September 26, 2017 – Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft
As part of Microsoft 365, SharePoint and OneDrive connect the workplace with intelligent content management and intranets. Digital transformation is driving growth across Microsoft 365, SharePoint and OneDrive. Today:
More than 300,000 organizations have SharePoint and OneDrive in Office 365, including 85% of the Fortune 500
More than 65% of all SharePoint seats are now online vs. 35% for on-premises licenses
Growth in active users was 90% in the last year alone
Customers are leveraging our investments in OneDrive, with 300% growth in file sync
We were recognized as leaders by analysts in six Gartner Magic Quadrants and Forrester Waves
Today at Microsoft Ignite 2017, we announced new innovations that further empower you to share and work together, to inform and engage people, to transform business processes, and to harness collective knowledge. In addition, we announced new capabilities for organizations to protect and manage data, and to build custom solutions with SharePoint, OneDrive, and Microsoft 365.
Let’s look at the highlights of the many innovations we unveiled today.
Today at Ignite 2017, we announced SharePoint hub sites, a new building block of the intranet, to bring together related sites to roll up news and activity, to simplify search, and to create cohesion with shared navigation and look-and-feel.
SharePoint hub sites bring together related sites to roll up news and activity, and to create cohesion with shared navigation and look-and-feel.
You can use SharePoint hub sites to organize concepts, teams, divisions, or resources throughout your businesses. Let’s dive into the details.
Create a cohesive set of related sites with shared navigation, look and feel
A hub site brings consistency across sites from the top down. When a team site or communication site is associated to a hub site, it inherits common characteristics, including:
Navigation – Define top navigation in the hub site that is inherited by associated sites.
Theme – Define the look and feel of the hub site, and that theme remains consistent across associated sites.
Logo – A logo on a site is like the green sticker on a map that says, “You are here.” It’s an important identifier of the site you are visiting, and the information and people the site represents. A consistent logo defined by the hub site and used by associated sites says, “You are here, and you have not left.”
SharePoint hub sites bring together team sites and communication sites together into more centralized locations within your intranet.
Roll up and present a consolidated view of news and activities
Throughout the lifecycle of your projects, your launches, your internal campaigns, it is important to increase visibility, awareness and discoverability beyond the core day-to-day people, and not expect everyone to have to drill into the various related sites, but more represent a clear, broad picture of what’s happening across sites, aka, what’s happening across projects and initiatives. Team sites and communication sites push content and information up to the hub site level with:
News aggregation –After you create and publish a news article on an associated site, the news article surfaces on SharePoint home, in the SharePoint mobile apps, and now on the hub site’s home page.
Combined site activities – It’s important to know what is happening within sites, so you can prioritize your focus and your time. Site activities are visible on a team site’s home page, and on the site’s card on SharePoint home. Now, site activities will roll up from each associated sites so that they are visible on the hub site’s home page, so you can see what happening across related sites, instead of having to view activity site by site.
Scoped search – When you search for content from a hub site, results include content from all associated sites. Because associated sites are related, search from the hub site home page increases relevance, and enhances content discovery.
Create hub sites and associate team and communication sites
It is easy for admins to create one or more hub sites. After a hub site is created, site owners can associate existing team sites and communication sites with the hub site, or to associate a new site while creating a site from SharePoint home in Office 365Soon you will be able to create an associated site directly from within the hub site itself.
Site owners can associate an existing team site or communication site with a hub site.
Site owners can associate an existing team site or communication site with a hub site.
Click the gear icon in the upper right of the site.
Click Site information.
In the Edit site information pane that appears, click the Hub site drop-down menu and choose the right hub site to join.
Note that team sites and communication sites can only be associated to one hub site. And as easy as it is to join a site to a hub site, you, too, can un-join from one. This is the power of a dynamic intranet, one that can change and adapt with the ebb and flow of your ever-changing business landscape.
Access hub sites and associated sites with the SharePoint mobile app
The SharePoint mobile app helps keep your work moving forward by providing quick access to all your sites, news and the team members you work with, and search to find content and people across your organization.
With the addition of SharePoint hub sites, the SharePoint mobile app will be updated to natively render hub sites, and their pages, news, and content, with smooth navigation between associated sites and the scoped search experience. Find what you need on the go, and get going!
SharePoint hub sites and their associated sites are easy to access and navigate via the SharePoint mobile app.
Moving forward and growing together
Team sites, communication sites and now hub sites – as well as classic publishing sites and sites for applications – are building blocks of your intranet. SharePoint connects the workplace so that you can share, manage, and find the content, knowledge, and apps you need, on any device.
