Announcements from the SharePoint Virtual Summit 2019
On 21st May, the SharePoint Virtual Summit was broadcast again from the SharePoint Conference North America 2019 (Las Vegas). There is a load of new features that many people have been waiting a long time for, and we can now see SharePoint modern list and library experiences in Teams too!
Read on for some of the latest announcements from the Summit.
Teams
Teams will have a more SharePoint-like document library experience within the Files tab of Teams, enabling metadata columns to be displayed and updated, with views, sorting, filtering, pinning, and column formatting.
As with SharePoint, the available views in Teams includes “Files that need attention” (e.g. missing required columns).
In a similar way that Office documents are supported to upload only changes to files, reducing bandwidth needs and time to upload into the cloud, all files will be support this approach, showing a demo of a 1GB image being edited, and the small changes were uploaded in seconds, as only a fraction of the image file needed to be uploaded.
Teams will support SharePoint lists in a tab, appearing to be full support like with document libraries.
Teams will also support the Quick Edit capability on lists.
Lists and files/libraries can be shown full-screen inside Teams.
OneDrive
Request Files — when needing to gather files from multiple people, rather than using emails and manually gathering the documents, OneDrive now supports requesting files, where a link is emailed (or copied) for the recipients to select the files to upload, and they will appear in the selected folder in OneDrive. The name of the person who submitted the file is also prefixed on the filename for convenience to identify submissions from each person.
SharePoint Online
SharePoint lists can be created using an existing list as a template for the new one, which copies the columns, views and formatting, without the content.
SharePoint lists can also be created via an import from Excel, including the ability to change the column types or exclude some columns from the import.
Sensitivity Labels can be used to grant/deny permissions and control encryption using RMS protection.
Sharing can be configured to auto-expire shares of content with external guests after X days, with options to extend individual users or to expire now.
The Modern Admin Center now includes “Classic features” so no longer need to use the classic admin center for features that were not directly implemented in the modern admin center.
In the Admin Center you can set external sharing policy to individual sites or to multiple sites at a time:
- Anyone
Users can share files and folders using links that don’t require sign-in. - New and existing guests
Guests must sign in or provide a verification code. - Existing guests only
Only guests already in your organization’s directory. - Only people in your organization
No external sharing allowed.
Something that many people have been asking for over many years is the new ability to change a site’s address — change the URL of a site, and it will automatically take care of redirecting existing links to the new URL.
The SharePoint team are constantly working with Azure, as Azure’s largest consumer of Azure services, to improve the performance on Azure storage which has enabled SharePoint file storage to become faster:
- 10x faster downloads
- 3x faster performance
- 30x faster indexing
- 320+ file types are now recognised
Co-authoring has been enhanced — it now instantly updates the screen as any co-author types — made possible using the much faster SharePoint Storage In Azure. No longer need to wait for users to complete editing a cell in Excel for example but can see changes as they happen.
Co-authoring can also translate languages on-the-fly while receiving instant updates from co-authors.
A table section of a Word document was also shown copied into a Teams chat, and then co-authoring capability in Word automatically updated the copied table in the Teams chat too.
SharePoint Home Sites were announced as the landing site for your organisation, bringing together news, events, content, conversations and video, built on top of communication sites and is natively responsive.
Coming later this year is a dedicated home button that will allow one touch access to your home site in the SharePoint mobile app. Additionally the organisation logo in the O365 nav bar can be configured to link to tour home site.
Integrated search using AI technology from Bing enables deep personalised insights to be surfaced from the Microsoft Graph. Microsoft Search appears in the header of Office, Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, Bing and Windows.
Search will find words spoken in videos in Stream, OneDrive and SharePoint, implemented by searching a transcript of the video, and displaying snippets of the transcript in the search results alongside a screenshot of the video where the word is spoken.
A mega menu has been introduced in the top nav bar that can show multiple levels of navigation at the same time.
Apps can be developed with an endpoint for Microsoft Search in Microsoft Graph API (private preview), with an example showing search results including items from ServiceNow with a customized result card.
Machine Learning improves with Machine Teaching — to gain knowledge from people, not just extraction from data alone. Use ‘lesson plans’ to teach the machine learning algorithms how to solve, e.g. identifying types of documents and extracting metadata from within document text.
This article has been reproduced with permission from my personal blog.
