If you’re still writing “2021” in a variety of places, have no fear: I’m still working on it, too. Thankfully in the digital age, we’re recalling fewer incorrect bank checks, right? The good news: SharePoint and related teams have been banking a lot of progress on the initial rollouts of 2022. And it’s time for you to cash in…
January 2022 kicked us off right in Microsoft 365 with a slew of SharePoint and related tech goodness: Microsoft Editor in SharePoint pages, Viva Topics topic card improvements, SharePoint navigation switcher, conversation search in Office.com and SharePoint, migration updates, Microsoft Lists: Board view, Power BI for libraries, new library drop-down menu, Lists in the SharePoint app bar, and more; all listed below with screenshots and links to more details.
I also chatted with Yogesh Ratnaparkhi - Microsoft principal program manager focused on migration of files and folder into Microsoft 365. In this episode of The Intrazone, Yogesh shares progress on Migration Manager in the SharePoint admin center, recent updates with the SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) and highlight some of the key organizing and scheduling capabilities now available to admins. It's a packed half hour, and you'll find yourself more informed at the end.
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All features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Microsoft 365 as of January 2022 (possibly early February 2022).
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Spellcheck and Grammar in SharePoint Pages
This update brings the Microsoft Editor service to SharePoint Pages and News posts - the same one you experience in Microsoft Word. This allows inline proofreading in SharePoint - to check your spelling and your grammar - without relying on any specific browser extensions. And a nice accessibility touch: This feature changes the suggestion’s colors to monochrome when they're shown on a themed background so it's more visible.
We all need a little editor in our life - to help dot those i's and cross those t's, and remind us with red squiggly that SharePoint is spelled with a capital S capital P. You don't want to be that person spelling SharePoint with a lowercase "p" - trust me.
- Roadmap ID 88534.
- Learn more.
Experience improvements to the Viva Topics topic card
Viva Topics topic cards now show more, with a few new enhancements: they dynamically expand so you can read longer descriptions, you'll see job titles for contacts, and navigate in context to a person's people card to learn even more about them. These improvements will help users get a better sense of the what and who - to stay in-context and informed.
On hover experiences expanding in January 2022 - learn, review, engage, and back to work.
- Roadmap ID 82175.
- Learn more.
SharePoint: Navigation Switcher
2022 wants you to feel the freedom of navigation control. You can now adjust SharePoint team site navigation – to keep it horizontal, make it vertical, or remove it from view; makes me think you may make SharePoint into the next Crossword puzzle platform - if it's not Wordle, it's the across and down of SharePoint.
With this new nav switcher feature, you can easily customize team sites by changing navigation's orientation and visibility to achieve different desired look and feel, layouts, and alignment styles.
- Roadmap ID: 85568.
- Learn more.
Conversation search in Office.com and SharePoint
The conversation - one of the most common forms of content that has been left out of the broader search world - often inaccessible when you're not in the individual conversation app. Conversation search allows you to find relevant Microsoft Teams chats and Outlook email conversations when searching in Bing for work, SharePoint and Office.com.
Results will be limited to conversations that they were part of and conversations that took place in groups and teams that they have access to. As you're searching, you'll see the results in a separate ‘Conversations’ vertical. It's an aggregate experience mixed within the broader discovery of search results. A lot of knowledge out there is not a document, and now knowledge is even easier to find.
- Learn more.
- Roadmap ID: 68779
SharePoint Migration Tool: Workflow migration
Migrate and convert your SharePoint Server on-premises workflows into Microsoft 365 as Power Automate flows. This is a public preview for SharePoint on-premises customers to migrate SharePoint 2010 workflows directly to Power Automate.
From within the SharePoint Migration Tool, you run a workflow migration task and follow the inline wizard; provide the source site and enter the destination. After the migration is completed, the flow owner can sign into Power Automate, navigate to the right solution, and validate the migrated flows.
A few notes: You can create workflow migration task and run it from SharePoint Migration Tool user interface or migrate the workflow with PowerShell scripts. The focus is on two out-of-the-box 2010 workflows: Approval and Collect Feedback.
Admins can start the workflow migration from SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) user interface or via PowerShell scripts
- Learn more , the workflow migration guide, and anything else you need to learn how to Migrate your content to Microsoft 365.
- Roadmap ID: 82108.
Egnyte migration now in Migration Manager
With the Mover acquisition, we began to expand migration capabilities from within the SharePoint admin center in Microsoft 365. This update enables moving content from Egnyte into Microsoft 365 (OneDrive, SharePoint, and/or Teams). This is the fourth cloud storage service you can migrate content from, alongside the ability to move content from Box, Dropbox, and Google.
