October 2020 brought some great new offerings: SharePoint Syntex, Organisation Chart web part, new IT controls for Microsoft Lists, Microsoft Lists – commenting, OneDrive widget for iPhone, Task in Teams GA, and more. All features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Microsoft 365 as of October 2020 (possibly early November 2020).
Inform and engage with dynamic employee experiences
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.
SharePoint Syntex
this is the first product to come from Project Cortex – a broader Microsoft 365 initiative, that applies advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to empower people with knowledge and expertise in the apps they use every day.
Syntex amplifies human expertise, automates content processing, and transforms content into knowledge. Syntex mainstreams machine teaching, enabling your experts to capture their knowledge about content in AI models they can build with no code.
Your experts train Syntex to understand content like they do, to recognise key information, and to tag content automatically. For example, a contract processing expert can teach the service to extract the contract’s value, along with the expiration date and key terms and conditions.
- Learn more: “Announcing SharePoint Syntex“
- Take a click-through demo and visit the main SharePoint Syntex resource center
Organisation Chart web part
Visibility on hierarchy answer many questions on who’s who and who knows what. This web part allows page authors to generate an organisation chart based off of a specific individual – just type in their name. The page author will have the option to determine how many levels up this org chart goes, and as you navigate, you’ll see who reports to who.
- Learn more about using web parts on SharePoint pages.
- Extra credit if you want to add an org chart to a SharePoint space.
IT control setting for Microsoft Lists
Governance depends on who can do what and what they can do. Based on Microsoft 365 admin feedback, we added new IT capabilities, along with new documentation, on how you can better manage *Microsoft Lists* via #PowerShell. This means you can:
- Control the creation of personal lists – a disable control, and
- Manage the built-in, ready-made templates – so that only the ones you wish to be available to your people will appear.
Teamwork updates across SharePoint team sites, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams
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.
New Teams file sharing experience
Share files on your terms. You can now create a shareable link for any file stored in Teams and directly set the appropriate permissions. Additionally, you can also set permissions for files stored in SharePoint or OneDrive while composing a private chat or starting a channel conversation.
The copied link can then be shared with others, by pasting it into a chat or channel. On pasting the plain lengthy link, this feature converts the link into a visual file chiclet/image. The sender can also set permissions on the file link that they are sharing, at the time of composing the message itself, so that the recipients do not run into access issues.
Microsoft Lists – commenting
Have something to say? Say it. And say it in a native, natural way without breaking privacy or compliance policy. You will be able to add and delete comments on list items. Users can view all comments on a list item and filter between views that show comments or activity related to an item.
Note: comments follow the permission settings inherent in SharePoint and Microsoft Lists. Users with read-only permission can only view comments. Those with list edit permission can make comments as well as delete comments; editing comments is currently not possible.
A few FYI notes on “where and how are comments stored”:
- Comments are stored in the schema for each list, which is based on the SharePoint storage platform.
- If you are using a classic list template, it will not have this commenting feature.
- Commenting on lists in Teams is not yet available; currently leverage Teams chat for lists in Teams.
- And last, comments are not indexed by Microsoft Search.
Related technology
OneDrive widgets for iPhone
Now, when you run iOS14 on your device, you can add a OneDrive widget to your iPhone home screen. The widget displays your photo memories “on this day” across previous years. And, if you don’t have any On This Day photos for today, you’ll see your most recent photos that you’ve saved to the cloud.
Note: this feature is only available for personal OneDrive account (home and family)
Tasks in Microsoft Teams is now generally available
Tasks in Microsoft Teams desktop and web is now 100% rolled out to everyone with a Microsoft 365 subscription across all non-government tenants. Tasks in Teams lets you manage your team tasks for Planner and individual tasks from To Do in your hub for teamwork.
Embed Visio files, stored in OneDrive or SharePoint, into pages in Atlassian Confluence
We’re excited to announce our first-ever non-Microsoft integration for Visio with Atlassian Confluence, a remote-friendly team workspace.
Alongside embedding Word, Excel, or PowerPoint files, you can also easily add Visio diagrams to your confluence pages – to then open them directly in a new browser tab – keeping the files where they are in Microsoft 365
Your data remains secure – Confluence respects all privacy settings set in OneDrive and SharePoint, so no unauthorised users can access your content.
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.
