There is a ton going on in the SharePoint world! 

There were a great deal of interesting product announcements that came out of the Ignite Conference held in November in Orlando, FL.  We'll attempt here to call your attention to what we think is most noteworthy for you to think about as you work to draft your SharePoint plan for 2020.

Site Modernization (Classic to Modern)

Many companies have been using SharePoint for years.  Now that modern sites are available, these companies are looking to embrace the new look and feel (and responsive!) designs as they implement 'SharePoint Facelift' Projects.  Microsoft has recently released some new information and scanner tools that help make this process much easier to implement.  You'll want to avoid the common pitfalls and miss steps here so be sure to reach out to Spyglass MTG for more information as to how we can help you convert your classic experience into these modern tools.

Looking for inspiration? - be sure to check out the updated SharePoint Look Book.  It has many great examples to help you get your creative juices going.  Best of all - you can add these designs to your tenant with a simple mouse click!

Top New Features & Enhancements We Are Most Excited About

1. Site Design Enhancements
   1. Site footer capabilities - More layout options, background color choice and the ability to organize footer links.
   2. Smart header options added - Reduce header size, hide the site title, and add a site logo thumbnail for your sites.
   3. SharePoint mobile Improvements -  App branding improvements so that you can easily add your organization's branding, logo image, app theme colors for top navigation bar, text and accent color etc. for a co-branded mobile intranet app experience for employees.
   4. Images - New stock images feature which will provide thousands of high quality, high res images (royalty free) for page and news authoring.   Also - robust image resizing enhancements also coming soon!  No more fuzzy images grabbed from the internet!
2. Hub Site Changes
   1. Hub permissions enable you to centralize the management of access to associated sites.
   2. Hub analytics provides rich, hub-wide usage insights -  total visitors, page views, popular content and much more!
   3. Linking Hub Sites to other Hub Sites (Yipee!)
   4. Audience targeting on hub navigation allows targeting navigation items based on a person’s profile settings.
3. Page & News Posting
   1. Page difference visualization and version history compare for pages and news posts which enables content authors to visually see what changes have been made across different versions.
   2. News filtering across sites with managed metadata.
   3. News & Page Scheduling - Nice feature that returns the old publishing site feature many relied on to publish news on a future date and time.  This is great for timing internal company news posts with public press releases.
4. Stuff
   1. Yammer Conversations Web Part (v2)  -  ask questions, mark and discover best answers, and compose with rich text and post praises. It’s also improved performance and is updated with a new Yammer design that is rolling out.
   2. The ‘My feed’ web part pulls in relevant documents, news, activities and other content that is personalized for you.

Multilingual Capabilities

Microsoft is putting a great deal of attention into the multilingual functionalities in the platform. 

Users will soon be able to view content in their preferred language, or easily switch to other available languages. Content translators will receive notification of changes.  Microsoft is also delivering a new version history capability that will enable translators to visualize the differences between any two versions of a page in order to easily translate content as needed (related to 3a above).

SharePoint Spaces

For those that are interested in truly cutting edge technology, be sure to check out what Microsoft is doing related to 'SharePoint Spaces'.  Leveraging these new tools and technologies allows users to interact with SharePoint using a VR headset!  We are looking forward to seeing where this goes….

Check it Out!

Interested in learning more? Contact us today!