SharePoint powers teamwork in Office 365 – to better collaborate on proposals, projects, and campaigns throughout your organization. SharePoint has the power to meet the widest range of content collaboration needs including teamwork with Microsoft Teams and SharePoint pages. All up, this delivers a unique teamwork solution connecting content AND communications.
Microsoft disclosed many new announcements at this week’s Ignite 2018 conference (#MSIgnite) in Orlando, FL – including:
- Further SharePoint integration with Microsoft Teams
- Enhancements to powerful SharePoint web parts and pages
- Team site governance and activity innovations
At work, it is important for every team member to streamline efforts and stay on the same page. Connected SharePoint team sites provide a central location to manage team files, input and connect to important data, and share timely news. And with insight into what drives the most engagement and value, people can course correct and optimize for greatest impact.
“Today, we have an enterprise data management solution that adheres to our document classification and retention policies using Microsoft SharePoint Online. This is huge from a compliance perspective for Cummins."
- Josh Littrell, Director of Corporate IT - Cummins
We’re excited to share this with you for the first time and look forward to working with you as a trusted partner to achieve your desired outcomes. Let’s dive into the details of what was disclosed…
Further SharePoint integration with Microsoft Teams
Already today, team members can highlight SharePoint files, lists, pages, news, and more – right inside of the Microsoft Teams user experience. When you share and work together, you need the tools and digital workspaces to communicate, access data, and stay productive. With employer expectations changing, employees are expected to be creative and to think critically.
Create a Team connected to your group-connected SharePoint team site - If your group-connected team site is not connected to a chat-based hub for teamwork, then it’s just one click away with the new Create a Team button in bottom-left corner of your site.
Document library folders in sites visibly connected to Teams channel – Now it’s easy to tell which folders within your library have an associated Teams channel. That means the chat capability associated to it is visible and actionable right from within the SharePoint user interface. SharePoint also helps users understand that some actions, like delete or rename of a channel-connected folder, need to happen through the Teams app.
SharePoint web parts as tabs in Teams – We’re working towards directly exposing SharePoint web parts as tabs in Microsoft Teams - including their configuration options. Now, your custom development can be used in more places throughout your organizations collaboration and communication efforts.
Teams connectors as SharePoint web parts for pages and news – We’re working towards directly exposing Teams tabs as full-page apps in SharePoint - including their configuration options. Now your SharePoint sites can take full advantage of the rich ecosystem of service providers who are building integration with Microsoft Teams.
SharePoint is deeply integrated with Microsoft Teams in Office 365. Use SharePoint team sites to manage content and share it with your team members via their hub for teamwork - Microsoft Teams. Create a group-connected site today and start sharing.
Enhancements to powerful SharePoint web parts and pages
SharePoint pages let you tell a compelling story. And web parts play the role of dynamic components on the page to pull in data, documents, images and such. Together, you shape the content and context of how you communicate throughout your organization. And now it’s time to provide you with greater flexibility and control for how your data reacts, interacts and displays.
Webpart-to-webpart connections – Let web parts talk to other web parts and your pages and experiences become more dynamic with data and interactive. You will be able to configure web parts to get their property values from other web parts, including updating those values based on what is selected.
Initially we will support dynamic data in a few of our 1st-party webparts, with the intent to grow these capabilities through the SharePoint Framework - more and more web parts (talking to other web parts).
- List (data provider)
- List properties (consumer)
- File viewer (consumer)
- Embed (consumer)
New page title region options – As you begin to create the look and feel of your page, you now have more control over what the title region of your page looks like. You can choose from several layout options, alignment of where the overlay text resides, add text labels, show published date and author and provide alternative text to enhance the accessibility of your page.
Page section background shading - Create additional visual design and clarity as a user scrolls through your content. Now you can add different colors to the background of your page sections or leave them white as they are by default.
Page designs to reuse and standardize content - Save your creators time when they generate new SharePoint pages, and ensure that the consistency of experience for how you promote your content and information remains intact. You can control the design and layout of your pages by simply designing one that can then be used by many.
You, too, can now duplicate entire sections or individual webparts to speed up your page creation experience.
Team activity innovations and site governance
Heat map - insights on site activity shows site traffic patterns – Discover when people most often visit your site, so you can best target and reach people for important announcements and events.
Site classification shows policy labels – We are updating the user experience for classifying a site to integrate with Microsoft Info Protection policy labels. Group classification is no longer an arbitrary string (like HBI or MBI) but an actual IP policy with rules around retention, conditional access, etc. – using the names of how you uniquely classify your content – like “for everyone” or “legal only” or “Shhhh” (if you want to keep things ‘top secret’ 😉; they're your policies – name them.
Try more and more of what SharePoint offers, and let us know what you think
In all, we encourage you to build out and organize your intranet. Establish the sites you need and ensure your users can create the sites they need. Once established, associate them to hub sites to organize related sites and projects. As you progress year over year, keep creating and sharing dynamic, data-rich news articles.
If you didn’t catch Jeff Teper’s general session, “Content Collaboration in the Modern Workplace” at Ignite or live streamed, I encourage you to watch the session, soon available on-demand.
We want to empower you and every person on your team to achieve more. Let us know what you need next. We are always open to feedback via UserVoice and continued dialog in the SharePoint community in the Microsoft Tech Community —and we always have an eye on tweets to @SharePoint. Let us know.
—Mark Kashman, senior product manager for the SharePoint team
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Q: When is this all being released in Office 365?
A: The above blog marks the disclosure of numerous feature and capability announcements. Our goal is to release all the items to Targeted Release customers in Office 365 by the end of the first half of calendar year 2019. You can expect future blogs and admin message center posts to raise attention to specific change management dates per each item to designate initial availability roll out in Office 365, with refined information about timing and duration of roll out.