Office 365: Fluid Framework

Office 365 Fluid Framework preview is now available to anyone who has an Office 365 Enterprise subscription. O365 Fluid Framework will enhance user collaboration across apps, and being web-based, it will provide interactive and shared experiences through a componentized document model.

What is O365 Fluid Framework?

Housed in GitHub, O365 Fluid Framework is described as an open platform that is accessible for use by developers. Generic tools for web applications is available in the software development kit.

On a user level, O365 Fluid Framework enables user collaboration across applications, including co-authoring in Office applications and the ability for multiple users to ink documents. Artificial intelligence is also leveraged to enhance collaboration, such as simultaneous text translation into other languages. Crowdsource meeting agendas, minutes, note-taking, and managing projects with multiple stakeholders will be a breeze with O365 Fluid Framework’s flexibility.

In the O365 Fluid Framework preview, users will be able to create, edit, and share their Fluid Framework canvases. In Fluid Framework, end-users will not only be able to collaborate on Fluid Framework documents, but they will also be able to use Office 365’s @mention to send instant messages.

What is in the O365 Fluid Framework Preview?

As mentioned above, the O365 Fluid Framework is accessible for those who have an O365 Enterprise subscription. To begin accessing your preview, sign in at the O365 Fluid Framework preview with either your work or school account.

Once signed in, creating can begin:

1. On the left-hand side, choose to Create New;

2. Add a Title; and

3. Save your project but note that the project cannot be saved locally. The project location for saving must either be in OneDrive for Business or in SharePoint.

As you create, you can invite others to collaborate with you on this project by clicking the Share () button to grant access to your colleagues. You can also copy the URL. Another way to share your project is to use the @mention. By tagging your colleague, if they have access, they will be notified. If they do not have access, a pop up will appear, allowing you to easily grant them access while you keep working.

Connected and live, collaboration on fluid canvases is nearly instantaneous. All users who have access to the file will be able to immediately see edits.

In O365 Fluid Framework, components are added, and these components represent the types of content that can be used to customize the workspace. To add components, either type the plus “+” sign or, on the left side of the page, choose the “+” icon. Currently, in the preview, the following components are available:

1. Action Items: track, in a table, tasks, timelines, and assignees;

2. Mention: tag colleagues with “@name” anywhere in the content so that they can easily find relevant content;

3. Table: create and customize a table;

4. Date: add dates to track upcoming deadlines and to highlight overdue tasks; and

5. Check List: as items are completed, check them off.

Though Fluid Framework canvases are not the documents that we are familiar with, canvases can still be formatted. To format Fluid Framework canvases, right-click within the section that you want to format. A pop-up will appear and within this menu are contextually relevant options for areas of text and tables.

1. Text Area: text formatting options include those in the image below:

2. Tables: table formatting options include those in the image below:

On the left is a navigation pane which provides quick and useful access to:

  1. – quickly access recent projects;
  2. – quickly scan mentions;
  3. – easily start a new project; and
  4. – easily share suggestions and feedback.

As with all Microsoft products, there are keyboard shortcuts for the O365 Fluid Framework. These keyboard shortcuts are:

Keyboard shortcut Action
@ Tag and notify a person
+ Opens the Discover Menu with component options
Shift + F10 Opens the Commanding Surface with formatting options
Ctrl + Alt + 1 Heading 1
Ctrl + Alt + 2 Heading 2
Ctrl + . Creates bulleted List
Ctrl + 1 Creates a checklist, checks off an item, or removes a checklist

Supported Browsers for Preview:

1. Microsoft Edge;

2. Safari (Mac only);

3. Chrome; and

4. Firefox.

Note that only the latest versions of these browsers are supported.

Office 365 Fluid Framework is a flexible, live, and real-time application that enhances team collaboration with a blank fluid canvas that is customizable for each user through the addition of components for a variety of content types. Breaking down app barriers, O365 Fluid Framework provides multi-users the capabilities to co-author document and web content with speed and at large scale. Because O365 Fluid Framework is a componentized document model, authors can deconstruct content into collaborative blocks. These building blocks can then be used across applications, and by doing so, a new, flexible document is created. The power of the O365 Fluid Framework is further fueled with intelligent agents, translating text, suggesting edits, fetching content, performing compliance checks, and more.

Though this is still in preview, O365 Fluid Framework is providing us some insight as to the direction that Microsoft is headed towards with content collaboration between users. O365 Fluid Framework has great potential to become the freeform collaboration tool.

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.

Microsoft Ignite 2019 Announcements: The Intelligent Intranet: Part 1

As technology evolves, so have the platforms and offerings from Microsoft. Office 365 is now a part of Microsoft 365, and Microsoft has been announcing major enhancements to Microsoft 365. Microsoft Teams has, and is, seeing many new enhancements, and we can expect that SharePoint will also be receiving new features that are directly related to Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Teams.    

