ROLLING OUT: SharePoint Online team sites + Office 365 Groups & Pages

Microsoft

Today marks the beginning of bringing the full power of SharePoint to Office 365 Groups, with additional benefits to SharePoint Online all up! New and existing groups will get modern team sites, which come with an updated Home page, the ability to pin items within the new Quick links web part, and to see what's going on in the site via the new Activity web part. 

 

These team sites within Office 365 Groups, and existing team sites throughout SharePoint Online, will also have the ability to create publishing pages - fast, easy to author pages that support rich multimedia content, and look great on mobile browsers and via the SharePoint mobile app. Get ready to communicate and share your ideas within SharePoint like never before.

 

Additionally, Microsoft will increase the site collection limit in SharePoint Online to "up to 25TB" (previously "up to 1TB); this will be refelcted in an update to the official "SharePoint Online boundaries and limits" support article.

 

Please review the associated blog on blogs.office.com, "New capabilities in SharePoint Online team sites including integration with Office 365 Groups" with numerous links to new and updated support.office.com articles.

 

SharePoint_ModernTeamSite-Home_MAIN.png

 

Let us know what you think,

Mark

207 Replies

Yammer web parts in modern pages sounds great! Are there any documentation available on this?

According to previous messages, modern Home page is being released first to Office 365 tenants where selective first release is enabled so if that's not your case it could be the reason why you are not getting it yet...this is what's happening for me, I don't have selective first release so I don't have the Groups Hoem page yet

Hi John

 

Many thanks for the feedback. I am looking forward to the enhancements and features.

 

Thanks

Azam

So we're talking about two different releases here with Modern teamsites being one and modern group home pages being a second?  That would at least explain why we have one and not the other.  What's strange is that we are not on selective first release but are on first release for the entire organization so maybe that limits us getting both.  It's clearly a dice roll......

We'll have help pages up soon, but hopefully for this webpart you won't need them.

We leverage the yammer embed API. You'll copy and paste in the URL of the yammer feed you want embedded (we support a few different types - home, topic, person, etc.)

The webpart will validate the feed & type and put it on the page.

The only other parameter you set is how large (vertically) you want the embed to be.

It's rolling out now, so let me know if you have any questions when you see it.
@Clint

We're currently rolling out to select users within first release (so tenants that selected individual people, not the entire tenant).

We'll move to the next ring of full first release tenants shortly, starting with 10%.

Ok, now have this for pages in my dev tennant with a selected FR user. A good start but quite basic. Even the banner image is fixed. I expect it will change though. I like that the new pages are mobile friendly but the experience of navigating to Office 365 itself is still pretty horrible with lots of switches to inconsistent views.

 

First it goes to some blue and white custom mobile ui. From there I select my site, which has a new type of page, however the old limited UI is still used unless I go into SitePages. When I do it changes to a responsive doc library page. At this point I can select from a drop down menu "home", which leads back to the limited UI.

 

Only switching to PC view actually gives you the new, responsive mobile pages. The link to site content gives the responsive page, but the link to documents gives a responsive page with no navigation..

 

I can see it's going in the right direction but the mobile experience is a long way off of being usable.

Another issue in general but the new pages in particular is what is the obsession in Office 365 in opening everything in a new tab. On the new pages:-

 

Documents or pages in quick links: new tab

Hyperlinks in text: new tab

Top bar link navigation: new tab

 

Users find this sort of behaviour very confusing. Is there a way to stop it?

Got it, thanks!  Sure enough, I changed my develpment tenant over to selected release and chose my lonely 1 user, logged out, logged back in and could add modern pages.  Very nice I might add!  Didn't mean to make a big deal about it, just thought it interesting that the Groups piece was rolled out to our regular tenant but not modern pages.  I expected them to come together.

 

Thank you!