As you modernize and extend your intranet to support collaboration and communication, SharePoint will support you and your teams now and into the future.
Let us know what you need next. We are always open to feedback via UserVoice and continued dialog in the SharePoint community in the Microsoft Tech Community —and we always have an eye on tweets to @SharePoint. Let us know.
—Mark Kashman, senior product manager for the SharePoint team
FAQs
Q: When can I expect to see SharePoint hub sites appear in my Office 365 tenant?
A: SharePoint hub sites with begin rolling out to Office 365 First Release customers in the first half of calendar year 2018.
Q: Can a hub site replace my current organizational portal?
A: Hub sites are designed to let you dynamically organize closely related sites, bringing together similar projects, and binding related assets, and presenting common activity. Customers with portals that include customization beyond the web parts and extensions that SharePoint Framework currently supports are likely to continue using the SharePoint publishing infrastructure, which continues to be fully supported both in SharePoint Server on-premises and SharePoint Online.
Q: When should I use a team site, and when should I use a communication site?
A: Your SharePoint team site lets you share content, knowledge, news and apps with your group as collaborate on a project. A communication site lets you tell your story, share your work, and showcase your product across the organization.
For additional details and to see the SharePoint Migration Tool in action, check out the video below.
While the SharePoint Migration Tool provides support for many migration scenarios, we recognize your needs may differ in scope and complexity. For more complex migrations, support with adoption and usage, or help planning Microsoft FastTrack includes resources, tools, and experts to make your rollout of Office 365 a success.
Getting Started
To get started and preview the new SharePoint Migration Tool from Microsoft visit https://aka.ms/spmt.
New web parts with updated search and usability from the authoring toolbox
Communication sites dynamically pull in content from across Office 365. To do this dynamically, and with flexibility, SharePoint pages use web parts, which you can configure to your needs. You can add files, videos, images, news, Yammer feeds and more. Just click the + sign and pick a web part from the toolbox to add content to your page. The toolbox itself has been updated to expand and more easily find the right web part by category or search.
The team has been hard at work developing new web parts and updating existing ones:
NEW
Planner – View Planner plans inside SharePoint pages and news with visual Kanban task layouts and beautiful plan overviews.
Microsoft Forms – Create your survey at forms.office.com, grab the final Share URL and display your surveys right within the SharePoint user interface. You can choose to show the results after the user submits the form, too.
Group calendar – display your Office 365 group’s upcoming and past calendar meetings and events.
Connectors – we will begin to bring in the value of Office 365 Connectors that provide connection to numerous third-party services like Facebook, Bing News, Jira, GitHub, Stack Overflow and up to 100 existing connectors – with more coming over time.
File viewer – Beautifully, visually highlight over 270+ file types from within SharePoint pages and news article. This web part is an update (+ name change) to the Document web part, and continues to support embedding Word, Excel and PPT, and now renders PDFs, 3D models, medical images, and more.
Twitter – bring in live tweets from chosen Twitter handles, specific collections or via search keywords. It’s always nice to show the live context of what’s being said externally right alongside the context of what you are working on internally.
Spacer & Divider – simple web parts that give you the ability to add physical space between web parts, or a visual line in between.
UPDATED
Yammer – Now out of preview, the Yammer web part can be programmed to showcase a Yammer group discussion, and it looks great in the Web layout of SharePoint pages and news articles and when viewed within the SharePoint mobile app (iOS, Android and Windows Mobile).
Image – You can pull in Bing Images that utilize the Creative Common license to enhance your pages and news (you are prompted to review the image licensing). You, too, can pull images directly from a specific document library. And once your images are on the page, you can edit them inline with simple gestures like adjusting the ratio and cropping.
Text – the rich text editor web part now gives you greater control for how your text appears. From the simple command bar within the web part, select the ellipses to display the broader set of choices in the edit pane, like font colors and highlights, plus table creation and editing.
People – a new Descriptive display shows more profile information with room to add custom links and descriptions per person.
Events – greater control of the preferred date range to show upcoming events, plus the ability to see each instance of recurring events.
Highlighted content – Ability to choose from a specific document library as the source, more design and layout choices like Filmstrip and Masonry, plus additional filtering mechanism to refine by document type and control metadata mapping to influence the display of the search-based results within the web part.
In July, we announced Microsoft 365, which brings together Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security, delivering a complete, intelligent, and secure solution to empower employees. It represents a fundamental shift in how we design, build, and bring our products to market to address customer needs for a modern workplace. Starting October 1, 2017, we are bringing Microsoft 365 to several new audiences.