For the majority of us, we know that SharePoint is known to be the cloud storage component of Office 365 and has been the cornerstone of the business intranet within an enterprise. As SharePoint moves with Office 365 to Microsoft 365, some significant changes are taking place. Fun fact: there are over 100 million active users of SharePoint in the cloud

SharePoint Home Sites

Powered by AI, SharePoint Home Sites is the landing page for an organization’s users that is customized based on the user’s role. Super intelligent, SharePoint Home Sites provide a customized view of relevant information for the user based on the information that they search, require, and interact with based on their roles and the teams that they belong with. Collaboration tools like Yammer and Stream are pulled into SharePoint Home Sites, making access easy and streamlining the processes for collaboration. Other features include:

1. Targeted Navigation: a mega menu appears on the Home Sites. Recognizing that large enterprises span different countries with many offices, the mega menu can be configured with the advanced navigation capabilities to target sites that are role and site-specific;

2. Web Feed: based on the Graph, the web feed can be personalized to preview relevant conversations, news articles, and videos from within the organization but also include news articles from the internet that are being discussed within the teams. Videos can be created with Microsoft stream, and with noise cancellation driven by AI technology, videos play sharp and clear; and

3. Integration of the New Yammer: integrated for communities inside your SharePoint intranet, Yammer provides one of the social platforms for collaborative discussions and the sharing of news.

Branding

Branding is vital to the instant recognition of an organization through visual association with the product or service that it delivers. SharePoint provides consistent, visual, and text branding to its customers, and now, it has added more features to ensure device-wide organization branding across the intelligent intranet and sites. These new abilities include:

1. SharePoint Mobile App Co-Branding: an organization’s branding can easily be added and featured in the SharePoint Mobile app. No longer will the organization name be SharePoint at the top;

2. SharePoint Mobile App and an Organization’s Custom Branding: an organization’s custom branding is now supported in the SharePoint Mobile app with a logo image, text, app theme colours (top navigation bar), and accent colours for a co-branded experience for the organization’s employees;

3. Expanded Footer: located at bottom of the Page, as a requirement, the customizable footer is applied to all Pages of the organization’s intelligent intranet. Background colour choices are supported along with the ability to organize links in the footer;

4. Shy Header and Options: a Shy Header allows the size of the site header to be reduced. Additional options include the ability to hide the site title and add a site logo thumbnail for the sites;

5. Microsoft Fluent Design System: customer needs are delivered across platforms through the utilization of innovative technology;

6. SharePoint Teal Default Theme: the SharePoint brand colors will be converted from the existing blue default theme to the new Teal theme for new and existing modern and classic communication team sites and for non-group connected team sites; and

7. Classic Sites with Modern Communication Sites Experience: classic team sites that are not modern group connected can now have a modern communication site experience. Classic team sites that have the classic publishing feature will also be able to experience the modern communication site.

New Hub Capabilities

Providing a point of organization for content across SharePoint sites, hubs can be used to organize content, teams, divisions or resources throughout the organization based on attributes such as region, division, department, and project. Hubs were first announced in Ignite 2017, and at Ignite 2019, new features and enhancements are being announced for hubs. These include:

1. Hub Permissions: centralizing the management of access to associated sites;

2. Hub Analytics: providing hub-wide usage insights including total visitors, popular content, page views, and other useful analytical data;

3. Associated Hubs: enabling discovery and search experiences across hubs with easy navigation between them; and

4. Audience Targeting: navigating hubs based on specific criteria such as office location and user role as defined in an organization’s Azure Active Directory group. Targeted navigation is one of the new enhancements for SharePoint Home Sites.

There have been numerous mind-blowing announcements ranging from Project Cortex to the flexibility and collaborative nature of Microsoft Teams to the new and improved intelligent intranet. Believe it or not, but this is not the end of the new features for the intelligent intranet. Our next article will discuss the SharePoint Lookbook and the new page authoring and publishing features.

Microsoft Ignite 2019 Announcements: Content Services Management: Project Cortex: Part 2

In this second article on Project Cortex, we will discover, in closer detail, what Project Cortex involves. As discussed in the first article, Project Cortex leverages AI, content mining, machine learning, and machine teaching to extract content and data from various sources, and then categorize and organize this data. Even though Project Cortex is AI-powered, how does it manage all this content?

Metadata and Management

AI or experts will be able to apply metadata to content and this metadata is managed in the Managed Metadata Service (MMS) which had been updated to support content tagging across Microsoft 365. Defining common terms in taxonomy, including synonyms and multilingual support, through managed metadata allows for more precise tag definitions. With MMS taxonomy, organizations who utilize this will able to mine those tags to recognize topics in their content. Synonyms allow content retrieval to be performed based on tag synonyms. To assist in analyzing content and tagging activities, a report can be generated.

