Takeaway from SharePoint Virtual Summit - Content Collaboration and AI

The SharePoint Virtual Summit took place on May 21, 2018 with a 1 hour 45 minutes keynote speaker with an audience of over 3,000 inhouse attendees plus online visitors. The presentation was packed with promising announcements of enhancements to SharePoint Hub Sites, OneDrive, communication sites, Microsoft team integration capabilities and a new site type called “SharePoint Spaces”.

Announcements for SharePoint Intranet

If you watched the keynote session, you already know how it was mainly focused on the latest functionalities and features in SharePoint Hub Sites and communication sites. What was the real focus? It was more on AI and a broader picture on the Office 365 based digital workspace.

• Organizational News – Your PR/Marketing team can now tag news as organizational news which will fetch news with a different visual presentation and shows up at the top of the news feed. The news feeds will have departmental, groups or top-level news, which allows users will be informed on a regular basis.
• Usage of “@” – You can now mention (like how we used to follow in Yammer). This will tag the user followed by notifications/emails, so they can join your discussions quickly.
• Communication sites news webpart – The latest communication sites has filtering options for news webpart. i.e. you can bring in more sources and choose on how to display news as well as setting different formats.
• Text Overlay – The image webpart supports overlay text on an image.
• Mobile App – The mobile app comes with latest functionality and features available for both Android and Apple iOS devices.
• Latest Yammer webpart – The latest Yammer webpart helps you to add an embedded Yammer feed with features such as likes, @mentions and of course, adding content.
• Microsoft Teams – Microsoft has enhanced the integration capabilities of Microsoft Planner and SharePoint document library to Teams. You can now find the full-page views added to the tabs and ensures native interface feature.
• Microsoft Flow – You can now experience the out-of-the-box approval workflows for both pages and adding sites to a hub.
• Metadata Management – A easier user interface is built for us to easily tag pages with additional metadata.

Let’s talk about “SharePoint Lists”

The announcements made at the SharePoint Virtual Summit regarding SharePoint Lists:

• Cognitive analysis of Flow – You can send any text message to AI engine with the help of Microsoft Flow. Using the latest Row formatting, you can easily witness whether the sentiment is positive or not (such as the Microsoft Listening/Engagement solution that came out 3 years ago).
• Creation feature – You can create lists by importing spreadsheets by copying an existing list or by creating a new one. You can create List templates (it has become much easier now).
• Edits in the same page – Need edits in the values? No problem! Now you won’t need to switch views to change property values.
• Forms Upload – Microsoft Forms can be used for uploading documents to a SharePoint document library.
• Power BI – You can have your data showcased using great charts and other visualizations using Microsoft Power BI.
• Visio and Flow – If you have deployed custom workflows using SharePoint Designer, map out the workflow in Visio Online and export it on Microsoft Flow.
• Microsoft Stream – That’s a YouTube version of video streaming. Comes with few extensions.
• Admin Console – You might have noticed the changes occurred in the admin console. Have a look for yourself. It looks amazing!

The All New “Microsoft Spaces” – The Power of UI with SharePoint 

SharePoint Spaces are systems for creating spaces for 3D and AR content for use with Microsoft Hololens AR headsets. It was a great demo at the SharePoint Virtual Summit where we saw on how easier it is to create AR spaces and fill in with content. Isn’t it great to have this functionality with the SharePoint Site? It made us feel inferior as we are far behind this technology. This should be something we should be focusing in the coming years.

Verdict

Okay, now experts who are still on on-prem solutions, SharePoint 2019 is something you should be waiting for. The SP 2019 is benefitting from the Office 365 online side of things so for sure, you will get the Modern SharePoint site types that includes the communication sites.

We hope you're just as impressed as we are with the recent announcements made by Microsoft. Stay tuned for more updates!