July brought a multitude of innovation across Microsoft 365 and SharePoint. Microsoft have been bringing both new experiences and refinements to help improve your productivity and give users more ways to disseminate their work, voice, and consume information from colleagues.
Last month brought: A New Employee Onboarding Hub, Hub permissions for visitors, SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) support for SharePoint Server 2019 (GA), Microsoft Lists, Quick Edit improvements, Add to OneDrive, and more.
Build your intelligent intranet on SharePoint in Microsoft 365 and get the benefits of investing in business outcomes - reducing IT and development costs, increasing business speed and agility, and up-leveling the dynamic, personalised, and welcoming nature of your intranet.
New Employee Onboarding Hub (NEO for short).
The NEO hub helps organisations guide new employees from the onset of their first day on the job. The hub provides new employees with the resources, support, and general information they need. It also helps connect them to important people, communities, and culture awareness. It also helps stakeholders contribute to the successes of new employee onboarding.
New Employee Onboarding (NEO) hub, based on SharePoint, helps customers improve their new hire onboarding experience.
To get it, simple head over to the Look Book site: lookbook.microsoft.com - View the designs > Solutions > "New Employee Onboarding Hub".
This is an optional feature for both hubs and associated sites which allows for greater viewer access to content and improved discoverability across sites. After enabling a hub to sync to associated sites, hub owners can specify access by invidividuals, security groups, or Microsoft 365 groups. The new visitor permissions will become activated the next time the viewer accesses the hub.
Sync hub permissions to associated sites from the hub Permissions pane.
Associated site hub owners can disable the sync for sites that need to remain private from the rest of the hub.
SMPT is designed for migrations ranging from the smallest set of files to a large scale enterprise migration. Bring your information to the cloud to take advantage of the latest collaboration, intelligence, and security solutions with Microsoft 365.
This past month, Microsoft have moved beyon public preview and made migrating from SharePoint Server 2016 generally available (GA).
Use the SharePoint Migration Tool (SPMT) to migrate file shares or SharePoint Server sites to SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams - all in Microsoft 365.
In review, SPMT lets you migrate content to SharePoint, OneDrive and Teams from the following locations:
Screenshot of the intelligent intranet resource center
Microsoft 365 is designed to be a universal toolkit for teamwork - to give you the right tools for the right task, along with common services to help you seamlessly work across applications. SharePoint is the intelligent content service that powers teamwork - to better collaborate on proposals, projects, and campaigns throughout your organisation - with integration across Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Yammer, Stream, Planner and much more.
Microsoft Lists begins roll out starting now with the Lists app in Microsoft 365 and eight ready-made templates. The Lists app is the central place for all the lists you access across different sites, with the ability to create new lists using the + New List button.
The Microsoft Lists app in Microsoft 365 - a home for all your lists.
Use ready-made templates as you create new lists - above shows the preview when using the Event itinerary template.
Microsoft Lists is a Microsoft 365 app that helps you track information and organise work. Lists are simple, smart, and flexible, so you can stay on top of what matter most to your team. Track issues, assets, routines, contacts, inventory and more using customisable views and smart rules to keep everyone notified and in sync. With ready-made templates, you can quickly start lists online, on the coming movile app, or with Microsoft Teams. And because it's part of Microsoft 365, you can rely on enterprise-ready security and compliance.
Fixed row height | When in Quick Edit, you will see a new layout options "Fixed Height" within the view drop-down menu. This layout will adjust the height of all rows to the same height to optimise vertical spacing.
Improved Row Selection | You will see an updated way for selecting single or multiple items. this, too, supports existing copy/paste and drag-to-fill, applicable to multiple rows when using shift+selection. And when navigating and interacting via keyboard key strokes - like what we talked to John Sanders about - a consisten keyboard navigation approach.
There were also a number of visual updates | You'll see new grid lines, an improved on-hover experience when using your mouse around the grid, themed colour bars on the side of list items - including error messaging, a "Create New Item" button at the bottom of quick edit for creating new items inline, and updated column header drop-down menus.
Sticky first column appears while in Quick Edit mode | As users scroll horizontally across a list or documentary library in Quick Edit, the far-left column remains in place.
The new Quick Edit experience showing some of the innovation: updated grid lines, multiselect, Add new button, visual cues and more.
Microsoft have improved the image upload experience - including mobile camera support. You simply add a new Image column and upload images for that list item of file. This is a default column when using the new Asset manager template, and is a column type that can be added to any list or library.
The new image upload experience for lists items - shown above adding a device photo to an inventory list.
"Title" is a good column title title, and now you're en'Title'd and empowered to rename it to whatever you want. Now you can rename the default Title column title and the change will be reflected everywhere - in quick edit, on the associated view, and in the list form.
Rename the Title column to your preferred name.