Microsoft 365 Education—A new offer that combines capabilities across Office 365 for Education, Windows 10, Enterprise Mobility + Security, and Minecraft: Education Edition, to provide students, faculty, and staff everything they need to create and work together securely in the classroom. Microsoft 365 Education is offered in two plans—Microsoft 365 A3 and Microsoft 365 A5. In addition, we’re excited to announce a new Microsoft 365 plan for non-profit organizations.
Microsoft 365 F1—A new Microsoft 365 Enterprise plan designed to maximize the impact of the Firstline Worker. Numbering two billion worldwide, these are the individuals behind the counter, on the phone, in the clinics, on the shop floor, and in the field who form the backbone of many of the world’s largest industries. This new plan helps foster culture and community, train and upskill employees, digitize business processes, and deliver real-time expertise while minimizing risk and cost. We’re also adding new product capabilities to StaffHub and Windows 10 to keep everyone connected, automate device deployment, and manage single purpose devices.
We also recognize the importance of providing Firstline Workers with streamlined and secure devices that reduce total cost of ownership. Today, we’re announcing new commercial devices with Windows 10 S from our OEM partners HP, Lenovo, and Acer, with availability starting later this year. Starting as low as $275 (ERP), these devices benefit from cloud-based identity and management and are ideal for firstline environments.
New capabilities to unlock employee creativity
Work today has quickly shifted from simple execution of routine tasks to creative problem solving. Microsoft 365 provides the tools people need to express their ideas effectively, build on the work and expertise of others, and create compelling content.
New intelligent capabilities in Excel—We’re harnessing the power of AI to make Excel more powerful. Coming in early 2018, Excel will understand new data types, beyond text and numbers, and augment that data based on public and enterprise information. For example, Excel will know that “India” is a country and “MSFT” is a stock. Insights—a new service coming to Office Insiders this year—also uses AI to find and recommend patterns, helping you derive additional insights from complex data.
Intelligent, personalized search—New search capabilities enable you to discover people and information from across your organization and beyond. We’ve made improvements to help you quickly find the content and expertise you need across SharePoint and Office.com, and you can even search for people and content directly from your Windows taskbar. Bing for business, now in private preview, brings internal sites and content into Bing search results to help you find the right information and resources. Wherever you start your search—you get consistent, personalized results powered by the Microsoft Graph.
LinkedIn profile integration—Today, we’re announcing the ability to view LinkedIn profiles in Microsoft apps and services. This new experience, rolling out now to first release customers, provides rich insights about the people you’re working with—inside and outside your organization—right from within Office 365.
See LinkedIn profile information from Microsoft apps and services.
The universal toolkit for teamwork
One of the hallmarks of the modern workplace is the shift from individual productivity to dynamic teamwork. Microsoft 365 addresses the complete set of needs you have across your organization by providing a universal toolkit for teamwork with a broad set of purpose-built apps, all on a secure platform.
Intelligent communications with Microsoft Teams—Today, we’re announcing a new vision for intelligent communications to transform calling and meeting experiences by bringing comprehensive voice and video capabilities into Teams, along with cognitive and data services, and insights from the Microsoft Graph. As a result, Teams will evolve as the primary client for intelligent communications in Office 365, replacing the current Skype for Business client over time.
Enhanced content sharing with OneDrive and SharePoint—The new unified sharing experience, now in Windows, Mac, web, and mobile, will come to the Office apps in the coming weeks. The new experience provides a simple, consistent, and secure way to share and control access to files across Office 365. And you can now securely share files with people outside your organization who don’t have a Microsoft account. In addition, you can customize the look and layout of SharePoint pages, add dynamic content from over 100 new web parts and connectors, as well as share those pages on SharePoint sites or as a tab in Teams.
Cross-org connections with Yammer—We continue to invest in Yammer as the best way to connect with people across your organization. Today, we’re announcingdeeper integration with SharePoint, new group insights for community managers, and enterprise-grade compliance with local data residency.
Yammer group insights show trends for group members and non-members.
Simplifying IT management
In the modern workplace, the role of IT has never been more important. Microsoft 365 is designed to meet business needs and minimize total cost of ownership across the IT lifecycle, from deployment to management and ongoing servicing. Only Microsoft delivers a complete solution for your entire productivity infrastructure.
Simplifying management—Beginning in early 2018, Lenovo, HP, Panasonic, Fujitsu, and Toshiba will join Surface in supporting Windows Autopilot on new Windows 10 devices, automating new device deployment and configuration. This fall, we’ll also introduce new capabilities in Microsoft Intune to manage Windows 10 devices with Office 365 ProPlus, configure Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, and deploy Win32 apps.
