Make your text appear more like you like – rich text editing (RTE) updates
Image web part now allows editing and photos from Bing
Further promote your pages and news
Site usage page – At the bottom of each SharePoint page or news article you’ll see a row of information that tells you how many people have liked your content, how many left comments and total number of views.
Are you confused about how permissions work in SharePoint? Controlling access to sites, libraries and items in those libraries is an important part of using SharePoint in your organization. This conceptual video explains the basic guidelines to follow when working with SharePoint permissions. You’ll get an overview of these guidelines, including how to creating unique permissions for sites, sub-sites, and libraries by breaking permissions inheritance.
One of the top-voted requests on the Ideas forum is for us to add triggers for the Microsoft Planner connector. This week we are announcing three new triggers:
When a new task is created – pick a plan and any new tasks in that plan will trigger the flow. Use this trigger if you want to sync a plan with another data source, like SharePoint Online.
When a task is assigned to me – trigger a flow whenever a task is assigned to you – this way you could create an item in Wunderlist or Outlook Tasks.
When a task is completed – whenever an task is closed in a plan, the flow will run. You can use that to mark items in other services as completed, or just send a notification out.
The third edition of Microsoft Ignite occurred from 25 to 29 of September in Orlando, Florida and had 26 000 attendees, for SharePoint it was an amazing week with a lot of new features being announced, if you hadn’t the opportunity to attend the event in this article you will find a resume of the announcements.
SharePoint is growing more than ever and Jeff Tepper made it clear with the announced numbers, over the last 12 months the number of users and organizations that joined SharePoint is higher than the last 12 years. Check down below what will be the features that will continue to bring more users to get on board with the platform.
Custom themes
This was the feature that I had higher expectations and unfortunately it didn’t deliver what I was hoping for. Microsoft is running away from heavy customized sites and the new branding options are very limited in total it allows the user to modify and build a color pallet for the site and supports custom fonts.
The branding options are very similar with the change the look introduced with SharePoint 2013, but at least gives the user some level of control in terms of colors.
There is a new tool that can be used to build the new themes available here.
The digital workplace and the company’s structures are dynamic and it can change frequently, with this in my mind Microsoft released the SharePoint hub sites, the new way of organizing your intranet.
The hub provides a common logo, navigation and themes and those are displayed across the hub. It also allows you to easily move sites inside the intranet structure, if a site needs to be moved from department A to department B it will automatically inherit the new navigation, logo and the theme from the new department.
After the creation of the hub site owners can associate existent team sites and communication sites to it, the creation of sites from within the hub will be available soon.
The hub will display a resume of what’s going on all the sites, this way team sites and communication site will push content to the hub home page, namely:
News aggregation – All the latest news will surface on the hub home page
Combined site activities – Site activities will roll up from each site directly to the home this way you no longer need to go site by site to check what is going on
Scoped search – Search from the hub home page will retrieve the results with more relevance to the hub enhancing content discovery
SharePoint Search is becoming smarter and faster, the content is now personalized to the user by Microsoft Graph and brings a new user interface that’s in line with the design of all the modern sites.
One of the features that impressed me the most is the capability to transform images into findable content. Every time you upload a photo to SharePoint or OneDrive, whether a snap of a whiteboard, a receipt or a business card it will be processed and all the relevant meta data will be extracted and added to the search.
The mobile apps will soon offer the possibility to upload images directly to become searchable.
The gallery of new web parts for the modern sites continues to grow and during the ignite there were a few that were shown for the first time to the public:
Document Library – New webpart to embed your documents into the team sites or news articles
Group calendar – Displays a group calendar in any modern site
File Preview – This web part has support for over 270 file types
Yammer – Finally a modern and responsive Yammer webpart that follows the Fabric UI design language
Forms – Forms from Microsoft forms can be easily integrated in any modern Team Site
Divider – Nothing fancy here, it adds a line to help you to separate content in the page
Connector – Connects and display external services in the Team Sites like twitter and RSS feeds
SharePoint Migration Tool
This free tool will help you to migrate content from SharePoint on-premises to SharePoint Online, it was designed to support the smallest migrations to large scale migrations with support for bulk scenarios.
Will be available next month on Windows 10 creator’s update, the One Drive and SharePoint libraries will include reach previews like never and will be possible to preview files that are not part of the Office suite like Photoshop files, Illustrator files and others.
Documents preview for SharePoint and One Drive now supports over 270 different file formats.
It will also allow the user to check the entire folder structure of the libraries using windows explorer without downloading the entire content to the hard drive.
Microsoft Teams is introduced by Microsoft as the hub for Team work where connections and collaboration on projects can be made. Groups inside SharePoint are responsible to make all the content between team members easily sharable.
With the integration of SharePoint and the Microsoft Teams app will be possible to add unique tabs to render SharePoint sites directly inside the app, without the need to open the browser. It’s still SharePoint but it’s easily available for you to use while chatting with your team mates.
Team Sites and Groups
Soon the option to connect existent Team Sites to Groups will be also available, for now it is called Groupify. All the sites moved to a group will keep the content as well as the permissions.
SharePoint Analytics
Knowing how your intranet is being used is important to make decisions about new and existent sites, so far Microsoft didn’t provide an option to track the usage of sites and pages and it is common to see google analytics being used for this purpose.
While analytics works fine for the classic experience, for the modern experience things are a bit harder to get deployed to all the pages, that’s why a lot of SharePoint administrators will love this new feature.
In this release Microsoft will include the following indicators:
Most viewed – site level
Most unique viewers – site level
Trending content – site level
Historical views – site level
Number of comments – page level
Number of likes – page level
Number of views – page level
The stats will be only available for the users with the right permissions to see it.
SharePoint Mobile App
With a new version released during the Ignite is now possible to Save news to read later and there is a new tab called Me where all the information tailored for you will be displayed.
Soon the mobile apps will have support to upload pictures directly from the app to the document libraries, and the content of those pictures will be indexed by the search.
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.