When you’re ready to move your content, click on the Migrate tab in the SharePoint admin center to start scan discovery, assessment, and migrate. You'll get detailed reports and the rest in a seamless transition of files and folders to Microsoft 365.
Tagging and scheduling migrations for cloud scenarios
Better organize and prepare for your move of files and folders from 3rd-party cloud storage providers into Microsoft 365 (OneDrive, SharePoint, and Teams). Tagging lets you organize, sort, and navigate through a large quantity of users or folders. And with Task scheduling, you’ll have more control of when you plan and organize your migrations, including scaling out properly when it’s best to schedule multiple tasks.
- Roadmap ID: 82016.
- Learn more.
Teamwork updates across SharePoint team sites, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams
Microsoft 365 is designed to be a universal toolkit for teamwork – to give you the right tools for the right task, along with common services to help you seamlessly work across applications. SharePoint is the intelligent content service that powers teamwork – to better collaborate on proposals, projects, and campaigns throughout your organization – with integration across Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Yammer, Stream, Planner and much more.
Microsoft Lists: Board view
All a’Board! This view is ideal when you want to track items as they move forward in a process or workflow. Moving items through stages is as easy as dragging and dropping across vertical columns. And like cards in Gallery view, it’s easy to configure which column metadata from your list is displayed in the cards and in what order.
One of the wonderful things about Board view is that the metadata of an item automatically updates as you drag and drop it to a new column - for instance, if you drag an event session item when using the Event itinerary template from the "Proposed" column to "In-review" column, the item's status gets updated from "Proposed" to "In-review" - and may even be tied to a rule you created that gets triggered when the item moves to the "Approved" column signaling another person to then finalize title, abstract, speakers, etc..
Now you don't have to always go to the Board of directors to move things forward, create your own board views and move things forward or back - with progress always in mind.
- Roadmap ID: 85634.
- Learn more.
Power BI for SharePoint document libraries
We are excited to announce that we are bringing the data visualization and task automation capabilities of Power BI – previously only available within Lists – to document libraries. Library users will see a new menu option in Integrate > Power BI > Visualize the library, which allows users to create a new Power BI report using that library data. Once a report is saved and published, it will appear in the same submenu under Integrate > Power BI.
Users with a Microsoft 365 E5 license or Power BI Pro license will have access to the full report authoring and viewing experience. Note: Users with a Power BI free license may only visualize their list data but cannot publish nor view reports.
Two additional capabilities tied to this update:
- You can also use the SharePoint Quick Chart web part to add simple, basic charts to your page. Enter your data points or get data from a list or library, add labels, pick your chart type -- column or pie -- and publish.
- And in a library, if you go to Automate > Rules > Create a rule, you can create rules to automate sending someone a notification when a new file is created, or a column value changes in the library - just like rules in lists. They have the same rules.
This all gives you a lot of options for how you want to visualize your libraries and helps make sense of it all and of course correct.
- Roadmap IDs 88706, 88716, and 88710.
- Learn more.
Microsoft OneDrive & SharePoint Libraries now have a dropdown menu
This is a simple, powerful one. We're adding a dropdown menu that allows you to easily switch between multiple document libraries associated with a team or site. Now when you select a team or site within OneDrive, you’ll be taken to the default document library instead of a list of document libraries to choose from.
When a user selects a document library within SharePoint, they will be able to choose a different document library using the library dropdown next to the breadcrumb. And it’s not a complete removal of past capabilities: You will still be able to click the site name in the breadcrumb to see the full list of document libraries. Drop down and navigate - it's liberating to not have to click two or three times just to get from one library to the next.
- Roadmap ID 81990.
Lists get an entry point within the SharePoint app bar
Getting to your lists should be easy. You can get to them from within SharePoint sites, Lists home, from within Teams, on the go via iOS or Android, and now from within the SharePoint app bar – a navigation element available off all SharePoint sites.
Look for the Lists icon after the Files icon - aka, My Lists. Content in the Lists panel is driven by Microsoft Graph and is personalized to user activity. You'll see your recent and favorite lists - with links to both the list itself and the SharePoint site it is stored in.
- Roadmap ID: 85641
- Learn more:
Related technology
Microsoft Lists - MSA Preview – lists.live.com
Have you heard? You can now sign up for the Lists preview using your Microsoft account - often referred to as your MSA. This is a lightweight version of the Microsoft Lists app designed for small business and individual use in conjunction with your MSA. A separate login if you're already using Microsoft Lists with your OrgID as a Microsoft 365 business plan customer. You can do both, and we hope you give it a try.
