New SharePoint Online Link web part rolling out now

Microsoft

SharePoint team is excited to announce that the new Link web part is starting to roll out to our customers!

What is a Link web part?

The SharePoint Online Link web part makes sharing links to external and internal pages and documents much nicer by providing a visual and contextual preview for the link and its contents -- with image, title and text snippet -- right inline within the internal communication (page or news).

Just add a Link web part to your page, paste in your URL and see the magic happen!

 

LinkInToolbox.jpg

 

What links (URLs) are supported?

We currently support links to (w/live examples per each type):

  • Internet resources : web pages, YouTube videos, images, etc.:ExtLink.png
  • SharePoint modern publishing pages and news articles:
    SPPage.png
  • Links to any documents stored in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business:

SPDOc.png

FAQs

1. Can I only keep the preview and remove the URL from the page?

Yes, you can. Your readers will still be able to navigate to the linked resource by clicking on the preview.

 

2. Can I just keep the link and remove the preview?

Yes, you can.

 

3. Will all links have an image, title and text snippet?

No. This depends on the data that we are able to get from the referenced link. Sometimes the preview will only have title and text, or image and title.

 

linksPreviews.png

Want to learn more?

Here are a couple of articles that provide more background on modern SharePoint authoring and other recently released web parts:

And this is what the links above would look like if they were added to a modern page using Link web part :

otherArticles.png

As always, let us know what you think, and where we should invest more time.

 

Thanks,

The SharePoint Team

14 Replies
Hi @Alina Skarbovsky, Although the web part is present, I cannot complete a paste action to use the part. I have tried different users and sites. Any thoughts? Am I perhaps doing something wrong? Pretty intuitive I'd have thought but you never know! Thanks and Regards

It should be pretty straight forward, copy&paste the link. Are you not able to paste at all? What if you try to type? Just trying to figure out what might have gone wrong here.

I can confirm typing works and returns the expected result. Paste action does not work currently for me, nothing is captured by the action. FYI I use Microsoft Edge on Windows 10.

Just tried and it works fine for me on Edge on Windows 10. I'll send you a private message to try to figure this out.

Alina, what's the roll out schedule? So far i don't see this web part (First Release).

Thank you

Should be available for everyone in FR tenants. We are not shipping to FR users, since there is no proper way to deal with consumption when some users have a web part and others don't.

Is your tenant in FR ?

I see, thank you. So, the situation is similar to one with Power BI Web part, only the reason behind it is different.

Nope, we are not "FR for everyone" and most probably never will be, FR is only for some users. Who "tests" new functionality and gives recommendation on entire company for deploying new functionality - or not to deploy at all.

However, if this trend when new functionality is available only for "entire FR" tenants will continue, the option with FR for separate users becomes useless.

Hi Sergei,

 

I understand your concern and we are having some internal discussions to see how this can be addressed.

Cool feature!

Is there a way to hide the meta data description and the meta data subtitle in the link? 

 

The problem is that when you link a communication site it will show all the text web parts and that doesn't make any sense.

 

Also the meta data subtitle (URL) is pointless because the site is still in SharePoint.

 

The highlighted content web part won't show the communication sites due to a bug...

There is currently no way to remove those pieces of metadata. The URL is there since Link web part allows to link to external sources and not just internal. 

Please create a user voice suggestion and we will triage this ask. @John Sanders as FYI. 

It is disappointing that the Link feature blocks local intranet shortcuts (e.g., "http://shortcut/mylink.htm") -- it requires fully qualified names. Please fix this. Like many companies, we use internet shortcuts internally. Our SharePoint Online access is restricted to on-premise network.  The work-around is to either tell people to cut-and-paste the URL shown on the SharePoint Page (terrible user experience) or to use SharePoint Designer to manually edit the page (painful and not easy).

 

@Alina Skarbovsky I can't use Link WebPart to display Microsoft Stream Video. Whereas I am forced to use only Stream Webpart only. But at the same time I am able to use Youtube link in Link WebPart. Why the Stream website is not allowing to load under Link WebPart?