SharePoint Virtual Summit : Office 365 with OneDrive and SharePoint

I attended the SharePoint Virtual Summit today which was dedicated to Office 365 with OneDrive and SharePoint. Some really great announcements were made today, the one about Communication sites was no doubt the big one for me!!!

Share with confidence 

·        OneDrive lets you get to all your files on any device

·        Collaborate with deep Office Integration

·        Share with colleagues inside and outside your organization

·        Every office 365 group gets a SharePoint team site

·        New web and mobile experiences

·        Collaborate on intranet and in Microsoft teams

            New:

·        See and sync all of your files with Files ON-Demand

·        Share seamlessly from file explorer and finder

·        Connect existing sites to office 365 groups

·        Add groups resources to navigation & pages 

·        Add SharePoint pages to Microsoft Teams

OneDrive admin center has options for Link expiration and who can have access (domain)

Once the admin sets the policy, end user cannot extend the dates for sharing.

Transform Business Process

·        Gather and manage Data and files in SharePoint

·        Automate Process and connect data with Microsoft Flow

·        Create mobile apps with Microsoft PowerApps

                  New:

·        Simple approval and feedback flows

·        Trigger and share flows in lists & libraries

·        PowerApps forms inside SharePoint lists & Libraries

Inform and engage employees

·        Brings award-winning intranets to the cloud

·        SharePoint home surfaces news & Activity

·        Create beautiful, natively mobile pages

New:

·        Communication sites reach a broader audience mobile ready, faster sites with richer layout 

·        Easy build pages with new layout options

·        New web parts drive engagement & interactivity

Harness collective knowledge

·        Find what you need with powerful search

·        What you need finds you with discovery experiences

·        Learn about co-workers using intelligent people cards

New:

·        Personalized search lets you find it fast

·        Find expertise by searching skills, interests and projects stored in o365 profiles

·        Build communities with SharePoint & Yammer

Manage 

·        Rest easy with global scale, reliability and compliance

·        Protect your content with security controls

·        Bring office 365 to your data center with hybrid capabilities

New:

·        Modern SharePoint admin experience

·        Service-level encryption using customer keys

·        Conditional access policies per site

Extend 

·        Modern client-side development with SharePoint Framework

·        Business process across Office 365 with flow and web hooks

·        Single end-point for sites, and beyond Microsoft Graph

New:

·        SharePoint Framework extensions for sites and libraries

·        Graph and Webhooks across sites and lists

·        SharePoint Framework for SharePoint Server 2016 in FP2

SharePoint and OneDrive support file sizes up to 10GB 

Microsoft is announcing intelligent indexing today, a series of engineering improvements to gradually eliminate the throttles that kick in for large lists (max capacity 30MM)

More about PowerApps

https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/powerapps-and-sharepoint/

Certificates 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/exam-list.aspx

Microsoft Ignite information 

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ignite/default.aspx

MS BUILD

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2017?wt.mc_id=build_hp

Admin center 

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Blog/Introducing-the-new-SharePoint-Admin-Center/ba-p/70294

Communication sites

https://blogs.office.com/2017/05/16/sharepoint-virtual-summit-showcases-growth-innovations-and-customer-success/ 

Some key features to look forward to:

• PowerApps eventually will have the ability to change Ownership of a PowerApps, or share them the way Flow now has "Team Flows"
•  Integrate apps built using PowerApps with the SharePoint Libraries.
•   You can build Microsoft Flows that will assist with many objectives you may have that involve SharePoint Libraries, and can run the Flow from the app or independently of it. Here is some helpful content: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/flow-in-spo-document-libraries/
•  SPFX will be released in OnPrem SharePoint - Scheduled as part of Feature Pack 2 for SharePoint 2016 in the second half of this year.
•  Plans to enable simple Renaming of O365 Groups (and their associated sites, alias etc.) 

Microsoft Ignite - Chicago Sparks!

Chicago sparked with approx. 23k attendees in this huge conference. This was one full week of being social & learnings!!

 

 

The Keynote was very well orchestrated and the demos were worth all the attention:

Satya Nadella's main Key focus was :
1. Era of more personal computing
2. Reinventing productivity and business processes
3. Building the intelligent cloud backend for the worlds applications

The demos that fascinated me were mainly focused on the below :

Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Edge will enable people to take notes on the Internet and share with others. Cortana is able to help with browsing tasks.

Microsoft Cortana is supported with an intelligent cloud backing up Windows 10 so it can intelligently answer complex questions. It's ability to search for questions online combined with helping you with simple tasks like how to use your PC, for instance as demonstrated at Ignite will have a huge impact!Cortana can also connect to PowerBI so you can ask her to answer questions regarding your business data. In the demo Cortana was able to answer questions such as ‘show me the average number of PCs that our attendees have by industry’.


Office 365 Delve
Office Delve is a collaboration tool that show the communication flows amongst teams such as email, Skype and Yammer as well as counts and growth rates. It is also able to keep track of work like balance by monitoring activity out of office hours.
Using the Health Tracker Dashboard you can see a view of team interactions, time spent in meetings and compare it to the average for the organisations. Plus, Outlook remembers the last files you have used saving you time. In addition Microsoft Sway which will be coming to Office 365 for Business next month.

 

 

Public Preview Of Office 2016, SharePoint 2016

Microsoft announced public availability of the preview version of Office 2016 with the final release slated for fall of 2015. Demos of Office 2016 showed emphasis on

• Document co-creation
• Pop-up warning messages meant to thwart corporate data leakage before sharing files via email or cloud services.
• Microsoft will be adding Sway to the Office family of apps with its next release. Sway is a new content-creation tool for mixing text, images and video from around the Web into one seamless Web page for sharing.

During the ignite week a sneak peak into the SP2016 preview was available and I enjoyed the liberty of using it. Still in the build phase this is something I am looking forward to..

 Click here to see/register to view the SP2016 preview (working site during the Ignite sessions)

 

Some great features for Microsoft products were announced and here's my learning's from Microsoft Ignite for SharePoint 2016 compiled in a PowerPoint slide :

 

 

 

 

 

My personal top 15 SharePoint related sessions from Microsoft Ignite are here as a quick reference:

 

1.	A New People Experience in Delve: Discover People Through Content, and Content Through People
2	Advanced Enterprise Content Management and Classification in SharePoint On-Premises and Office 365
3	Best Practices for Design and Performance in SharePoint Online
4	Big Bang: The New Universe of Findability and Discoverability
5	Dealing with Application Lifecycle Management in Microsoft Office 365 App Development
6	Deep Dive into Safe SharePoint Branding in Office 365 Using Repeatable Patterns and Practices
7	Future-Proofing Your On-Premises SharePoint Development
8	How to Decide When to Use SharePoint and Yammer and Office 365 Groups and Outlook and Skype
9	Microsoft Office 365 Groups Overview and Roadmap
10	Proven Ways to Build Robust, No-Code Solutions in Microsoft SharePoint
11	The Evolution of SharePoint: Overview and Roadmap
12	Transforming Your SharePoint Full Trust Code to the Office App Model
13	What's New for IT Professionals in SharePoint Server 2016
14	eDiscovery Redefined: Real Time and In-Place
15	Office Development Matters, and Here's Why...

Happy Learning!! Here is a pic of one of the great times at Ignite...