Managed Metadata will support content types across an enterprise and by doing so, will provide ease for governing document templates and metadata columns. Third-party systems are becoming easier to import, export, and integrate with a custom taxonomy.

Topic Cards

When a topic is detected, a topic card will appear. Appearing automatically in SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Word, Outlook, and in Microsoft Search results, topic cards will show a description, the resources, the experts (people), and other information (related topics), and project details on the topic. Additionally, users can follow the topic or suggest an edit should it be needed.

Across Microsoft 365, topics will be prominently shown in people cards, which will assist easy identification of people belonging to teams who are working on projects. Searching for a topic in Bing or in Microsoft Search will provide a list of people who have added the topic to their profile. By adding the topic to their profile, the search encompasses not only the topic but also their skills, expertise, and projects they are assigned to. With Project Cortex, automatic prompting will ensure that users add topics based on the work they are doing to assist in keeping their profiles up to date.

Topic Page

Information from the topic cards can be explored further, in greater detail and depth, on the topic page. Topic pages are automatically built and kept up to date with Project Cortex’s AI as well as with user infused curation. Topic pages become better and more accurate with information contributed by experts. Experts can edit or create new topics, add additional resources, and incorporate their knowledge. By doing this, experts are training the knowledge network in a transparent fashion.

Knowledge Centre

Topic pages roll up into the knowledge centre. The knowledge centre provides a personalized view of relevant information across the organization. This information includes relevant and trending topics and open questions.

Within the knowledge centre, topic-specific knowledge centres, centres of excellence, that support topic-specific knowledge sharing scenarios can be created. Centres of excellence can be created to share topic-specific knowledge such as policies, projects, products, procedures, or customers.

Custom knowledge centres can be created with web parts to integrate training and knowledge from across an organization. These custom knowledge centres are built-in, seamlessly integrating with, the organization’s SharePoint intranet.

Content Centres

Content centres are libraries where reports and analyses can be generated to see how content is being used. AI-powered capabilities that automate content capture and content categorizing will be delivered to all SharePoint libraries and content centres when Project Cortex is enabled. Creating AI models for content processing can be done in content centres. Additionally, automating content-centric processes with AI Builder and Power Automate, which integrates with Project Cortex, will be available in the content centres.

Security

Project Cortex is built into Microsoft 365. As such, Project Cortex maintains the privacy, securities, and compliances that can be expected from Microsoft 365. Within this framework, IT Admins will have control over which scopes of content are included in Project Cortex by excluding sites or documents, whether content is published with broader visibility, and the exclusion of specific topic names based on a block list. Only users with access to content and related information will be able to see topics. User access is reflective of the topic information they are to see.

Project Cortex, by automatically tagging content with metadata and categorizing content, enhances an organization’s security profile. Microsoft Information Protection (MIP) uses metadata to apply security and compliance policies.

Enabling Project Cortex and AI automated tagging and categorization allows Power Automate to streamline business processes.

Third-Party Repositories

New Microsoft Search connectors allow Project Cortex to connect to content in third-party repositories and systems. Connectors that are currently supported include Windows File Share, ServiceNow, SQL Database, Intranet Websites, MediaWiki, Azure Data Lake Gen2, Salesforce, and third-party connectors through the ingestion API.

Project Cortex extends the collaboration ability of SharePoint and Microsoft services. It strengthens the collaboration of an organization by providing relevant and organized knowledge across the enterprise with ease of access for users. Knowledge is valuable. By providing this value to individuals, teams, and the organization, the accumulation of knowledge provides the power for success.

Microsoft Ignite 2019 Announcements: Content Services Management: Project Cortex: Part 1

Project Cortex is the latest and newest content service for knowledge management in Microsoft 365, and it is SUPER EXCITING! Being cloud-based, Project Cortex is easily and proactively accessible by users in SharePoint as it helps to organize content across an organization.

What is Project Cortex?

Project Cortex is an “interactive knowledge repository” of customer content. Being interactive, it leverages AI to intelligently ingest content in a variety of forms from analyzing documents and content to allowing subject-matter experts to teach the system how to understand semi-structured information extracted from conversations, videos, and meetings.

Project Cortex reinvents enterprise content management by leveraging the cloud and AI whereby users create a knowledge network. What is a knowledge network? A knowledge network is a result of creating a union between content, people, and work processes together. Every user in an organization will have the opportunity to access knowledge and to upscale themselves. Knowledge is the key for organizations to gain a foothold, advance, and maintain a strong presence in today’s competitive markets.

How does it Work?