Much of Windows and Microsoft 365 is navigable via keyboard, and this month, SharePoint pages joined in. This month we released a way to see all the pages keyboard shortcuts you can take advantage of when authoring text, navigating the page or performing undo/redo/ Just click Shift + ? when in page edit mode to bring up a list of available keyboard shortcuts. I'm particularly fond of Ctrl + K and Tab - huge time savers.
When in page edit mode, click Shift + ? to bring up the page keyboard shortcuts.
Learn more about working with SharePoint pages.
You can enable Data Loss Prevention (DLP) to automatically block external access to new OneDrive and SharePoint files until they have been fully scanned by the service for sensitive information - including search freshness and indexing.
Create and manage DLP policies on the Data loss prevention page in the Microsoft 365 Security and Compliance Center.
If the file has no sensitive content based on the DLP policy, then guests can access the file. If the policy identifies a file with sensitive content, then guests continue to be prohibited from access the file.
Note: There is no change to existing restrictions on guest user access to sensitive files. To mark new files sensitive by default, you will need to change a tenant property using PowerShell and cmdlet. You need to enable at least one DLP policy covering all SharePoint and OneDrive content.
It's time for a coherent task management experience in your hub for teamwork - Microsoft Teams. The new Tasks experience bring together Microsoft Planner and Microsoft To Do into Teams, giving you one place to manage your team plans and individual tasks.
Tasks in Teams, show on mobile on the left, web on the right.
This enables you to add shared folder shortcuts directly to your OneDrive. Shared folders include content that others shared with you through their OneDrive or content that is a part of your shared library in Microsoft Teams or SharePoint.
With Add to OneDrive, not only can you bring all your shared content into one place, but you can also work with the shared content with the same power and flexibility as if they are files you own. This means that the added content can be synced, shared, and collaborated on - and that it retains all existing security and compliance policies. Once added, the "Add to OneDrive" shortcuts show up in OneDrive on the web, within Windows File Explorer or Mac Finder, in Teams, and in the OneDrive mobile apps.
It's a noisy world and not every video is produced in a nice studio - often onsite and unable to get everything quiet. Noise suppression, when turned on by video owners, allows viewers to isolate speech from other sounds and music during playback. Noise suppression can be switched on or off for each newly uploaded video.
Turn noise suppression on for a video.
The outcome is the ability to focus on the person speaking, not what's happening around them. This makes things like remote workplaces and virtual classroom content much more effective. This, too, is the same technology you've been hearing about from a Microsoft Teams meetings perspective.
We would be happy to explain any of the above features in more detail and how they could benefit your organisation.
Adepteq are experts in developing and deploying SharePoint solutions, alongside training and on-going support. Call us on 0800 644 365, email info@adepteq.com or complete our Contact Form.
With organisations around the world enabling remote work for their teams, it is essential now, more than ever, to ensure that information on your intranet is readily available to all your users. Using communication sites in SharePoint with Microsoft 365, you can now create a flexible, intelligent intranet in multiple languages.
The multilingual publishing feature for SharePoint communication sites is now rolled out worldwide. Enabling you to create and translate pages, set translator roles, and get email alerts when pages need translating, updating, and publishing. All of this comes on top of the rich and flexible pages and news creation experience in SharePoint. Everything is built to give the user the best experience possible. Let's jump in to see how multilingual SharePoint publishing works.
Once a communication site has been created in the default language, the site owner can enable the multilingual SharePoint publishing feature. Then they choose the additional languages to support on that site.
Once the feature has been enabled and languages added, the site owner can assign individual users, security groups, and Office 365 groups as translators for each of the languages.
Then, page authors can make copies of pages created in the default language. The content in the copies can then be manually translated by the translator. They are notified when there is a new default language page requiring translation or when an existing default language page is updated. When translations are published the author of the default language will be notified as well. Published translation pages are automatically shown in the users language. This includes in the News web part and the Highlighted content web part.
When page approvals are turned on, the default language pages and the translation pages must be approved and published before the translation pages are available to everyone who has access to the page. This extra layer of review and approval can help ensure that incorrect information is not published.
Site navigation, hub navigation, site name and site footer can also be translated. The content there is first created in the site default language. Translators can log in and update navigation, site name etc. in their preferred language. Users will automatically see pages and news in their preferred language if its published. If unavailable, they can view pages in other languages from the dropdown menu in the top right of the page.
Communication between teams, managers and everyone in between is one of the most important things an organisation can facilitate currently. With many teams spread all over the globe, Microsoft is proud to be able to provide a tool built into modern SharePoint that helps to ensure your information is easily delivered to your team.
If you are still using SharePoint Server, there have also been enhancements to the SharePoint Server multilingual functionality from Microsoft.
If you would like to talk to us about SharePoint, whether it’s Development or Support, don’t hesitate to contact us to arrange a one-to-one call or send us a message.
