Big SharePoint, OneDrive and Office 365 Announcements

This year’s Microsoft Ignite unveiled exciting new products and innovations that span across its entire business software and cloud spectrum.  Focusing on empowering the modern workspace, Microsoft has made advancements in management, security, and intelligence as well as recognizing new groups of users. 

Office 365 targets two new groups of users through its two special packages. The first is for education, Microsoft 365 Education, and the second, Microsoft 365 F1, for first-line workers.

Microsoft 365 Education

Microsoft 365 Education provides the tools for students, faculty, and staff to create and work together securely in the classroom.  Office 365 brings its productivity applications and combined with Enterprise Mobility + Security, Minecraft: Education Edition and Windows 10, students and teachers alike have a powerful system to create, learn and grow together in the classroom.  Microsoft 365 Education is offered in three different plans as Microsoft 365 A1, Microsoft 365 A3, and Microsoft 365 A5.  The fourth plan for non-profit organizations is in the works.  There are price point differences between the plans, and the differences between each are compared below.

Microsoft 365 F1

Who are first-line workers?  Any staff who has direct contact with a customer while providing a service or care to the customer is a first-line worker. First-line workers account for nearly 2 billion workers worldwide. Microsoft 365 F1 promotes the growth and development of the community and culture amongst first-line staff. It also trains and upskills employees, digitizes business processes, delivers real-time expertise with minimized risk and cost. Many first-line workers work shift work and to help manage their schedules, Microsoft 365 F1 offers a new feature – StaffHub. Combined with Windows 10, front-line staff is now able to stay connected, automate device deployment and manage single-purpose devices. In response to the need for devices for first-line workers, Microsoft is offering through its OEM partners HP, Lenovo, and Acer, streamlined and secure devices loaded with Windows 10S.  Through its OEM partners, the total cost of ownership is reduced, and these select entry-level devices (HP Stream 14 Pro, available in October, and the Lenovo v330, available in February) will provide cloud-based identity and management for the first-line environment.

Office 365 continues to evolve, enhancing and supporting employee creativity.  With the emphasis changing from routine tasks to creative problem solving, Office 365 is adapting, providing users the tools to express their ideas effectively and the ability to build upon the work and expertise of others, resulting in the creation of compelling content. 

The Improved Excel

Harnessing the abilities of AI and combining it with Excel has resulted in a powerful, sleek, and fresh Excel that will understand new data types, beyond numbers and texts that are currently recognized, and augment these new data types based on public and enterprise information.  For example, Excel will now recognize that “India” is a country and the acronym “MSFT” is a stock.  Also, releasing in the spring of 2018, Insights, a service reserved for Office Insiders, will derive insights from complex data using AI to find and recommend patterns. 

Searching with Results

Searching capabilities can now be initiated from SharePoint, Office.com, the Windows taskbar as well as Bing for Business.  From so many sources to initiate your search, it becomes simplified to find your information from across your organization and beyond.  Whether you are searching for a person, content or a site, Microsoft Graph powers the engine and provides consistent and personalized results.

Linking in with LinkedIn

From within Office 365, you can now view LinkedIn profiles in Microsoft apps and services.  Currently rolling out to first release customers, this ability provides rich insights about the people who you work with, whether they are within your organization, or external to your organization.

Threats and Protection

With all the new and enhanced features of Office 365, security and protection have been addressed through advanced threat protection, including features that address phishing, impersonation and domain spoofing. Preventative measures including multi-factor authentication, including third-party access, expansion of conditional access capabilities, encryption of emails and documents when using consumer email services such as Outlook.com and Gmail, protection of information (detect, classify, protect and monitor your data wither it is stored or shared), and applying compliance measures as per regulations.  

SharePoint and OneDrive

The biggest announcement at this year’s Ignite: SharePoint 2019 is coming! Productivity applications include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and new versions of Skype for Business, SharePoint and more!

OneDrive is a powerful feature which provides the ability to securely share files across Office 365 not only with people who are within your organization but also with those who do not have an account and are external to your organization.  Not only can you share content, but you can now see who has viewed the shared files in OneDrive. Web versions of Office now open faster than ever.  Supported in the desktop version of Excel for Office 2016 is co-authoring.  Thumbnails and previews have been improved along with the ability to connect existing sites to Office 365 Groups.  There is also deeper integration with Microsoft Team. 

The Combined Power of SharePoint and OneDrive

SharePoint and OneDrive are now integrated with PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, Power BI, and Microsoft Form, each of these provides the resources and capabilities to create and share custom forms, applications, and workflows that automate processes. 

Within SharePoint, rich forms can be built from blended data, retrieved from lists with over 160 online and on-premises data sources.  Custom forms with Power Apps provide solution‑creators the tools to build these forms within SharePoint.  The Column Formatter allows power users to add rich formatting and interactivity to data in SharePoint lists and libraries. If your lists are becoming large and unwieldy, Predictive Indexing in SharePoint automatically sorts, queries and indexes your information into workable lists and libraries. Simple forms and interactive visualizations can be added to any SharePoint page with Power BI & Forms web parts.  Finally, you can add PowerApps to any SharePoint page with PowerApps web parts. 

Flow for OneDrive provides you the capability to build and launch Flows directly from within OneDrive to automate processes for your personal files.  Triggering the Flow Launch Panel, an inline panel prompts the user to enter information that is used by the flow.  Routing a document for review and feedback is built in Flow, ticketed as Document/Item Review. Finally, custom processes can be built with Flow with the Custom Approval Action, which requires formal approval check-in and approval before content for libraries can be published.  

Microsoft Teams and Skype

As Microsoft Teams begins integrating voice and video capabilities, along with chat, to become the main workplace communications collaboration app, Skype continues to receive an enhanced infrastructure for improved video and voice communications.  Microsoft Teams now has the added calling features of call transfer, calling to and from external phone numbers and voicemail as well as insights from Microsoft Graph.  Teams will evolve as the primary client for communications in Office 365, and over time, will replace Skype for Business.

SharePoint and Yammer

The question of whether Yammer is a product that will stay or be replaced was partially answered at Ignite this year with the announcement of several new updates.  These include new mobile-ready web part for integrating Yammer conversations into SharePoint Sites, SharePoint documents have an enriched preview and editing experience with Yammer, Yammer Groups connected to Office 365 will have default SharePoint file storage and OneNote services, launching video and voice calls directly from Yammer, and the ability to see Presence straight from Yammer.

In addition to all these great features, there is one last improvement that was announced at Ignite.  This important piece of news is the new building block of the intranet – SharePoint Hub Sites, which we discuss in detail in this article.