There are many new technologies and apps across Microsoft that many users would benefit from. Project Cortex brings knowledge to the users through the use of these new technologies by integrating the many apps that are available to reach the greatest number of the organization’s audience. Behind the scenes, Project Cortex builds on the intelligence of Microsoft Graph, a variety of Microsoft AI technologies, and leading content services of SharePoint. It brings these together while providing a simple and seamless experience to the user.

With the increase in apps and platforms available, Project Cortex allows organizations to connect to external repositories and systems by using advanced AI to automate content capture, categorization, management, and protection of information with intelligent security and compliance.

Basically, Project Cortex applies AI to reason over structured and unstructured content in an organization. Advanced cognitive services recognize content types, extract the important information, and then automatically organize it into topics along with tags.

What Types of Content can Advanced Cognitive Services Recognize?

1. Text and Image Recognition: identify objects in uploaded or scanned images. The library is vast as it on over 10,000 attributes and text extracts from PDFs and images;

2. Forms Processing: important information can be pinpointed in forms. This information can be extracted as metadata; and

3. Machine Teaching: as opposed to machine learning, machine teaching has experts training AI similarly as one would train a person to read and tag information in documents. With machine teaching, experts can train AI to recognize information in unstructured documents, including contracts, proposals, and training materials, which contain various formatting styles and vastly different types of content. Machine teaching is powered by LUIS and through machine teaching, a reusable model is created based on a small subset of sample documents.

Project Cortex creates and shares content in Microsoft 365 by categorizing the content based on the type and tags it with extracted metadata. The content is securely collected and includes conversations, files, and recorded meetings and videos.

Next, AI applies advanced topic mining logic to identify topics and relate content to those topics. The content can be extracted from Microsoft 365 or from externally connected systems. Customers, projects, policies, products, and procedures are a few examples of important knowledge that can be created by AI as topics. These topics are knowledge entities, a new object class in Microsoft Graph. By connecting knowledge entities, experiences, knowledge, and people, a knowledge network is created.

Project Cortex is the next step in true knowledge collaboration across an enterprise. Microsoft is taking a huge leap in AI and integrating it with human actions to provide value to organizations. This value is knowledge which is the basis for communication and collaboration. By empowering individuals with knowledge, individuals will band together, collaborating and bringing successful solutions and results in the projects that they are tasked with.

In our next article, we will explore Project Cortex in greater detail.

SharePoint: Summer Feature Enhancements

Since the May SharePoint Conference 2019, it can be assumed that the many great minds and the many talented people at Microsoft have been working diligently to ensure the rollout of the many new features and additions that were announced. Add summer vacations, and these two reasons might explain why it is so quiet on the news and announcements front.

Even so, I have a few features that have quietly been rolled out. The first of these is the increase of the SharePoint hubs limit which has been raised from 100 to 2,000! This is a significant increase and allows greater flexibility in the organizing of sites for an organization. The ability to connect even more related hubs together provides the ability to create shared content and provide shared navigational experiences across these hubs for uniformity across the organization.

Analytics. It is one of those buzzwords that everyone mentions and talks about. As a SharePoint Online site owner, you have access to review analytics that reflect user interactions on your site. Analytical data on the usage of the site includes the number of users who visit your site, a list of files that are viewed the most, and the number of times that the site has been visited by users. Accessing this information can be done by clicking the Settings gear, and then accessing Site Usage by clicking on it. An alternative is to navigate by choosing the Site Contents menu on the left-hand side and then clicking Site Usage located at the top navigation bar. Analytical data will include:

1. Unique Viewers: this shows the number of unique views in the past 7, 30, and 90 days, and a running Lifetime total of unique viewers who have viewed the site content which includes pages, documents, and news;

2. Site Visits: an algorithm calculates the total number of site visits in the last 7, 30, and 90 days, and provides a running Lifetime total of site visits by the users to view content. Site content includes pages, documents, and news. The algorithm is designed to exclude repetitive and continual operations by the same user on the same item by filtering out these actions. Refreshing a page, document, or news post can be considered as repetitive and continual operations by the user;

3. Site Traffic: this is a graphical representation of visits per hour to the site for the last 7, 30, and 90 days. The hourly trend is colour shaded with darker shading correlating to more views on that content for that time slot;

4. Popular Platforms: this is a visual representation of the platform that the user visited from (desktop, mobile app, mobile web, tablet) to the sites’ content. The data includes the last 7, 30, and 90 days. This information is obtained through metadata, the user agent header, that is received whenever a user visits a site;

5. Most Unique Views: this displays the top 10 files and pages with the most unique viewers for the past 7 days;

6. Most Viewed: this displays the top 10 files and pages with the most views in the last 7 days; and

7. Shared with External Users: this displays a list of files that you have access to that are shared with external users who are not internal to your organization. These files are shared via a link that requires them to log in in order to view the file.

