At Microsoft Ignite, we announced several exciting new features coming to the new SharePoint admin center. 

 

Today we're excited to share that we’ll start to roll out these features worldwide later this month to organizations that have “Targeted release for everyone” turned on. 

 

What's coming in this release? 

 

Make the new admin center your default admin center…

The new SharePoint admin experience provides a completely revamped SharePoint admin center that draws heavily on our modern principles… an administrative console designed to help IT achieve more, so their users can achieve more. If you’ve enjoyed using the new SharePoint admin center up until today, you now have the option to make the new SharePoint admin center your default experience while still being able to go back to the classic admin center if you need to. 

 

Improved management experience for group-connected sites

Office 365 Groups is a service that works with the Office 365 tools you use already so you can collaborate with your teammates when writing documents, creating spreadsheets, working on project plans, scheduling meetings, or sending email. Now we’re making it easier to manage group-connected sites by allowing SharePoint administrators manage ownership, change sharing settings, and delete and restore sites.  

 

 

Simplified hub site creation and association

Sites and data grow as your organization grows. With SharePoint hub sites, you can bring flexible, dynamic building blocks to your organization’s intranet – connecting collaboration and communication.  Now in the SharePoint admin center, you can manage existing hub sites in addition to creating hub sites and associating existing sites with a hub site.  These capabilities also extend to multi-geo scenarios. 

 

 

Quickly customize and control the site creation experience

Creating sites is one of the most common tasks an administrator performs in many SharePoint environments, and we’ve made it easier to customize and control how sites are created.

New site creation options allow you to create sites on behalf of users and configure common settings such as language, time zone, and storage limit and for classic and communication sites you can now also specify their managed path.

 

In addition to these site creation controls, you now can specify global settings that apply to all site when they're created too such as the time zone and site creation path and for organizations who want to control the site creation experience, you can enable or disable self-service site creation.

 

Improved site management experience 

In response to your feedback, we’ve added more management controls across site management and storage, including a simplified view of your tenant-level storage usage and limit and the ability to switch to manual site storage management.

 

 

 

 

Additionally, in many cases you may want or need more than one or two administrators for a site collection.  In response to your feedback, we’ve now enabled the use of security groups as a site collection administrator in SharePoint Online.

 

Finally, we’re making it simpler to execute site actions by moving many of the common actions to the command bar rather than the site information panel.  

 

Keep your information secure with improved access control and policies options 

The freedom to work fluidly, independent of location has become an expectation as has the freedom to access email and documents from anywhere on any device—and that experience is expected to be seamless.  However, data loss is non-negotiable, and overexposure to information can have lasting legal and compliance implications.  IT needs to make sure that corporate data is secure while enabling users to stay productive in today’s mobile-first world, where the threat landscape is increasingly complex and sophisticated.

 

New updates to the SharePoint admin center include a consolidated view of access control policies to help safeguard your information.   On the new access control page, you can configure policies for unmanaged or non-compliant devices, configure the idle-session sign-out experience for users, as well as configure location policies to restrict or allow access to SharePoint Online from known IP ranges. 

 

We're looking forward to the ongoing feedback. Use the feedback button at the bottom right of the new UI.  Also, if you see a survey that pops up and asks you how you feel about the new site, don't be shy, let us know. 

 

Wanted to get started with some of these new features?  Take a tour of the new admin center at https://resources.techcommunity.microsoft.com/resources/demos/.

 

Resources

Manage sites in the new SharePoint admin center https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/manage-sites-in-new-admin-center 

 

And listen to the recent The Intrazone podcast all about the SharePoint admin experience in Office 365, "Cloud admins are human, too" episode #16 with Ben Stegink (SharePoint consultant at Intelligink), myself, Chris McNulty (SharePoint PMM / Microsoft) and Mark Kashman (SharePoint PMM / Microsoft).