized for you.
New stock images feature which will provide several thousand high quality, high resolution images, royalty free for page and news authoring, with an inventory of images that will grow over time.

News and Page scheduling

As customers have been adopting SharePoint news for official company news, we have heard from you that you need the ability to author news posts and pages in advance and have them go live at a later time. We are now announcing the ability to easily schedule news posts and pages to be published at a future day and time.

Multilingual capabilities

Global organizations need to enable content across different languages and so we are delivering multilingual site capabilities. This will enable you to create content and sites in multiple languages.

People will be able to view content in their preferred language, or easily switch to other available languages. Content translators will receive notification of changes. We are also delivering a new version history capability that will enable translators to visualize the differences between any two versions of a page in order to easily translate content as needed.

Multilingual publishing.