There was a reminder of the importance of monitoring SharePoint Online page performance as more content and features are used to build pages, and if caution and prevention are not practiced, then loading of the pages can become excruciatingly slow. To monitor and manage this, the Turn SharePoint Online Performance article has many concepts to aid in managing this to maintain optimum loading speeds.

Though these are not all new features, these features bring greater flexibility, versatility, and information on usage and performance review. With analytics, it will become easier to manage site content that is not receiving high hit rates, pages that do not retain and engage the user. With this data, improvements can be made to stimulate user engagement, increase site visits, and provide more relevant content.  

Though summer has been quiet with announcements, we can rest assured that many more features will be rolled out in the coming months.

SharePoint Conference 2019 (SPC2019): Announcements Part 2

There are so many great announcements at the SharePoint Conference 2019 (SPC2019)! The vision of Microsoft encompasses three pillars in building an intelligent workplace: teamwork and business process, employee engagement and communications, and search and content intelligence. By connecting these three pillars, with SharePoint underpinning as the connecting foundation, employees within your organization and those external that are teamed with them, become powerful through content management and collaboration across Microsoft 365 and Office 365.

Collaboration starts with individuals and through fostering inclusion and engagement, teams are built. Through engagement, collaboration becomes successful. Microsoft Teams provides the space for your teams, while engagement through learning, teaching, and sharing is provided through Yammer. Combining core applications like Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, Yammer, Microsoft Search, OneDrive, Stream, and AI, you now have a powerful tool that provides your employees and teams the ability to collaborate in several mediums, on the go, on any device, and across platforms and applications.

Organizational attributes in sites, such as project, department, division, or region, are organized and connected through SharePoint hub sites. The unified navigation experience is provided with hubs. Sites can be created for a specific function and these sites can be added to the hub. All sites in the hub can roll up content to the top. If you click down to a different site, all the branding and design is automatically applied. Just like adding, sites can be moved from one hub to another.

Keeping your data secure is one of the forefront priorities with Microsoft, and with Classification Labels, this process is now more streamlined and simplified. There are two types of Classification Labels: Retention Labels for applying retention policies on all data; and, Sensitivity Labels for applying consistent security and access policies to all data. This includes content marking, group privacy, controlling level of access on unmanaged devices and restricting access to specific users in your organization. Additionally, anonymous sharing of sensitive files can be blocked through the creation of a DLP policy. And, an audit can be run with your DLP policy for accessed denied requests.

Not only are documents secured, but site access by an external user can be set through a tenant wide limit that defines how long an external user can access content on a shared site. Once the limit is met, the external user will automatically lose access. Requests for an extension can be granted by the Admin in the Admin Centre under User Expiration. Likewise, the Admin can terminate the access immediately.

Managing the Classic experience and the Modern experience is now made easier as the full features in the Admin Centre in the Classic experience is now in the Modern experience. Sites can now be managed with just one-click with bulk actions.

The ability to change the URL of a site is one of the coolest and handiest features (in my opinion). This can be accomplished by going into the Admin Centre, then choosing “Change site address”. Next, type in the new URL in the popup. At the same time, the opportunity to change the name of the site is offered. Once you accept, links will be updated plus a check is made to ensure all links are valid. Old links pointing to an old site are handled with Automatic Redirect. With this running automatically, the user is redirected to the new site, eliminating the need for you to copy content from the old site to the new site.

Collaboration, in real-time with multiple users, is the goal, and with Fluid Framework, this is now possible. Fluid Framework provides the platform for the collaboration of multiple co-authors to work on the same document and at the same time while edits and additions appear almost instantaneously for real-time collaboration.

Microsoft Search combines the power of AI and Microsoft Graph to produce search results not only from files, conversations, and insights but can find people, tasks, or even take you to the spot where you left off in a document. Microsoft Search connects your users with relevant content and people across several platforms and applications, including SharePoint, OneDrive, Yammer, Microsoft Teams, Office, Outlook, Windows, and Bing. One powerful search engine across all Microsoft applications. One feel, and best of all, it brings your design, your branding, your company voice across all MS products.

These are just a few of the applications, and with so many applications, the Admin Centre has been redesigned. The newly redesigned Admin Centre allows the configuration of Microsoft Search settings across all apps and services. Using a third-party? No worries – with search connectors, third party and line-of-business application information will be connected and searchable.

The power of Microsoft Search in SharePoint is prominently featured in the header, like it is in all Microsoft apps and services, on the SharePoint Home Site. It is available when you are, wherever you are. Catching up on announcements and news or continuing where you left off in a shared document or finding sites that are relevant to you without endlessly scrolling through feeds or bookmarks, is made effortless with Microsoft Search in SharePoint.