Initial Thoughts on Modern Pages -- honestly, they're not that far from prime time and more flexible, as far as content (embed and highlighted content add a great deal of flexibility) than I imagined.  The biggest issue for me/us is simply this

  • The biggest issue, and it's brought on by the lack of branding capabilities (which I know is coming in the future), is the need to be able to change the background like Delve.  I'm sure it's coming, but giving us the ability to add some visual variety between different sites and pages is huge.  We'd get over lack of branding options with that simple addition.
  • SEARCH?  Search IS in the new modern pages for groups so why not in modern teamsite pages yet?  Consistency is vital.
  • Activity feed should have the option to scroll horizontally with arrows.  Show 3 or 4, then move one way or another to see more.  Give the option of showing only a specific amount on top of that.
  • Any thought to giving us a second column to work with?  A right column we can pin content to?  I suppose that hinders the slide panel and responsiveness.
  • Can't hide "Pages" in the quick launch?  
  • Global navigation is coming I'm sure, but if it takes a while, give us the ability to add a web part to the TOP of the page.  I've never understood why team sites don't, at the very least, give us the option to use managed metadata for global nav as an option. Why should I need publishing on to get a global nav?

 

Again, that simple addition of being able to add an image to the header would be a big step to easing the lack of branding and customization options as we wait for more robust customization options.  Still, very impressive start here.  Looking forward to more!

 

Thanks! Can you confirm that a standard SPS Plan 2 comes standard with 10gb + 500mb per user. Additional space can be bought at $0.20c per GB per month per tenant?

Cheers

I agree in part. However, just because something has always been, that doesn't mean it should always be.

 

If we put branding aside for a moment, one of my bugbears with SharePoint is how bloated it's become. Microsoft need to get better (and they are, thanks in part to the move to SharePoint Online and the increased ease at which data can be aggregated and analysed from multiple tenants as a result) at capturing which of SharePoint's features are being used:

 

  • the most;
  • the least or;
  • not at all.

 

That way, development teams will be able to prioritise how they spend their time. Features that are seeing little use should be removed, because maintaining these features is taking away from improving popular existing features and introducing new ones.

Just had a quick first look at the new pages.. is Microsoft thinking about setting up a Miles & More member scheme? All these new layouts have the same in common: so little content is actually visible and so much scrolling involved.

The amount of information I can put in the same amount of space on these new pages compared to the current pages is negligible. There is the large amount of space which is taken up be the site name and menu, then half of the page is taken up by an image placeholder which no one really needs and then I am forced to use a huge font size, one column layout... content really is not king here.

Is this the only layout available to us in the near future?

 

 

 

Taking a look at how the new modern experience shows up on all devices, the new look does work very well in all environments.  Gone are the days of smashing as much content into a page as possible. The single column experience really is the easiest way to present information so that it will work in any device scenario.  Scrolling is now the norm and users should be used to freely moving around vertically to find information.  

 

About two years ago we had testers from our company and customers test out a website setup that was very similar to how the new modern sites/pages are setup.  I was extremely nervous but it quickly became obvious that it was the right decision.  Content is not king.  Simplicity and good styling actually takes precedence over even content, believe it or not, for driving adoption and repeat visitors.  Who knew....

Hi Eric,

 

We are currently in the process of rolling out to our first release customers this week. We will pause our rollout during Ignite Conference (Sept 26 - 30) and then begin rollout to production starting the beginning of October. 

 

Will be keeping you posted on our timeline. Excited for you to try out modern Site Pages! 

As a side note, all modern Web Parts are backwards compatible and work on older versions of SharePoint Web Part Pages. 

That leaves a big question mark over server side parts. As I understand it they don't work on modern pages but there's things that only server side parts can do.Hopefully this will come in the future as I'd hate to be restricted to the older style pages.

For server side we have the Add-ins model that for now is still an option...don't know in the future

Hi Kevin,

 

Yes, there are quite a few improvements to the authoring canvas that hopefully will address your needs.

 

We have added the following to text editing:

  • Multilevel headings
  • Stronger copy/paste behavior
  • Left/right/center align
  • We have not added functionality for different fonts, but capturing your feedback! 

 

Additionally we have added a series of new/improved web parts:

  • Document web part - now you can browse your site for documents to embed in addition to uploading one
  • Embed web part
  • Highlighted content web part
  • Yammer web part