At Ignite 2018, Microsoft provided a great perspective about how Modern Intranets (using SharePoint Communication Sites) and Collaboration features are becoming a major collaboration platform for many companies and investments Microsoft is doing to make them better. Some of these cool features were mentioned during the event. We will take a look at many of them in this blog and how we could use it to make Modern Intranets, Modern Team Sites and Microsoft Teams work even better and seamlessly together.
If you are looking a strategy or starter guide for building Modern Intranet using Communication sites, check here.
Another reason for writing this blog is that earlier I had posted some of these postings from Microsoft updates in my LinkedIn and Twitter feed but found that information was too scattered and hard to collate, so thought of combining all here. Please feel free to use it as useful.
1. New Page designs – It is possible to select different page designs when adding a page, which adds a lot of variety, and additionally provides prebuild content besides the standard page sections.
2. Audience targeting – Audience targeting provides personalised content to users and can be set on a unified group, active directory group or user.
3. Conversations (New Yammer) web part – This is going to be updated version of the current Yammer web part.
7. Web part Connections (Dynamic data) – Not exactly clear yet how this will work yet but assuming it will be the same the old web part connections (but better) to be able to pass a property from existing to another web part.
9. Column formatting from edit properties – Now we can add column formatting on the edit pane of the list instead of writing JSON (at least for the simple ones) for it.
10. Custom web parts on list edit web part views– We can have custom web parts on list views, so no need to create custom pages to have custom views for lists.
12. Modern Teams linked libraries now visible on SharePoint – This allows users to know the content is also accessible through Teams.
13. SharePoint news feed into Microsoft Teams – Now we can publish SharePoint news to a Teams Channel allowing users to view the news content in teams itself.
15. Stream Mobile App and Live Streaming video from SharePoint – With the Stream mobile app to stream videos and keep for offline viewing. Also there is an additional feature to live stream videos from the portal.
17. File Plans, New Labels and Label analytics – File plans allow to manage department, categories, identifiers etc at scale. New labels coming up such as Immutable Record labels and sensitivity labels applied to a site. Finally we will have label analytics to look at usage reports.
Above, we saw some of the important and highlighting updates from Ignite 2018. There will be another blog about updates about latest SharePoint Admin Center and Security and Compliance updates, not covered here.