One key feature is zero intent queries. Simply click on the new search box, and contextually relevant information pops up! What’s contextually relevant? Documents that you recently used, recent suggestions, and people (skills, projects, and interests are all searchable) are ranked based on insights from documents, sites, and people you work with. Matches with rich previews, from over 270 different file types, will display as a live site preview on the search results page, visually making it easy to identify the content you want. For people, a people card will appear that lists their basic information, who they report to, projects they are members of, and teams that they belong to. To help you decide on what content you want to open, and to highlight company endorsed content, Administrator curated answers with markers will appear in the appropriate space on your home page.

A key feature of Microsoft Search in SharePoint is the Megamenu. With the megamenu, not only content on your Home Site is accessible, but content across the entire estate is now at your fingertips.

Interestingly, traditional search engines are based off an inverted structure. However, Microsoft Search leverages machine learning to build optimal models that are refined based on the click thru rate, search results, and the use of documents by users in organizations. Microsoft Search is now the consistent search engine across all platforms and applications. The uniqueness of Microsoft Search is that it is an open source repository where teams across an organization build it cooperatively through collaboration and with AI, creating a repository that is the most relevant to the users.

With one click on the top left Apps Launch button, you can quickly navigate between apps like OneDrive, SharePoint, Outlook, Yammer, and more while corporate branding and navigation flow through. Being natively mobile, all content and conversations are available on the go. An excellent feature is the News Digest Summary which summarizes what you need to know, and with one click, it takes you to the specific article. On the go or no time currently to read it? Simply save it for viewing and reading later.

Even with all these new, enhanced and exciting features, there is more to come! Based on community feedback, Microsoft continues to listen carefully and develop SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft 365 and its applications to provide the best tools to its customers. Announced for the future will be the capability to unlock text in images that are stored as PDFs, find conversations in Teams and Yammer across all applications, having these listed in a dedicated vertical search area, search videos in Stream, OneDrive, and SharePoint in a dedicated vertical search area, utilize custom connectors with adaptive cards for the search results page (you can customize how it looks and take action from that card), and develop your apps with endpoint for MS Search in MS Graph API (currently available in private preview).

These are just a few of the upcoming enhancements, but Microsoft has and will be delivering many new features to SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft 365, OneDrive, Yammer, Stream, Outlook, and many more of their applications. Combining their powerful individual capabilities together, and coupling it with AI, these applications provide your employees with the tools to use to support, engage, and redefine how collaboration between them is performed.

SharePoint Conference 2019 (SPC2019): Announcements

At the SharePoint Conference (SPC2019) held in Las Vegas this spring, many new announcements were shared that will impact SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Teams, Yammer, PowerApps, Microsoft Flow and several other applications within Office 365 and Microsoft 365.  

The internet connects the world while an intranet connects the people and content in the workplace. But, an intranet does more than just connect people and content. A properly organized intranet will cause collaboration between people, whether in teams or in siloes, through the sharing of knowledge, the harnessing of this collective knowledge to create solutions and the provisioning of a platform for communication. SharePoint has been the powerhouse behind intranets for more than a decade and can be found in every industry and geography. As a leader, SharePoint continues to set the bar higher and higher, meeting the needs and goals of organizations and its people with intelligent solutions.

SharePoint Home Sites

A SharePoint communication site, but amped up, SharePoint Home Sites is the landing page for your organization and the new home view on the SharePoint mobile app. SharePoint Home Sites, with personalized content, information, and navigation, not only engages through conversation but also through video that is powered by Yammer and Microsoft Stream. It neatly organizes and curates the organization’s news, with official news being marked visually and is available for all users with access to the home site. Relevant content and news are shared based on the role of the person as well as their role while Microsoft Search serves as the main connector of content within the organization.

A key focus with all of SharePoint’s enhancements is the time-to-value for customers. With the improved navigation and activity insights across sites, and coupling these features with views of your documents to get back to work quickly, work processes are greatly streamlined, underscoring the valuable time-to-value gained.

As we all experience, we may come across content that we would like to read, but at that moment, cannot. With SharePoint Home Sites, news and content can be flagged for review at a later time. This feature, enhanced saved for later view, will be an extremely useful and well-used feature.

SharePoint Home Sites are easily deployed – within minutes – straight out of the box with no coding! Customizations to reflect company branding and design are easily done through web parts, navigation, and site design – all straight out of the box.

Being the leader as the powerful platform for delivering applications on the intranet, many SharePoint partners are onboard with integrating their intranet offerings closely to the SharePoint intelligent intranet. Additionally, solutions built with SharePoint Framework by your developers or by SharePoint partners can be embedded.

