ROLLING OUT: SharePoint Online team sites + Office 365 Groups & Pages
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. Let us know what you think, MarkBinge watch all the new SharePoint deeper dive demos in our Microsoft Mechanics video playlist
If you want to binge watch all of what's new and coming to SharePoint, check out the Microsoft Mechanics SharePoint Virtual Summit 2017 demo playlist. We feature the engineers behind the technology updates across Communication Sites, OneDrive, mobile, Team Sites and more. First up: Communication Sites, but the rest will roll in automatically
Hidden gems at Ignite: A conference guide from the SharePoint product team
Hi everyone! My name is Adam Harmetz and I run the Program Management team for SharePoint team sites, portals, biz apps & dev platform. I’m thrilled to be spending time with the community next week in Atlanta – the fantastic SP community is one of the main reasons I’m still working on SharePoint after joining the team 11 years ago. I sat in on over 17 hours of Ignite content reviews this past week – there is a fantastic amount of great content and the team is working overtime to get everything ready for the show. Of course, as you’d expect there are the various overview sessions (like Jeff Teper’s SharePoint keynote) and here’s a handy graphic Mark Kashman and I are using in our talk that highlights the major overview sessions in each aspect of the modern Intranet: What I wanted to share here was how you can get beyond the overview sessions and into some of the deep dives that often don’t get as much attention. We are doing some unique new types of talks this year and new types of speakers (designers, developers, security experts, accessibility drivers). If you are looking for the hidden gems or interesting spin on a topic, these suggestions might help: Behind the scenes: How we engineer SharePoint. Last time I was on a cruise ship, I paid extra to take the tour of the engine room and the bridge. I’m the type of person who loves to peak behind the curtains, and I know there are many of the same type of people coming to Ignite. We have two sessions for you here: BRK3246 Looking behind the scenes at how we're making SharePoint's front end/UX modern, responsive, and open looks at the client-side, SharePoint Framework-powered front end UX architecture (where the speakers are a design developer and a director of engineering!) and BRK3031 Peak Behind the Scenes of running and building SharePoint Online talks about deployment and back end tech from Zach who manages all our COGs and hardware purchasing. MVP + Product Team == Awesome. There are a ton of MVP talks and of course a lot of talks from the product team, but in a few cases, we decided to team up and join forces! Tejas and Eric are describing the latest How To guidance in branding with BRK3025 – Learn Best Practices for customizing and branding team sites. And I’m teaming up with Laura Roger to talk about the new experiences through the lens of customer adoption with BRK2041 – Get the most out of the new SharePoint. AMAs! I visited the Exchange conference (MEC) a few years ago and was impressed by some of the talks they did where the engineering team just took questions from the audience for the entire time. We figured we’d try it so on Thursday a bunch of us leaders across product, design, and development will answer whatever you ask with BRK2295 – Unplug with the experts on SharePoint and OneDrive. The MVP community is doing something similar with BRK225: Learn from MVPS: panel discussion on all things SharePoint. Build it live on stage! SharePoint has a long tradition of having a bit of fun with a session where we get multiple people up there building cool sites live on stage. It’s a great way to let the product itself do the talking. This time, Jeremy and Emma will be building a team site from the very first “create site” click. Check out BRK2247 – Watch us bring together the best features a team needs to get the most out of the modern SharePoint. Go WAY deep with the new SharePoint Framework. In BRK4015 – Build Client Side Webparts for Microsoft SharePoint, Chaks is going to go as detailed as you can go with SPFx (frankly, I didn’t even know there WAS such a thing as a 4000-level session code!). We did a similar talk at our internal TechReady conference in July and it was ranked the very top Office session of the entire conference. Meet the Security Experts. Five minutes – let alone 75 minutes – with Matt Swann will change your worldview about the cloud. Honestly, if you ever work with him, you’ll see he’s one of those people you’ll remember working with when you look back on your career. Hear from the guy in charge of SharePoint security directly in BRK3032 – Learn how SharePoint safeguards your data in the cloud Talk to coders! Our director of engineering and the development manager of a large chunk of our UX investments will be laying down the knowledge in BRK3026 - Learn how to build a fast, responsive portal in SharePoint Online. Part of coming to Ignite is hearing directly from those who write code – and together Russ and John have decades and decades of experience. Change Management: We’ve heard you! Many of you (including on this very forum), have given us feedback about what you expect from us as we roll out new UX. We added a session on it to both share our strategy and continue the conversation and feedback. If you have opinions on how we roll out new functionality, join Zohar at BRK2297: Learn how we move fast without breaking things by managing change in SharePoint Online SharePoint