Ignite 2018 Announcements: SharePoint, Office 365, OneDrive, and Microsoft 365

At this year’s Ignite, Microsoft has focused their enhancements on combining the power of SharePoint and Microsoft 365, delivering to employees across the organization targeted digital content that pertains to their needs. Displayed visually, targeted for teams, and easily accessible, files can be accessed for live team collaboration.

Engaging Employees

The purpose of SharePoint is to share digital content across the organization, promoting collaboration amongst team members. SharePoint is already effective for sharing information for collaboration, but with audience targeting, knowledge, news, services, and corporate visions can now be delivered to the appropriate teams and their members. External articles can now be shared as news with news links, another great new feature. Visually, there are new page designs and new, powerful web parts, both which will help create stunning pages. Visual tags can be used to accent and highlight Organizational News.

Video Streaming

What better way than to engage your employees with video? Everyone loves to watch video, and with video becoming the preferred method of creating compelling news that captivates the audience, not only is Microsoft Stream the intelligent video service in Microsoft 365, but it is the driving force for video experiences in SharePoint sites and for live and on-demand events for Yammer, Microsoft Teams, and Stream. The mobile app, Microsoft Stream, features offline viewing when in areas of limited or no internet connection. Videos that you can engage in can be found across the organization on Microsoft Stream mobile.

Modern Portals

The digital experience for your employee can be fast, dynamic, natively mobile sites and pages, personalized, beautiful, social, and most importantly, actionable. There will be over a dozen new features that will give you the tools to make your sites and pages look amazing. The new portal web part will help create these experiences, including the ability to personalize views of recent sites, recent documents, and personalized news. For SharePoint portals, the new mega-menu and site footer are game changers. The new Yammer conversations web part will engage and build a community site that brings conversation and content together, encouraging learning and open sharing amongst your audience.

Hub Sites, Your Intranet, and Modern SharePoint

Hub sites is a great way to organize your intranet. With the roll-up events feed and hub join approvals, not only can you deliver information targeted to each team but managing hub sites can be done effectively and simply through SharePoint Admin Centre. In preparation of transitioning and replacing classic publishing sites and portals, the number of hub sites in a tenant has now been increased to 100. By migrating to modern SharePoint, your teams can now experience the new digital content in SharePoint.

Microsoft Teams and SharePoint

Microsoft Teams will be experiencing a new makeover as it morphs to encompass full capabilities of SharePoint document libraries. Create custom views, gain insights into file activities add and format custom columns, and pin files to the top are all capabilities that will be available. With the familiar files command bar, syncing files from Microsoft Teams to your PC or Mac is another added new experience.
With diverse needs, Teams must be able to create solutions to solve their needs. Building composite apps that can also be surfaced in Teams with modern SharePoint pages part-to-part communications. Data and custom-built SharePoint Framework web parts solutions can be shared by adding a SharePoint list as a tab in Teams. Additionally, one will be able to add Teams apps to SharePoint sites, bringing many more apps to your intranet.
Collaborating in a SharePoint team site, a new visual indicator of channel folders will provide information regarding the folders that are associated with channels in Teams. The new link to Teams in the site navigation will navigate you quickly to Teams.
Connect any SharePoint team site to Teams. With your site connected to an Office 365 group, and from your site, create your team with one additional click.
As you can see Teams and SharePoint are coming closer together, providing a platform where your Microsoft Teams and groups can collaborate without compromise on the intranet.

Collaboration – Office 365

Only with Office 365 and with files in the cloud, collaborators can work together and co-author in real-time across mobile, web, and desktop versions of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Add Comments – OneDrive
Coming soon will be the ability to add comments with @mentions to all file types, including photos, CAD drawings, PDFs and more, in OneDrive. If permission is required to the document, an email notification with a link to the file to join in will be automatically be sent.

OneDrive – Files On-Demand
OneDrive connects you to all your files (personal and shared) in Office 365 whether you are on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, or web. OneDrive Files-On Demand in Windows 10 allows you to view and open files inside File Explorer, including files from Microsoft Teams and SharePoint. By opening up inside File Explorer, no storage space is used on your device. The files remain in the cloud and can be accessed, edited, and shared as if locally stored. If you choose to download and store locally, the file can be used. Once you connect back to the internet, your edits will be automatically uploaded to OneDrive. The power of OneDrive is enormous, and based on requests from UserVoice, OneDrive has now crossed platforms to Mac. OneDrive Files On-Demand for Mac is now available for consumer and commercial customers.

AI and Content Collaboration
Machine-learning and AI can aid in increasing productivity, making informed decisions, and keeping files more secure, and by combining AI with content stored in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business, these goals are achieved. In addition, video and audio transcription services will be coming soon to SharePoint and OneDrive along with scan and metadata capture with the OneDrive mobile app.

Deployment
The new SharePoint Admin Centre will allow you to manage all sites, including group connected team sites, hub sites, and communication sites. Deploy with confidence.

Recovery
Personal files are protected from malicious attacks and file corruption with Files Restore for OneDrive which provides the capability to move a user’s Desktop, Documents, and Pictures folders from their Windows device into OneDrive.
This same protection is now available for shared files in SharePoint. A self-service recovery solution, administrators can restore files from any point in time from the last 30 days with File Restore for SharePoint.

SharePoint On-Prem

For SharePoint On-Prem customers, SharePoint Server 2019 will be available in October this year and will offer modern user experiences, support for SharePoint Framework, OneDrive Files On-Demand, and improved hybrid integration with Office 365. The SharePoint Migration Tool is free and highly recommended for moving complete on-premises SharePoint sites, including data from libraries, lists, and file shares.