Yammer and Microsoft Stream

Both Yammer and Microsoft Stream are featured out of the box for SharePoint Home Sites. With Yammer and Microsoft Stream, engaging employees in communication and learning has never been easier.

Yammer provides the platform for employees to engage in open conversations that can drive cultural transformations and cause organizational alignment.  Every employee across an organization is empowered to express their opinions, ideas, and feedback and now, with the new Question and Answer feature, you or a group admin can mark the best answer, making this knowledge easy to find, share, and reuse. Taking it one step further, a group can feature bot-like, intelligent answers to questions that are frequently asked.

There are some major changes for customers using Yammer groups connected to Office 365 groups. For these groups, e-Discovery for Yammer will be available for them. Recognizing the unique data residency requirements for European customers, in-geo data storage for Yammer in the EU is now available for new Yammer networks in the EU. Yammer messages and files attached to these will be stored at-rest in Microsoft EU datacentres.

Video is becoming more popular, and is quite often the first choice, for learning, engaging, and communicating. Microsoft 365’s video capability is powered by Microsoft Stream, a powerful engine that provides users the ability to securely record, upload, and share videos from the iOS or Android mobile apps. By incorporating Microsoft Forms into Microsoft Stream, polls, surveys or quizzes can easily be inserted into the videos.  

A natural extension of video is 3D and virtual reality. SharePoint Spaces has been in development since 2018, and at Ignite 2019, expect to see what SharePoint Spaces is in its early stages.

OneDrive

OneDrive is the Office 365 files application that stores all your individual and shared files across platforms, across browsers, and across devices and is accessible on mobile or on desktop. With so many files stored, accessing has become more streamlined and simple with Microsoft Search in OneDrive as the powering search engine. Personalized recommendations are provided with the new AI-powered experiences. Activity, file insights, and lifecycle signals such as DLP policies are shown on OneDrive’s enhanced file hover cards. Another great feature is the save for later which allows you to flag a file that you can return to later to read.

With the OneDrive web application, you can now work with metadata columns, custom views, sync files to your PC or Mac, and preview more than 320 file types, including 360-degree images and AutoCAD .DWG files. This can all be done with the new, full-fidelity files experience for shared libraries. And, with the comments on non-Office files, comments and be added to any of the 320+ file types, including PDFs, CAD drawings, and images.

Sharing policies set by your organization can now be done directly from OneDrive, making it that much easier to collaborate through file sharing with internal and external collaborators with the create a shared library with a streamlined experience backed by an Office 365 group. With this, you can specify the people you want to share with. Files can also be shared in Teams, which is the hub for teamwork, with the new file sharing control in Teams chat. This allows you to either upload a copy of the file or share a link, and the access provided by the link is configurable. The new sharing control to Outlook will also be implemented.

A new request files capability is being introduced which allows you to select a folder and invite people to add files. Everyone can upload folders to the file, but the only files they see will be theirs. With each file added, you will receive a notification. With request files, you are able to collect files from multiple individuals while preventing individuals from seeing other peoples’ files.  

These are few of the highlights announced and shared at this year’s SharePoint Conference. All are very exciting and will help your organization’s employees collaborate with greater efficiency and productivity while encouraging learning through enhanced media platforms.

Office 365: Classification and Retention Labels

As part of the Advanced Data Governance (ADG) suite of tools, Office 365 labels help you keep the data that is needed in your organization and disposes of information when it is no longer needed. Classifying content across Office 365 services entails the use of Office 365 labels. These labels are used for records management and follow governance rules as laid out by the organization and by legal authorities.

Three components comprise Advanced Data Governance:

Labels: fall under two types: sensitivity labels and retention labels (both originally were called classification labels but with the updated Office 365 UI, they have been renamed). These are used to classify the information for governance purposes. A retention policy can be associated with a label.

Retention: policies to ensure that data is not prematurely deleted but rather, once the content has reached the end of its retention period, one of three actions are triggered. Actions include: no action, delete content, or initiate a process for data review.

Supervision: assigns specific individuals to review and monitor email and third-party communications for the organization.

Office 365 Labels and Retention
Credit: www.recordpoint.com

As collaboration is not rooted to a single location or with one source, organizations are relying upon security and compliance to ensure that data remains secure, especially when it roams with collaborators. With Office 365, this can be accomplished through the use of labels.

Sensitivity labels allows sensitive content to be labelled and protected without hindering productivity and collaboration between users from different organizations. Sensitivity labels can be used to:

  1. Enforce protection settings, including encryption and watermarks, on labelled content;
  2. Protect Office app content across platforms and devices;
  3. Prevent sensitive data from leaving your organization on devices running Windows;
  4. Extend sensitivity labels to apps and services of third-parties; and
  5. Classify content without using protection settings.

Sensitivity labels classify data across your organization and enforce protection settings based on that classification.