Dev’s Secret Weapon: PNP. Vesa was recently sharing with me the usage and community engagement stats from the SharePoint Patterns and Practices site and github – they floored me. It’s such a great virtuous cycle and we are starting to bring some of the scenarios from PNP directly into the product based upon our learnings. If you are a SharePoint dev, you must go to Vesa’s BRK2115 – Learn about PNP and the new SharePoint Framework. Geek out on very specific parts of the product. What would a SharePoint conference be without some sessions that dive incredibly deep into one aspect of the product? Three stand out to me here: an entire session just on doclibs with BRK2043 Review SharePoint Document Libraries: what’s new, what’s coming, and when to use what, a session just on the various ways you can create site templates with BRK3027 Learn best practices for creating and managing Site Templates, and a session on our new mobile apps with BRK2037 Explore what’s coming with the SharePoint apps Accessibility and Inclusive Design. At Microsoft, we take designing for all needs and abilities seriously as a core part of our processes. This year at Ignite, we are starting to open up and talk about that work a bit more and provide guidance for you. Melissa, who has been running our accessibility efforts in SharePoint for many years now, has some great guidance in BRK2214 Ensure your intranet sites are inclusive for people with disabilities. There are a lot more talks at the conference, of course (188 tagged with SharePoint) – including some great talks from the community. I didn’t include the community talks here because I didn’t help prep for those, but they are some of my favorite personally to attend myself. If you have any questions about how to maximize your time at the conference next week, feel free to leave us comments!UPDATE: SharePoint Online team sites + Office 365 Groups moving beyond First Release
As announced in August, 2016, we are bringing SharePoint Online team sites to Office 365 groups. This change rolled out to First Release tenants in the end of 2016 and is now beginning worldwide rollout. This next phase of the rollout will start Thursday, January 12, 2017, and is expected to complete to customers worldwide in 100% of production by the end of the month. The new SharePoint Online team site home page for an Office 365 group showcases important news, content and site activity. When you create a group, Office 365 gives the group a shared inbox, calendar, OneNote notebook, a Planner for task management—and now, a full-powered SharePoint team site. Each group gets a modern home page—with the ability to create additional pages—document libraries, lists and business apps. The integration of groups and SharePoint team sites means that any time a new team site is created, a new group membership will be created as well. You can easily see the members of the site, if the site is listed as public or private within your organization and how it has been classified. In addition, all existing Office 365 groups will be updated with their own team site. And once the rollout is complete for your tenant, all existing and newly created groups will get a team site by default. Within a group’s team site, this roll out brings a new home page, features News for highlighting important content in the team, and the Activity web part for showing recently active content. These team sites also include our new responsive and powerful page authoring and consumption experience – all connected to the overall Office 365 group experience. There is nothing you need to do but collaborate with your team in a more modern, connected way. Please ask in a reply to this thread if you have any questions. We are pleased to reach this milestone, and here with you along the way. Thanks, Mark
UPDATE: Create Office 365 Groups with team sites from SharePoint home moving beyond First Release
We recently completed the worldwide rollout for Office 365 Groups getting full-powered SharePoint team sites at the end of January 2017. Our next step is to now bring the ability to create SharePoint team sites connected to Office 365 Groups from SharePoint home beyond First Release. This next phase of rollout will begin today, and is expected to reach all customers worldwide over the next month. We also wanted to share some of the additional capabilities we’ve added to group-connected team sites since we first began roll out to First Release. No matter where you create an Office 365 Group from – whether SharePoint, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, or elsewhere – you consistently get the full collaborative power of a connected SharePoint Online team site among the other services groups provides (shared inbox, shared calendar, Planner plan, team notebook, and more). This move beyond First Release includes the capabilities described in our November blog post: Fast creation of sites connected to Office 365 Groups from the SharePoint home page Editable team site home pages that look great at your desk and on your phone Modern creation panels for new libraries and lists In-place navigation editing Site settings panels for editing site information and site permissions Modern page creation in classic sites Admin controls for team site creation The site permissions panel listed above has been enhanced to include options for adding members to the site’s Office 365 Group or simply sharing only the team site without providing access to other group resources. The panel is intended to provide simple permissions management, but also includes a link to ‘Advanced