SharePoint Online

SharePoint Online 

Offer and oversee substance, learning, and applications to enable cooperation, rapidly discover data, and consistently work together over the association.

Basic sharing and consistent coordinated effort 

Enable sharing and coordinated effort on your intranet. Give individuals places where they can arrange and work together on substance, information, and news to remain in agreement.

Educate and interface your association 

Educate and interface your kin with intranets and entries. Offer regular assets and applications and communicate your message with rich, powerful pages.

Knowledge and bits of knowledge 

Depend on amazing undertaking inquiry to discover records, destinations, and individuals. Worked in knowledge conveys the most important outcomes and encourages you find data and aptitude around you.

SharePoint Online incorporates: 

Record storage OneDrive gives every client in any event 1 TB of individual distributed storage.

Outer sharing 

Safely offer records and substance with individuals inside and outside your association.

Content administration 

Sort out and oversee content in libraries and records with metadata, records the executives, and maintenance arrangements.

Group destinations 

Give a spot to your group to sort out and team up on substance, information, and news to remain in agreement.

Correspondence destinations 

Extensively share and impart your gathering's message over the association with lovely, powerful correspondence destinations.

SharePoint for Intranets 

Educate and connect with your association with intranets and destinations to recount to your story, report your news, share assets, streamline procedures, and draw in individuals.

Versatile applications 

Access intranets, group locales and substance with the SharePoint portable application for Android™, iOS®, and Windows and OneDrive versatile applications for Android, iOS and Windows.

Computerize work 

• Computerize business forms with alarms and work processes. 
• Revelation 
• Find applicable individuals and significant substance when you need it most. 

SharePoint 2019 Top Features Announcement

Microsoft's recent SharePoint Conference was a typically dense affair, with announcements spanning nearly everything under the Microsoft 365 and Office 365 umbrellas.

For the most part, however, the news focused on coming SharePoint Online improvements for Office 365 subscribers, rather than SharePoint Server improvements.

Jeff Teper, corporate vice president for OneDrive, SharePoint and Office, gave the keynote talk during the event this week, which is available as an on-demand "virtual summit" talk here. For those wanting more, there's an Intrazone audio recording of Teper that's available, too. Microsoft also released multiple blog posts with announcements, which can be found throughout this article.

SharePoint Server

Microsoft had just a couple of things to say about SharePoint Server products in an announcement. It's adding support on Azure Stack for running SharePoint Server 2016 or SharePoint Server 2019, although the timing wasn't described. Azure Stack is Microsoft's Azure "datacenter in a box" appliance offered by hardware partners that lets organizations run Azure services on their own servers.

In addition, it's possible to use Azure SQL Database Managed Instance with SharePoint Server 2019. Once again, it wasn't clear from the announcement if the capability was available yet. With Managed Instance, Microsoft is promising "near 100% compatibility with the latest SQL Server on-premises (Enterprise Edition) Database Engine," while Microsoft takes care of the patching. The Managed Instance service is aimed at organizations wanting to move applications to Microsoft's "cloud" while leveraging a compatible database management solution.

SharePoint Spaces

Microsoft's surprise at last year's SharePoint Conference was SharePoint Spaces, a way of building 3-D SharePoint Online sites that provide mixed-reality experiences for users wearing headsets. At this year's event, Microsoft showed off the use of SharePoint Spaces for viewing its "campus" headquarters, as well as Microsoft's new construction plans.

More than 1,800 companies have applied to use the "limited preview" of SharePoint Spaces, but Microsoft is currently just working with a "handful of those customers" to develop the SharePoint Spaces feature. The company is planning to share more about SharePoint Spaces at the Microsoft Ignite event coming this year in November.

New Home Sites

Microsoft announced a new landing page for employees called "SharePoint Home Sites" for sharing news and content based on the employee's role in the organization. Microsoft defines a Home Site as "a communication site that is designed and designated to serve as the top portal in an organization." Microsoft is targeting a rollout of the Home Site capability to Office 365 tenancies sometime in third quarter of this year.

A Home Site is built on top of a Communication Site, which is used for broader organizational communications in SharePoint sites. A Home Site differs from a Communication Site in that an organization's "official" news gets shown by default and the landing page is connected to a user's SharePoint home page. Home Site pages are integrated with Microsoft Search, and they support video playback via Yammer and the Microsoft Stream service. The page features the so-called "megamenu layout" for navigation by users, which shows the whole menu instead of using flyouts.

