SharePoint Announcements

I plan to delve a little deeper into some of the announcements at MS Ignite 2017 once I’ve left the conference and had a bit of time to digest the massive amount of information that’s been thrown at us over the last few days.

However, from a purely SharePoint perspective, there were a number of announcements which are particularly tantalizing that I wanted to unpack right away.   From my point of view, these are some of the more interesting tidbits:

SharePoint Team Sites

• Dozens of new web parts coming – such as connectors to Twitter and Yammer, the ability to embed all kinds of external content, including Microsoft Stream videos, Microsoft Forms, file viewer web part
• Shortcut to Teams will make it easier to launch conversations
• 270+ rich file previews, including the ability to open up and inspect the contents of a ZIP file straight from SharePoint
• Ability to “Groupify” existing team sites not currently associated with an O365 Group

SharePoint Hub Sites

• Hub sites bring together a collection of sites
• Individual sites can join a “hub”, becoming associated sites
• All associated sites share a common navigation bar, branding/theme, and search scope
• IT Admins must create the Hub, however individual site owners can join an existing hub

New SharePoint Admin Center

• Complete re-design – simpler to use
• Usage reports and Notifications
• Site Management:
  • includes all site collections, including O365 Groups and Teams
  • more metadata to be able to sort and filter sites
  • custom views
• Site Level Conditional access policies – the ability to give full access, limited access (web only) or block access

Lists and Libraries

Long the foundation of SharePoint sites, Lists and Libraries are getting some updates that are worth mentioning as well:

• Views:
  • Compact List view – bringing modern list views closer to the beloved classic list views
  • Attention views – easily identify files which need attention (do not have required metadata filled out)
  • Preview view – to preview one of the more than 270+ file format now suppored
• Ability to edit text files right in the browser
• More column creation tasks available right from the library view
• Bulk tagging from the view
• Drag and drop – SharePoint will now prompt for required metadata
• Filters pane replaces Metadata Navigation with a wide variety of filtering and grouping options
• Conditional formatting

Conclusion

All this and a new SharePoint migration tool to migration directories, file shares and document libraries into O365.

This is really just a highlight of the things to come.  I’ll delve a little deeper into some of these and other topics and provide my own unique analysis in the coming days.  A lot of new/updated O365 applications to be excited about such as OneNote, Teams, Forms,  Flow, Stream, Whiteboard