New migration capabilities—To help customers on their transition to the cloud, this fall, we’ll introduce co-management, a new set of capabilities to help customers migrate to cloud-based management of Windows 10 devices with Microsoft Intune. We’re also announcing FastTrack for Microsoft 365, which provides planning, guidance, and assistance to help IT professionals drive adoption and usage across Microsoft 365.
New proactive insights—Office 365 Usage Analytics, generally available in early 2018, will enable IT professionals to analyze and visualize service-wide usage data in Power BI. On the desktop, we’re updating Windows Analytics this fall with new update compliance and device health capabilities to help proactively identify and address new issues that may impact user experience and productivity.
The new usage analytics dashboard uses Power BI to unlock rich insights about service adoption.
Intelligent security and compliance updates
As employees embrace a new culture of work across devices and cloud apps, their interactions can become more difficult to secure. Updates to Microsoft 365 provide broad security capabilities, powered by Microsoft’s Intelligent Security Graph, to help protect people and sensitive data from new, sophisticated threats, and to help you meet compliance obligations.
Expanding conditional access—To help you better secure the “front door” of your organization, we’re expanding conditional access capabilities. To secure sessions inside SaaS apps and protect sensitive documents, we are integrating across Azure Active Directory, Microsoft Cloud App Security, and Azure Information Protection as well as extending multi-factor authentication to include third-party support.
The Microsoft Cloud App Security dashboard.
Information protection—Microsoft 365 helps you detect, classify, protect, and monitor your data, regardless of where it is stored or shared. Today, we’re announcing the integration of Azure Information Protection with Office 365 Message Encryption, which makes it easier to send protected emails and documents to recipients using consumer email services such as Outlook.com and Gmail.
Phishing protection and automatic remediation—Today, we’re unveiling new threat protection capabilities built on the Microsoft Intelligent Security Graph. New Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection features help mitigate content phishing, domain spoofing, and impersonation. We’re also announcing a limited preview of Azure Advanced Threat Protection to help detect attacks on user identity sooner, and the integration of our recent Hexadite acquisition into Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection to automatically help investigate, assess, and remediate threats.
Compliance Manager—We’re also announcing the upcoming preview of Compliance Manager, a tool to help organizations meet compliance obligations like the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). It performs a real-time risk assessment with a score that reflects your compliance position against data protection regulations when using Microsoft Cloud services, along with recommended actions and step-by-step guidance.
FindTime is even easier to access (beyond an add-in) to help more people save time. As of today, FindTime functionality is directly available in Outlook on the web as a preview.
Now you can “Poll for a Time to Meet” in Outlook on the web.
We originally launched FindTime through the Garage, which is Microsoft’s official outlet for experimental projects from small teams across the company.
As we continued refining FindTime, we knew that we were onto something when many of our users started recommending the service to their co-workers and friends because of how much time FindTime was saving them.
Since FindTime was an add-in for Outlook, we decided that the best way to help even more people save time was to make meeting polls available directly in Outlook on the web. With “Poll for a Time to Meet” now available in Outlook on the web, we are discontinuing FindTime as an add-in for Outlook on October 1, 2017.
What will happen to my existing meeting polls?
FindTime will continue to operate until Oct 1st, 2017, at which point we will discontinue the add-in and service. The plug-in will no longer be available to schedule meetings and attendees will be unable to vote on meetings. Polls that are still open and not finalized will be discarded. Any meetings where voting has closed and the meeting has been scheduled will be unaffected. To continue saving time when scheduling meetings, we recommended transitioning to Outlook on the web at http://www.office.com.
What happens if I don’t see “Poll for a Time to Meet” in Outlook on the Web?
Although most FindTime users should be able to see “Poll for a Time to Meet” in Outlook on the web immediately, some users may not be able to see it yet. We recently started rolling out the feature, and in some cases, it may take up to a week to become visible.
Can I get it now?
Although FindTime users should already have access to “Poll for a Time to Meet,” you can also ensure that you and your organization have access by asking your O365 Administrator to join the First Release Program.
How can I give feedback?
We want to make sure you’re able to use Outlook on the web to take advantage of “Poll for a Time to Meet”. If you need any assistance, you can submit your feedback via User Voice.
Use the Office 365 Adoption content pack within Power BI to gain insights on how your organization is adopting the various services within Office 365 to communicate and collaborate. You can visualize and analyze Office 365 usage data, create custom reports and share the insights within your organization and gain insights into how specific regions or departments are utilizing Office 365.
The content pack gives you access to a pre-built dashboard that provides a cross-product view of the last 12 months an contains a number of sections. Each section provides you with specific usage insights. By clicking on the top level metrics you can access more detailed reports. User specific information is available for the last month.
