What is the one thing that we can guarantee is going to happen in every business? Change. And when it happens, you want to be in control of how it happens, and how efficiently you can make it happen – in style – while maintaining a level of automation to ensure certain aspects happen consistently. Your SharePoint intranet is your intranet to design and control.
To help, we’re getting ready to release updates to SharePoint hub sites, news, pages, and web parts:
- Create more SharePoint hub sites – up to 100
- Adjust sites automatically when they get associated to a SharePoint hub site
- Modify the color of your site header
- Spread news from anywhere
- Page editing improvements
- New web part layouts
Let’s dive into the details… plus FAQs and links to key, related resources at the end.
Create more SharePoint hub sites – up to 100
You can now create up to 100 SharePoint hub sites.
Before you make everything a hub, consider how your users will best organize and ultimately find people and information. The SharePoint hub site planning guide has a lot of best practices and guidance across structuring your information and logical organizational methods for organizing your sites across your intranet.
100 is the new 50, and we’re eager to know how you plan to use hub sites – more.
Adjust sites automatically when they get associated to a SharePoint hub site
When people in your organization create new SharePoint sites, you often need to ensure a level of consistency. You can use site designs and site scripts to automate provisioning new or existing modern SharePoint sites that use your own custom configurations. And this can be most critical when sites get associated to well-managed SharePoint hub sites.
Site scripting during hub site association – when a site gets associated to a hub site, it not only inherits the theme of the hub site, it can now be further configured using powerful site designs and site scripts to adjust and enforce permissions, apply shared metadata, preferred content management and policies.
Note: the site design, and associated site script, will need to already be published to the tenant. If you don’t wish to reuse this site design in self-service site creation be sure scope it to restrict visibility. You can learn more about site designs scoping here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/dev/declarative-customization/site-design-scoping.
Read more about what capabilities recently became available - site scripts / site designs Summer 2018 update.
Modify the color of your site header
Don’t feel boxed in, especially when you want to express your site’s personality in more ways than one. We’re enabling a new option to modify the color of the site header region to provide more site theming flexibility. This Header emphasis will be based on the currently applied site theme color and can either be a lighter, softer color or a darker, stronger one. The site owner always has the option to set to gray or back to no emphasis. This new option sits within the change the look menu within the upper-right gear icon of a site.
Note: this option currently only applies to SharePoint themes and not custom ones.
Spread news from anywhere
When you have news to share, you don’t want to be limited with how you can share news – especially when it exists from an external source. You, also, don’t want to hit that blocker of a page or news article being left in an edit state when the previous author forgot to click publish. SharePoint introduces new ways to distribute external news and editing improvements to keep the push of information flowing.
News links – you can share a link to items like existing news within your company, news from your public website, LinkedIn articles, and so on. Within your site, click New > News link (or from within the News web part), paste in the full URL from the original source and the service will automatically show an image, title, and description for the link when available. Each of these values can be edited by the author. Once you save it, the news article goes into the SharePoint news service as a new News article visible on the site, SharePoint home in Office 365, and the SharePoint mobile apps News tab. When a person clicks on a news link, and they will be taken to the original source to read the article.
Pages editing improvements
Be more aware of who is editing a page, and don't feel locked out. People who go to work on a SharePoint page will be able to see if someone else is already editing that page. They’ll be able to see who that person is and how to contact them. Additionally, to prevent unintentional page lockouts, we’ve added a 5-minute timeout if no changes are made and the page is left open in edit mode.
New web part layout options
As you are editing your news articles and pages, you’ll use web parts to arrange and present you’re the content in the context of your message. And it’s important to showcase that content in the most engaging way. Now, you’ll have additional choices to configure the layout.
The following key web parts will receive new options:
Quick links – the Quick links gets four new layouts (Buttons, Grid, List, & Tiles). You then choose your preferred icon from hundreds within the now built-in gallery of Office fabric icons (and they are searchable), or an image, to represent each link. Further, you can now choose whether you display descriptions for your links in some layouts.
- Image Gallery – the Image gallery gets a new Brick layout to show images of varying aspect ratios; huff and puff – you can’t blow this one down. Once you’ve selected your desired set of images, SharePoint lays them out in an engaging way according to their size. Sorry, Mr. Wolf.
- Hero – the Hero web part gets the ability to set a focal point on each image. You now have the ability to draw your site visitors eyes to the exact portion of the image that is most important, and this, too, carries over as the hero web part reflows to different screen sizes and within the SharePoint mobile app. Now that’s much more Hero’ic.
- News – the News web part can now display all news in a carousel layout. You can encourage your site visitors to review your news more closely – giving them a moment to focus on each one before swiping to the next. Less news is sometimes more.
Learn more about using web parts on SharePoint Online pages.
Keep the conversation going year-round
In all, we encourage you to build out and organize your intranet. Establish the sites you need and ensure your users can create and distribute information easily. SharePoint bolsters the connective tissue across employee engagement experiences throughout your organization. And we are here to help. The SharePoint team is always open to feedback via UserVoice and continued dialog in the SharePoint community within the Microsoft Tech Community —and an eye on your tweets to @SharePoint.
—Mark Kashman, senior product manager for the SharePoint team
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: When will the above features and adjustments be available to Office 365 customer?
A: These updates will gradually roll out to Targeted Release customers in early September, and the roll out will be completed worldwide by the end of November.
Q: Can I associate one SharePoint hub site to another hub site?
A: No, you won't be able to associate a SharePoint hub site to another hub site.
Q: Can a team site or a communication site be associated to more than one SharePoint hub site?
A: No. It will only be possible to associate a site to one hub site at a time. It is possible to link to various non-associated sites in the top navigation. And it will be possible, within seconds, to associate and/or disassociate a site as the business changes.
Key related resources
- SharePoint hub sites planning guide https://aka.ms/PlanningSPhubsites
- Learn how Microsoft’s own IT is “Redefining their intranet site experience with SharePoint in Office 365.”
- Webinar (on-demand) “Intranet strategy and planning with SharePoint hub sites & Office 365”
- Learn more how admins create and manage hub sites
- Learn more how to associate and dissociate your sites to and from hub sites
- Review best practices for setting up your hub site.
- Broader SharePoint site design and site script overview.
- Learn how to change the look of your SharePoint sites.
- Learn more about using web parts on SharePoint Online pages (includes the full list of all first-party web parts from Microsoft in Office 365 production).