Microsoft also has a page type in SharePoint called a "Hub Site," which is the top navigational page in SharePoint intranets. It's possible for a Home Site to be a Hub Site, per a FAQ in this Home Site announcement.

Microsoft is planning on making Home Sites the new home page for the SharePoint Mobile App. It'll be accessible via a "dedicated home button" that will be coming "later this year," according to the Home Site announcement.

Microsoft also suggested that IT pros can make a Communication Site become a Home Site via "a simple PowerShell command." Typically, organizations would create one Home Site per Office 365 tenancy, Microsoft indicated. The PowerShell command adds official news, sets a tenantwide search scope, provides the connections to a SharePoint start page and enables the dedicated home button on the SharePoint Mobile App. Microsoft plans to add the PowerShell command to the SharePoint Admin Portal at some point, but didn't specify when.

Microsoft plans to ease the branding with Home Sites. It'll be possible for IT pros to add a link behind company logos that can steer users back to a Home Site.

Other SharePoint Enhancements

Microsoft also briefly noted that it's planning to add a new site starter design to make it easier for organizations to build SharePoint sites, according to an Intelligent Intranet announcement. No timeline was described, but a coming "organization site design" capability will have layout options such as "a vertical section" and "new SharePoint webparts."

In a separate business solutions announcement, Microsoft described a coming "organization templates for the Office backstage" feature, which perhaps is the same thing. These organization templates, which lets organizations use preferred templates instead of Office defaults, is planned for "Targeted Release in summer 2019."

Organizations have some site design help with examples from SharePoint Look Books. "Now tenant administrators can take advantage of the SharePoint Provisioning Service to automatically provision SharePoint Look Book designs to any tenant in the world," Microsoft's announcement explained.

Microsoft also raised the connected site limits for Hub Sites from 100 sites to 2,000 sites.

A few business apps enhancements are coming this summer. Around that time, it'll be possible to use PowerApps to "build custom forms for document libraries" in SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. This summer there will be a private preview of Compliant Workspaces, a feature that lets organizations drill down into single files to manage their retention policies.

Organizations will be able to take bulk actions on approval workflows with a new "bulk approvals" feature. It'll be arriving as a "Targeted Release in mid-to-late June."

The SharePoint Connector for Microsoft Flow, a solution for automating tasks, will be getting "new actions to check-in/check-out documents, get version information, grant access, and create folders." Those enhancements are scheduled for "targeted release in August 2019."

Security, Management and Compliance

Microsoft announced that "multi-geo capabilities," used to ensure that data residency requirements are met in certain countries, has reached general availability for "SharePoint and Office 365 Groups," according to a SharePoint security announcement.

Previously, there were multi-geo licensing restrictions based on the number of users. However, the number has now been reduced to "500 users for multi-geo support effective June 1st 2019." The change was made to address the needs of midsize organizations, Microsoft indicated.

The SharePoint Migration Tool, used to move local sites to SharePoint Online, has a SharePoint Server 2013 site migration capability that's now generally available. Microsoft described it as a "comprehensive solution for migrating your SharePoint Server 2013 sites and their settings and content." There's also a SharePoint Server 2010 migration capability for moving content to SharePoint Online in Office 365, but it's still at the preview stage. The SharePoint Migration Tool now has support for 11 languages, Microsoft indicated.

The SharePoint Admin Center will be getting the ability to show classic and modern SharePoint management views, which will be "available soon," Microsoft promised. Microsoft also is adding the ability to carry out bulk actions in the SharePoint Admin Center, which will be "available soon." Possible bulk actions will include "updating the site's sharing configuration, performing hub site association, in addition to deleting sites."

The SharePoint Admin Center "soon" will let IT pros rename the URLs used for SharePoint sites, and end users won't have to refresh their links, Microsoft promised. In addition, the portal will let IT pros swap site links. It'll be done using "a new Windows PowerShell cmdlet (invoke-spositeswap) that allows you to replace the root site within a tenant" with an existing site.

Microsoft also announced various "sensitivity labels" enhancements that work between SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 applications. Sensitivity labels add information protection capabilities to documents. Most of the coming improvements were at the "private preview" stage, so they are yet to come.

The Microsoft 365 Compliance portal is getting some new records management capabilities, according to this Microsoft announcement. Organizations can set document retention periods "across SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, Teams, Exchange and more." Users can see a review of "bulk disposition, retention extensions, or re-classifications." Microsoft also added "native connectors" that can be used to archive non-Microsoft 365 data, such as social media data from Facebook or Twitter.