One of the big updates is the new Lists top-level URL: lists.live.com
We would love you to participate. Start by creating and sharing lists with your work colleagues, partners, your soccer team, or your neighborhood volunteer groups. We’ve designed the app off the core of Microsoft Lists, plus introduce new experiences like tabbed views, sharing from within a Person column, add images inline, and more.
It’s time to liberate yourself from coordination chaos. Time to clear your brain space and get organized. In short, it’s time to try the Microsoft Lists – MSA Preview.
- Start at the blog and go from there: https://aka.ms/MSLists/blog/MSAPreview
New Microsoft Viva adoption resource center
Microsoft Viva is an employee experience platform that brings together communications, knowledge, learning, resources, and insights into the flow of work.
The new Viva adoption center offers resources to go from inspiration to execution. Get started, experiment with our services, and onboard employees at scale while being confident that you are improving the employee experience. You'll find the Viva eBook, links to the Bersin Assessment Tool, communications templates to help get the word out internally, a nice Day-In-the-Life Guide, quick-read infographics, demos and more.
- Start here: https://adoption.microsoft.com/viva/ and follow Microsoft Adoption all up on Twitter: @MSFTAdoption
New intranet report from ClearBox: 'Intranet and Employee Experience Platforms' 2022 report
This replaces the 'SharePoint intranet in-a-box' and 'independent intranet' reports they've released in the past, combining them into a comprehensive buyer's guide. And here's the real news: It's now entirely free (it used to be $495); in my opinion, it was always worth the expense, and always brings business value - be it free or not.
You can review offerings from Microsoft Partners such as Valo, Powell, Beezy and LiveTiles - as well as their 3rd-party perspective on how SharePoint and the Microsoft Viva Connections module stacks up on their own. It comes with product reviews, vendor teardowns, loads of screenshots, and helpful thoughts on "build vs. buy"
- Read it today: ClearBox Intranet and EX Platforms 2022
February 2022 teasers
Psst, still here? Still scrolling the page looking for more roadmap goodness? If so, here is a few teasers of what’s to come to production next month…
- Teaser #1: Viva Topics brings new integrations with Yammer [Roadmap ID: 72184]
- Teaser #2: Pairing naming convention between Teams channels and corresponding SharePoint folders [Roadmap ID: 72211]
… shhh, tell everyone.
Helpful, ongoing change management resources
- Sign up and try the Microsoft Lists - MSA Preview
- Read and review the free ClearBox 'Intranet and Employee Experience Platforms 2022'
- Visit the Microsoft Viva adoption center within adoption.microsoft.com
- Upcoming events + on-demand workshop:
- RnD Show “Microsoft Lists Overview” – LIVE on Feb.11.2022 at 8am PST w/ Reza Dorrani and Daniel Christian, and guests: Miceile Barrett and Mark Kashman
- CollabDays - Bletchley Park, England (Feb.23.2022) + @CollabDays_Park
- Enterprise Connect (Mar.21-24.2022, Orlando, FL)
- Teams Nation 2022 (Mar.23.2022)
- CollabDays - Cologne (Mar.2022 - no specific day announced yet)
- Document Strategy Forum (DSF) 2022 (April 4-6.2022, Chicago, IL)
- Microsoft 365 Conference (in-person, Apr.5-7.2022, Las Vegas, NV)
- AIIM 2022 (Apr.27-29, Denver, CO)
- SEF 2022 (planned for in-person with a few sessions delivered virtually, May.4-5.2022, Sweden)
- 365 EduCon (May.9-12.2022, Seattle, WA)
- Microsoft Lists workshop [available on-demand]
- "Stay on top of Office 365 changes"
- "Message center in Office 365"
- Install the Office 365 admin app; view Message Center posts and stay current with push notifications.
- Microsoft 365 public roadmap + pre-filtered URL for SharePoint, OneDrive, Yammer and Stream roadmap items.
- SharePoint Facebook | Twitter | SharePoint Community Blog | UserVoice
- OneDrive Facebook | Twitter | OneDrive Community Blog | UserVoice
- Follow me to catch news and interesting SharePoint things: @mkashman; warning, occasional bad puns may fly in a tweet or two here and there.
Thanks for tuning in and/or reading this episode/blog of the Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop – January 2022. We are open to your feedback in the comments below to hear how both the Roadmap Pitstop podcast episodes and blogs can be improved over time.
Engage with us. Ask those questions that haunt you. Push us where you want and need to get the best information and insights. We are here to put both our and your best change management foot forward.
Stay safe out there on the road’map, and thanks for listening and reading.
I appreciate your time,
Mark Kashman – senior product manager (SharePoint/Lists) | Microsoft)
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