permission settings’ for site owners that have a need to do things like add custom SharePoint permissions & mappings. Note this panel also allows you to add users or groups to the ‘Site Visitors’ permissions group, so it is easy to provide read-only access to the site. All you need to do is add a new person or group via the ‘Invite people’ button, and then change their permission level to ‘Read’. The user or group’s permission level determines which permission group they appear under – those with ‘Read’ permission will appear in the ‘Site Visitors’ category. Managing group-connected team sites Since new team sites are connected to Office 365 Groups, managing them involves possible interactions with Office 365 Group settings in addition to those provided by SharePoint. Examples include settings that apply to groups such as whether group creation is allowed in the tenant, which users are permitted to create groups, usage guidelines URL or group classification labels. Once the group-connected site is created, management of the site is likewise split between Azure Active Directory (AAD) PowerShell cmdlets and the SharePoint Online Management Shell. Anything dealing with creation, deletion, un-delete (restore) or membership happens through AAD. SharePoint-specific management, such as storage quota and link sharing policies, take place using the SharePoint management tools. For governing modern site creation, this support page details the administrative controls, but is useful to summarize the relationship between a group’s policy settings and how the SharePoint ‘Create site’ experience behaves. By default, if group creation is enabled in the tenant, the ‘Create site’ command will appear on SharePoint home, and if a user is permitted to create groups they will get the site creation experience. If the user is *not* permitted to create groups, they will get the classic self service provisioning experience that results in the creation of a subsite. The table below describes how the combination of group and site creation settings work together: * The current user is considered to have group creation permissions if the AAD property EnableGroupCreation is true, or it is false but the user is a member of the security group assigned to the GroupCreationAllowedId AAD property. ** Site creation is enabled via SharePoint Admin Center under Site creation settings: In addition to managing site creation, we are also enabling the SharePoint Online PowerShell cmdlets to administer modern, group-connected site collections. This means that modern team site collections can now be enumerated with the Get-SPOSite cmdlet with the following example: Get-SPOSite -Template GROUP#0 -IncludePersonalSite:$false Most parameters for these site collections can also be set using the Set-SPOSite cmdlet, with the exception of those that would result in breaking connection with their corresponding Office 365 Group (e.g. you cannot set the Owner property using this cmdlet – you would need to set the Group’s owners via AAD). Please refer to the respective documentation for each of the above cmdlets for additional details. For more information on using PowerShell to manage Office 365 Groups, this article may be helpful as well. What else is new? In addition to the above, this phase of the rollout includes a couple of previously unannounced capabilities. The first is a group membership management experience that lives in SharePoint itself. Now, when you click on the member count of the group in the site header, you will be presented with a new group membership panel that allows you to add members and change their roles between owners and members, or remove them outright. Users will no longer need to jump to Outlook to manage the group’s membership. The second is Content Type Hub syndication – modern sites can now consume content types that have been published from a central content type hub. We heard feedback that this is an important feature to enable, and we are including it in this rollout. As noted above, this rollout will take place over the course of a few weeks. We are very excited for you to take advantage of modern, connected team sites and look forward to any feedback or questions you may have. As always, please ask in a reply to this thread. Thanks, TejasUPDATE: Support for Structured/Managed Navigation enabled on Modern Pages in Classic Team Sites
Hi everyone! Thank you for the feedback around wanting to move to the “modern” team site experiences, and needing support for structured/managed navigation. We’re pleased to announce that we have addressed this issue and will be rolling out the fix to the worldwide production environment in the coming days. Thank you for your patience – and to the community for helping us identify some issues during the initial First Release preview! With this update if you have enabled publishing on a classic team site, your structured or managed navigation will now render correctly in the modern experience (both global and current navigation), including any scoped or audience-targeted links. We haven’t pulled all the classic settings into the modern panels yet, so when you need to edit the navigation elements, the edit link will direct you to the classic settings page. Navigation settings on a classic team site: Now render correctly on a modern page: Additionally, subsites will correctly inherit from the parent web when structural navigation is used. Parent site: Subsite: We hope this unblocks you as you move to the modern user experience (UX). Try it out, and let us know if you have any questions. Thanks, Sean!
