Posted by Today, at Microsofts SharePoint Virtual Summit, Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jeff Teper unveiled the roadmap for SharePoint.
The keynote went into the Office 365 suite on a whole. Collaboration does not have a “one size fits all” solution. That’s why Office 365 offers a suite of functions, ranging from Yammer, to Microsoft Teams and SharePoint.
Product innovations were presented as well. Some of these innovations have been in the pipeline for several months and we have been really awaiting them. In this blog I’ll discuss these innovations.
To start off, some statements:
- The new SharePoint look will be presented to all functions: business apps, portals & publishing sites and teamsites.
- All users will be presented with the new OneDrive functions.
After these statements, the session went into details:
- Share with confidence;
- Collaboration;
- Business components;
- Engage with employees and harness knowledge;
- Security and governance
Share with confidence
This section is dedicated to OneDrive (client) improvements and consist of:
- Files-on-demand sharing
- Share from Explorer and Finder
- More management tooling
OneDrive files no longer take any space on the workstation. Instead, you will receive placeholders in the OneDrive folders. When you access a document, it will be downloaded to the device. When you exit the document, it will leave no trace on the device. If you need to keep the document on the device, you can choose to do so.
Documents can be shared with people within and outside of the organisation. Just click on the file from the Explorer and a sharing link will be sent.
By the way: you probably do know that OneDrive for Business has its own admin-portal? Very cool indeed. You can manage all settings (conditional access, external sharing, quota, and more) from this one dedicated portal. Btw. this section was presented by Miss Moneypenny 🙂
Collaboration
Existing sites can be connected to Office Groups. Groups will be added to navigation components within pages. Microsoft Teams will be extended with SharePoint pages.
Business processes
PowerApps and Flow will be greatly extended. Approval and feedback flows will be added to document libraries. Great, because these were only available as SharePoint 2010 workflows and have great business value. These (work)Flows will be available to every user and are very easy to use.
Flows can be triggered from forms and libraries. PowerApps will deliver forms within lists and libraries. The demo showed a purchase Request SharePoint list which was accessed on the iPhone using a PowerApp. A purchase order was approved using this PowerApp. Cool stuff. But I’ve seen Dan Holme a little less nervous 🙂
Engaging with employees and harness knowledge
A new type of site will be offered. This is the Communication site. This site is used for publishing information. It’s a media rich site-template which is (off-course) fully responsive.
Creating such a site is easy as Microsoft have added the option from the SharePoint Home landing page. Before this you could create teamsites or groups. Now you have to categories:
- Team Collaboration
- Communication
Knowledge is very important within the organisation. Office 365 will provide a more rich “people card”, enabling you to find people using skills, interests and skills. A more personalized search will enable you to find information faster and more accurate.
Security and governance
Office 365 is already best-in-class on security and governance. The SharePoint admin experience will be enhanced. Bring your own key will enable organisations to use their own enterprise (master) key for the encryption functions within Office 365.
Conditional access now applies to sites. Before this time, conditional access (which is based on the location or device you are using) could only be applied to Office 365 as a whole.
Microsoft will also support the new GDPR standard for privacy.
More information
All information and demo’s can be found on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ9905MRHxwLZ2jeNQGIWxA
And we ended on a high note 🙂
Governance, Risk, Security and Compliance 