How does a sensitivity label work? It operates similarly to tags in the sense that they are customizable, are presented in clear text, and are persistent.

Being customizable, different levels of sensitive content can be defined as categories. These include Public, Personal, General, Confidential, and Highly Confidential. Third-party apps and services can read the clear text, allowing them to apply protective actions as dictated. Once applied to content, the sensitivity labels persist in the metadata of the document or email which means that the label travels or roams with the content. The label becomes the basis for applying and enforcing policies as it includes the protection settings.

Protection settings for sensitive labels include:

  1. Encryption on email and/or documents whereby specific users or groups can be granted permissions to perform actions and for how long;
  2. Marking content through the use of watermarks, headers, or footers to documents or emails. Watermarks are confined to 255 characters and can only be applied to documents. Headers and footers are restricted to 1024 characters, with the exception of Excel with only 255 or fewer as it depends on what the workbook contains;
  3. Prevent data loss with endpoint protection which works with all Windows devices; and
  4. Automatically apply labels to sensitive data content as opposed to manually applying labels. With manual application, users are prompted to apply the recommended label whereas with auto-apply, the criteria will determine the label that is automatically applied.

When creating the sensitivity labels, it is important to list them in the right priority sequence. The most restrictive sensitivity label should appear at the bottom with the least restrictive at the top. For example, the top sensitivity can be Public with the last one being Highly Confidential. This list determines what is a lower classification should a user change the sensitivity label.

Creating Office 356 labels is a two-step process. The first step is to create the actual label which includes the name, description, retention policy, and classifying the content as a record. Once this is completed, the second step requires the deployment of a label using a labelling policy which specifies the specific location to publish and applying the label automatically.

To create an Office 365 label, following these steps:

  1. Open Security and Compliance Centre;
  2. Click on Classifications;
  3. Click on Labels;
  4. The label will require configuration including: name your label (Name), add a description for the admins (Description for Admins), add a description for the users (Description for Users);
  5. Click Next once the configuration is completed;
  6. Click Label Settings on the left-hand side menu;
  7. The Label Settings will need to be configured. On this screen, you can toggle the Retention switch to either “on” or “off”. If you choose “on”, then you can answer the question “When this label is applied to content” with one of two options. The first option is to Retain the Content. From the pick boxes, you can choose the length of retention and upon the end of the retention, the action that will take place. The three actions are to delete the data, trigger an approval flow for review, or nothing can be actioned. The second option is to not retain the data after a specified amount of time or based on the age of the data; and
  8. The label has now been created.

Upon completion of creating the label, the next step is to create a label policy. Sensitivity labels are published differently than retention labels. Sensitivity labels are published to users or groups and will appear in Office apps for users and groups. Retention labels are published to locations such as Exchange mailboxes.

With label policies, you can:

  1. Choose the users and groups who will see the labels, including Office 365 groups, distribution groups, and email-enabled security groups;
  2. Apply a default label, which becomes the base level of protection for all content, to all new documents and emails created by the groups and users that are included in the label policy;
  3. Require justification for changing a label when a user wants to either remove the label or replace it with a lower classification. The admin will be able to review these justifications;
  4. Mandatory labelling can be enforced to all users to sent emails or saved documents. The label can be manually assigned by the user, assigned by default (see above), or assigned automatically based on criteria; and
  5. Help Link directing to a custom help page can be added for users.

To create a label policy, follow these steps:

  1. Open Security and Compliance Centre;
  2. Click on Data Governance, Retention;
  3. Choose Label Policies box at the top of the screen; and
  4. There are now two options. The first is to Publish Labels. If your organization wants its end users to apply the label manually, then this is the option you would choose. Note that this is location based. The second option is to Auto-apply Labels. With Auto-apply, you would have the ability to automatically apply a label when it meets the specified criteria.

Sublabels can also be defined and these sublabels will be seen by the user. Sublabels are a simple way of presenting labels to users in logical groups. Sublabels do not inherit any settings from the label they are under.

What if a sensitivity label is deleted from the Security and Compliance Center? Deleting the sensitivity label from the Security and Compliance Centre will not remove it from the content. The protection settings continue to be enforced on the content.

What if a sensitivity label is edited in the Security and Compliance Center? If a sensitivity label is edited in the Security and Compliance Center, the version of the label that was applied to the content will continue to be enforced. It will not change to the new settings.

Visually, this is the basic flow process for the admin, user, and Office app for using sensitivity labels:

Creating labels is a straight forward and easy process that provides detailed and complex information for the classification and retention of data, whether this data is static or dynamically roaming with collaborators. With increased mobility of collaboration, data integrity and security continue to be a focus. With Office 365 labels, classification and retention are steps that can be taken to ensure the security of data, including its deletion upon the end of its retention.