Update: Document Sets in Modern Document Libraries
I am pleased to announce some updates on the plan and timeline for improving the Document Set experience in modern document libraries. In January, we communicated a March delivery date for these improvements. We apologize for missing that date. We’re now planning on rolling out this change in May. We will be making the official announcement to the Message Center very soon with exact dates. Thank you all for your patience! This change allows organizations to use the power of document sets to group related documents together with consistent metadata and structure without having to go back and forth between classic and modern experiences. Document sets now look and feel like ordinary folders in modern libraries, and benefit from all the cool new features in modern. This means that users can drag and drop content to upload to document sets, link to content that lives outside the document set, pin files to the top of the document set, start flows on document set items, and define conditional formatting on document set items. It also means that the Document Set experience can be customized using SharePoint Framework Extensions, just like all other modern list views. All the content management rules you can define on document set content types are still supported. No business processes were harmed in the making of this change! Document set metadata can be viewed and edited in the details pane while in a document set. Shared metadata specified in a document set content type continues to work as it always has; values inside shared columns will be copied to items inside the document set. Columns that are identified as Welcome page columns in the content type are sorted to the top of the details pane, so that users can find them easily. Content and structure rules specified in the document set content type are also supported, including the default content and default view settings. Document set versioning functionality will appear under the context menu on document set items in the modern list view, include “Capture Version” and “Version History.” Other document set-specific actions from the Document Set ribbon are still there, but only in classic. Just like any other modern list view page, you can click “Return to classic SharePoint” in the lower left hand corner to go back the classic document set experience back. The one caveat is that customized document set welcome pages are not supported in modern. This change will not affect document sets that use welcome pages that have been configured with custom HTML or web parts; those welcome pages will still be displayed in classic mode, as they are today.
New Library UI - non-required "Required" metadata
The new Library UI does not require metadata or content types to be filled out when uploading a document. This topic was well discussed in the Yammer network, but I feel it is important enough to move here since the Yammer content is to be deleted in September. I will try to summarize the issue. Please comment if I've left out something. - The new UI does not require metdata to be filled out, even if the column is set to "required" - There is no promt for the user to fill out metadata, they must know they need to go to the "details" pane or "quick edit" view to enter metadata after the document is uploaded. - There is no prompt for content type selection when uploading a document. - The document is not marked in anyway to notify the user it is missing metadata or content type. In the classic library UI, the document would be checked out and could only be checked in once the uploader filled in the required metadata - Library webparts on pages are affected by the the Library UI view. When trying to upload a document to a library webpart, Content type selection is buggy if the Libary itself is set to use the new UI. As discussed in the Yammer network, these changes are a major blow to businesses that rely on and preach the use of metadata instead of folders. Microsoft is trying to make document uploading easier for the users, but this type of change in (significant) behavior dramatically affects the design and usage of SharePoint and document storage. Consumption of content via views and other methods requires proper metadata to be filled out, and users are rarely inclined to fix document metadata after it has been uploaded. Ultimately, these changes make it too difficult to use SharePoint to rigorously structure and drive processes around data. Some things that were suggested/discussed: - Bring back the original functionality - Create an optional library property that lets admins turn on and off prompting for metadata/content types. - "required" should me "required" - bring back item checkout on upload - Mark the document somehow that it is missing required metadata - when uploading multiple documents, open quick edit immediately for users to add metadata - better reporting on checked out documents, and which documents may be missing metadata - required metadata options will clash with folder syncing from windows explorer I am amongst many other admins who have rolled back the new UI and continue to use the "classic view" until functionality is production ready. If you would like to read further on this issue, you can access the Yammer thread for a few more weeks: https://www.yammer.com/itpronetwork/#/Threads/show?threadId=727393585
