Microsoft Ignite 2019 Announcements: The Intelligent Intranet: Part 2

Microsoft Ignite 2019 has been a plethora of game-changing announcements, not only in the way we use technology, but how we see knowledge as being a consumable that is used to upscale, grow, and collaborate to achieve successful end results. By leveraging and investing in AI, Microsoft continues to innovate and create new, collaborative, and communicative business worlds with intelligent intranets that interface with many other software technologies and platforms.   

Microsoft Search

Creating and supporting an intelligent intranet requires an excellent search engine, and Microsoft Search is the engine behind the intelligent intranet. Microsoft Search has new vertical menus, which include videos, custom videos, and knowledgebase articles. Microsoft Search is a SharePoint page and can be customized and tailored with web parts.

Page Authoring

New abilities with page authoring include:

1. Image Resize: easily adjust image sizes when adding to news posts and pages;

2. Change Tracking: content authors can visually see what changes have been made. In edit mode, content authors can choose the version to review and changes will be highlighted. Changes include additions, edits, and deleted items and text;

3. News Filtering: news filtering can be accomplished across sites with managed metadata;

4. Yammer Conversations Web Part (v2): combined with a new Yammer design that is rolling out, participants will be able to ask questions, compose rich-text posts, and mark and discover best answers;

5. “My Feed” Web Part: leveraging AI, relevant news, documents, activities, and other personalized content is brought together;

6. Royalty-Free Stock Photography and Images: accessible in the UI, thousands of high-quality, high-resolution, and royalty-free images can be uploaded for pages and news authoring. This inventory will continue to grow over time; and

7. News and Page Scheduling: news posts, announcements, and pages can be written in advance and then be published at a future date and time, providing flexibility and streamlining the process of posting.

Multilingual Capabilities

There have been many exciting announcements at Ignite 2019, and one of the top and long-awaited announcements is the support for multi-languages in the Modern Experience for SharePoint Communication Sites. The creation of content and sites in multiple languages is possible with the language hero web part. Users can choose their preferred language, and they can switch between languages.  

Content translators will receive a notification of revisions. To help visualize the differences between versions, the new version history will display the differences between any two versions of a page. This will enable content translators to quickly and easily translate additional content as needed.

SharePoint Lookbook

The SharePoint Lookbook was a huge hit last year! Lookbooks originate in the fashion industry where photographers and models created a book of looks that were expected to arrive for the future season. Today, lookbooks are common with vloggers and bloggers, and now, Microsoft is on the lookbook train.

The latest SharePoint Lookbook consists of collections of stunning sites that are categorized under Organization, Department, Team, and Community. Without a doubt, these sites are eye-catching and inspirational. Provisioning sites are fast and are done inside of Microsoft 365. The design templates can be directly added to your tenant for future use.

OneDrive

With OneDrive, navigating files across platforms will provide a common file experience whether you are on the desktop, mobile, or tablet that is running on Windows, iOs, Android, or LINUX.  

One of the most exciting features being implemented on the web view for shared libraries is the hovercard. The hovercard is an amazing little pop-up and displays information. The hovercard displays metadata information from threaded conversations, documents from Microsoft Teams, mail, and conversations from other sites.  

Files, especially image files, are becoming larger and larger as quality and resolution increase. In Microsoft 365, 110GB files are now being supported. Because of the size of the files, delta sync technology has been implemented whereby only delta changes will be synced when revisions are made, ensuring fast upload speed of large files to the cloud.

SharePoint Spaces

Microsoft is enabling SharePoint end-users to create 3D scenes with 3D objects, 2D documents, photos, and 360º videos, which all can be integrated into the site. For a full, immersive experience, users can wear a virtual headset.

The intelligent intranet, SharePoint, is all about teamwork, content collaboration, and employee empowerment, and these new features provide the means to continue to do so with greater flexibility, increased capability, and easier communicability.