Next Generation SharePoint Collaboration

I just got back from an amazing Microsoft Ignite Conference held in Atlanta. A conference where Microsoft shows their latest and great releases of products, features and take the opportunity to hold new announcements. Collaboration is at its peak in this conference, where attendees, exhibitors and Microsoft product groups come together to share their knowledge and experience around the Microsoft technology stack.

So many announcements, releases and features that were presented to us by the product team that is making everyone in the SharePoint and Office 365 world so excited about the future of SharePoint. There are so many technical details on the upcoming features, but I will summarize the major ones in this blog.

This is all started with the Future of SharePoint event that took place in May 4th. You can read about it on my blog post, the Future of SharePoint.

Announcing Team News

A new feature in SharePoint is Team News. It is pretty much the new "Announcements" for SharePoint, and I call it Announcements web 3.0. you can now create and publish beautifully branded announcements, in a very easy "wizard type" process. The news item will be available on mobile devices the minute you publish it.

For more information on this new feature you can check this Microsoft Office Blog Post.

OneDrive and SharePoint Sync

We can say goodbye to the Groove.exe process, because we have a new Sync technology is on its way. Currently, we are in preview mode and the new Sync technology should reach availability to everyone in 2017.

SharePoint sync is being added to the OneDrive sync, and should offer superior sync reliability and performance compared to the current process. Through this preview, users will be able to sync SharePoint Online document libraries and OneDrive folders with each other.

We will also have the ability to decide where to store synced file from the OneDrive. The "On-Demand Sync" allows you to choose if you want to keep the offline files in the cloud or locally on your OneDrive for Business sync folder.

New People Profile

Based on the new Graph API, we are going to tap into a new power with People Profile. People cards will surface profile information and content throughout Office 365 and updates to the Office 365 profile. From anywhere in Office 365, you can click on the user's name and the user's card will pop-out that shows information about the user along with recent collaboration activities the user has participated in.

Office 365 Groups

Every time you create an Office 365 Group, you will get a full site collection. This means the members of the groups will have full control of the content in SharePoint.

Also the Yammer will be moving in with Office 365 Groups. Now users can get into Office Online and SharePoint from within Yammer. You can share documents from Yammer or you can share to Yammer from Outlook.

Other new features

Intelligence Services for PowerPoint where you can build a complete presentation deck based on existing session templates. Can you say build my session in few minutes? This is huge if you want to present a specific topic to a client without the need to create a deck from scratch. The Intelligence Service will build the outline for you.

Machine Learning will be integrating with Excel, as well as co-authoring within the Excel App.

Delve and Mail will be a match made in heaven, where Delve will get into your email and start showing how much you spent in your email or calendar, after hours, during business hours, etc. the MyAnalytics is the new name for Delve Analytics.

And so many more around new canvas experience with team sites, new team site experience, integration of Cortana with OneDrive, the new SharePoint Framework (FX).

I must say, very exciting time ahead of us and we will be seeing the birth of new innovative portals, machine learning applications, and beautiful integration between all Office 365 applications and Azure Services.