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SharePoint updates will help the Office 365 Intranet experience
SharePoint updates - Office 365 Intranet
Tanya Denton
With the SharePoint conference in May, Mark Kashman wrote a blog about new features coming to SharePoint which will enrich the capability and experience for users. With these updates due to be rolled out, we thought we would take a look at what is coming.
Teamwork and Collaboration
The SharePoint Experience in Teams
The ability to access the full power of SharePoint from within Teams will provide the document library features with the collaboration capabilities of Teams.
- Full document library files experience with Teams - Allows users to work together on files with previews, pinned items, metadata, Flows, etc
- One click connection for linking a SharePoint team site to a Microsoft Teams team
- See the Teams connection from SharePoint
- Pick articles and lists and bring them into your hub for teamwork
Group Connected SharePoint Tools
To help improve creativity and thinking critically, new tools are needed to communicate and access data. These include:
- Microsoft Planner integrations
- Group inbox activity visible within the site activities
- Team sites now available on SharePoint Servier 2019 for on-premise deployments
News And Communication
Communicate to your staff via your intranet using a wide range of tools.
Organizational and Team News
Move away from email-centered staff communications with easy to create content including documents, videos, polls, and surveys.
- Create news web parts with sources from a variety of sites, filtered to the content that you require, on a layout that suits your site style.
- New Hub News layout web part, with carousel and pinning support
- Save for later now on Web and Mobile, allowing users to catch up later from their SharePoint home
- @mentions allows users to highlight articles to each other
- Tag specific sites as "organizational news sources", which will be given visual stimuli to encourage user interaction
Page Management Updates
With the latest tools, you will be able to control who views what content, so that you can target your audiences better. With this innovation, you will not need customization or page proliferation to manage your portal.
- News, pages and other web parts will allow you to target audiences based on groups. In this way, each person will have a unique experience which will be targeted and personalised.
- Improved page approvals with Microsoft Flow integration.
- The improved content organisation allows for filtering around metadata, such as region, page type or status.
Improved SharePoint hub and communication sites
Hub sites and communication sites help you to disseminate business goals and messaging throughout your company.
- Improve company theme and branding with rich colours now available for the hub site header
- Site association approval process
- Scripting of a site during association to a hub site allows enforcing permissions, shared metadata, preferred content management, etc.
- SharePoint communication sites can now be created and configured within SharePoint Server 2019 for on-premise deployments
New and updated web parts
Configurable web parts pull in content from across Office 365 to provide a rich and integrated experience.
- Weather web part shows information provided by MSN Weather
- Text on Image allows hyperlinks and overlay text on image web parts
- Document library and lists have been updated to include custom views, grouping, sorting, filtering, column formatting and drag & drop upload
- Stream web parts allow videos to play on your sites, even on mobile
- Yammer feed updates with @mentioning, adding content and more
Keep Connected on the Go
Driven by customer use and feedback, Microsoft has announced a range of mobile innovations to help staff to work on the go. As well as an improved information architecture (IA), there is a range of new features:
- The new Find tab improves the entire mobile experience, bringing together Sites, Links, People and Search into one streamlined experience
- Direct document library access allows you to stay in the SharePoint app to navigate your files before being taken through the integrated connection to OneDrive
- @mentions are now available in mobile comments
- Mobile notifications for page likes
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