New web parts for your modern communications in SharePoint Online

[John_Sanders]

The SharePoint team is excited to announce we're adding three new web parts to the toolbox when creating team news articles and modern pages:

1. Image gallery
2. Bing maps
3. Quick charts

These new web parts are rolling out to First Release customers now…

• Note: only tenants that have First Release (FR) set to on for the entire tenant will see these features.
• Per user first release flighting is not applicable when creating new content that could be seen/viewed by non FR enabled users.

What are modern pages you ask?

“Modern team site pages are fast, easy to author and support rich multimedia content. And pages look great on any device, in a browser or from within the SharePoint app. Using pages is a great way to communicate and share your ideas—such as status and trip reports, how-to write-ups, know-before-you-go guides and frequently asked questions.” - from our blog post last year.

---

Image gallery

The Image gallery web part lets you share collections of pictures on a page. Simply select your images with the file picker, or drag them on to the web part. Once you’ve built your collection, you can reorder them with drag and drop as well.

We support two beautiful layouts today:

1. Tiles layout

Mobile

Tiles view on a mobile phone

Larger screens

Tiles view on a larger screen

2. Carousel layout

Mobile

Carousel view on mobile

Larger screens

Image gallery on a larger screen

You can also add additional information about each image such as:

• Image title
• Image description
• Alternative text

Looking forward, we will be listening to customer feedback and adding more layouts and features that highlight your images beautifully on pages.

---

Bing maps

This web part makes it easy to add a map to your page. Simply enter an address or a well-known location name, and your map dynamically appears.

If you want to pick a different map type, you can of course do that... as well as change the zoom level, label your map pin with a friendly name, etc.

Mobile

Bing map on mobile

Larger screens

Depending upon your location, Bing maps may not support some map styles (e.g. Streetside view isn't available everywhere).

---

Quick charts

The Quick chart web part allows you to easily visualize simple data on your page. Enter your data points with labels, pick your chart type, and publish.

We support two chart types today:

1. Column

Mobile

Column chart on mobile

Larger screens

Column chart on larger screens

2. Pie

Mobile

Pie chart on mobile

Larger screens

 Pie chart on a large screen

We have a lot more web parts in the works, some of which you can see highlighted in this session “Discover the new SharePoint content publishing experiences” (link jumps right to web part section); from #MSIgnite.

As always, let us know what you think, and where we should invest more time.

Thanks,

The SharePoint Team

[#2]

No if only they could add Search Parts, and pdate the Content Part to include Lists, we would almost be in a position to use Modern Sites.

[#3]

Can't wait to find out tomorrow morning if we're in the 10% group (we're usually not 😞 ).

I've been waiting for a gallery web part ever since the future of sharepoint announcement! 🙂

Is this a upload-only web part, or can a create I "collection" of photos out of an existing image/document library?

Also it would be awesome if you could improve PDF support in your existing web parts. We have a lot of blurred PDF previews with the Quick Links webpart and the document webpart doesn't support PDFs, which it should (since you could enable office web apps server to view pdfs with office online in sharepoint 2013 back then 😉 )

[#4]

---

As always, let us know what you think, and where we should invest more time.

Search query and results web parts is an absolute must.

Would love to see the Script Editor Web Part come back, I know the dev team is doing their SPFx thing, but there are too many simple use cases that the SEWP solves that SPFX overcomplicates.

[#5]

@Ivan Unger You can select images from your site or upload them. We don't at the moment have a way to point at a folder or list and say "use these images" as a gallery, but it's one of the ideas in our backlog for potential v.next next implementations.

We have on our backlog to enable PDFs in the document web part, but it isn't something we're actively working on.

Thanks for the feedback.

[#6]

---

@John_Sanders wrote:

@Ivan Unger You can select images from your site or upload them. We don't at the moment have a way to point at a folder or list and say "use these images" as a gallery, but it's one of the ideas in our backlog for potential v.next next implementations.

Where do the uploaded images actually "go"?

All the manual work of curating the images seems like it would be easily addressed by having the "point at a folder", then leverage SharePoint library for content management (which is quite a novel idea if I do say so myself ).  So hopefully that comes sooner rather than later. 

[#7]

@Brent Ellis while it's certainly powerful to enable pointing image gallery at a library or list, is also complicates the simple scenario of "I want to throw the five pictures I took during the trip into my trip report" scenario. That's the kind of scenario we initially optimized for.

We create a folder in the site assets library for each instance of image gallery, per page.

I totally see the value of the list & library scenario; we just wanted to keep it simple initially for easy content creation.

Thanks

[#8]

@Scott Mckenzie - When you say "No if only they could add Search Parts", we have highlighted content today which is essentially the first iteration of content by search / content by query (CBx) for modern pages, using the SharePOint Framework (SPFx).

We do have on the backlog for it to also support filtering by content in a partiuclar list.

I understand it doesn't do all the myriad of things you could with the previous CBx web parts on classic pages. Do you have a PRI list of things you want after lists?

Thanks

[#9]

@Brent Ellis - One of the notitions behind creating the sharepoint framework (SPFx) was to eliminate the need for the script editor web part. We understand that as of now, since you could litterally do anything you wanted in the SEWP, we don't yet enable "anything".

We'd however love to understand the scenarios you used to be able to easily solve in the SEWP that you refer to "...too many simple use cases that the SEWP solves that SPFX overcomplicates."

[#10]

Highlighted content doesn't match the functionality necessary to have display templates and content from across multiple site collections. We've got content tagged all over the place that can be correlated and shown on specific team sites.

It's ok maybe to replace content search, but not the full fledged search results web part

[#11]

Simple one: I want to create a custom html based button that does something while hovering. About 1 line of html and 3 lines of css, but with spfx it turns into hundreds of lines, multiple files, all kinds of "builds" and tools

[#12]

Baby steps. The "Highlighted Content" web part is owned by the search team, and this is the first of its kind from a SharePoint Framework pov, aka, it looks great in News/pages, is easy for end users to use, and works on mobile without custom dev when using. More to come in the future, and thanks for the feedback.

[#13]

@John_Sanders 

Cool, thanks for the input. As guessed, we're not in the 10% 😛 Is there anyway to get into that group or do you randomly select 10% every time for each rollout?

Some additonal input on the document webpart. Right now you can't easly show Office documents with the document webpart when the document is in a document set. The documents might show up on recently used, but browsing a document library (with the document webpart) with document sets shows nothing at the moment.

[#14]

Cool nice stuff!

[#15]

Got nothing yet, will there be any support for columns and/or tables. In it´s current state you give away a lot of useful space

[#16]

@Ivan Unger - Thanks for the tip on document sets not showing up in the file picker to select; we'll take a look at that.

[#17]

Will any of the "stanard" SP features come to these pages? Lists, libraries, etc.. When I watch the videos they have so many options, but we don't have them. 

It has been a bit disruptful that all our sites "Add New Page" send folks to this new modern but limited experience. We have been scrambling to let them know to go to Pages and use the Wiki page option.

Looks great on the mobile, but that massive header kills the "above the fold" design/usability patterns on our laptops. IMHO  

I realize this is a new feature and this is the way of the cloud and it will all get better. </whining>

[#18]

Yes. We are actively working on supportting multi-column sections as well as adding tables support in Modern Pages. Please stay tuned...

[#19]

Great stuff. Trying these out today. Quick Charts especially useful to me.

[#20]

Oh, I got one more wish for a new webpart: People Picker WebPart.

Possibly similiar to the quick links webpart. Pick one or multiple people from the people picker, and display them as contact cards/tiles. Pull in the image, job description and department and of course link that card to their Delve Profile.