SPTechCon San Francisco

I am excited to announce that I am returning to speak at SPTechCon San Francisco on the week of February 17, 2020. SPTechCon is THE training, problem solving, and networking event for those who are working with SharePoint, OneDrive, and Office 365. This includes the varied uses and approaches to managing SharePoint; On-Premises (2013 thru 2019), Hybrid Variations, and SharePoint Online.

I will be delivering 2 sessions and a half-day workshop:

  1. Session # 1: SharePoint Classic to Modern Migration
    Abstract: Many organizations have used SharePoint classic with their on-premise version, or when they originally moved to Office 365. Many of us resist the change and do not intend to embrace the new SharePoint modern as quick as we want, with the fear of loss of functionalities in the modern UI. This session will cover the following topics to embrace the new SharePoint modern UI and what you need to do to get yourself ready for it:
    1. Differences between Classic and Modern
    2. Steps to moving into modern
    3. Developing in modern using SPFx
    4. Customizing your list with column and view formatting.
  2. Session # 2: Build an Intranet with modern SharePoint
    Abstract: Learn how to build a world class Modern Intranet by leveraging Office 365. Intranet should no longer be a single portal with multiple site, but it should span across multiple features and capabilities to deliver the platform you are looking for. Explore how to use Microsoft Teams, Modern SharePoint Team Sites and Communication sites, as well as Hub sites to create this unique modern site that can be glued all together to provide the future of the intranets.
  3. Workshop: OneDrive Deployment from Start to Finish
    Abstract: n this half-day workshop we will walk you through the key areas you need to know to help you deploy OneDrive to your organization and to enable collaboration within your team. We will cover key topics like how to best plan, deploy, upgrade, manage and secure OneDrive, how to use. The session will focus on:
    1. Why OneDrive
    2. Deploying your OneDrive Sync Client
    3. Automation
    4. Security
    5. Collaboration with SharePoint and Teams

This is a conference not to be missed! you can use my code MikeM20 to save $200 on your registration.

SPTechCon San Francisco 2020 Banner
SPTechCon San Francisco Banner

North American Collaboration Summit: April 2 – 4, 2020

I’m excited to announce that I will be presenting two sessions and facilitating a workshop at The North American Collaboration Summit (NACS) this spring from April 2nd through 3rd in Bronson, Missouri, USA (You can use my last name: Maadarani, to get a $50 discount). There is an additional and optional day of workshops that will take place on the 4th.  This is a must-attend conference. The session topics will be of interest to IT professionals, developers, business leaders, end-users, and generally, anyone who wants to expand their knowledge base. At this multi-day conference, the focus is on Microsoft: SharePoint, Microsoft 365 and Azure. Throughout the conference, you will learn how these three components and other Microsoft components come together to be the powerhouse that drives clear communication, collaboration, and organizational effectiveness throughout your organization.

The NACS is a unique conference as everyday users, implementors, and developers, such as  Microsoft MVPs, RDs, MCMs, and Microsoft employees, provide insights on how SharePoint, Office 365, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Flow, PowerApps, Azure, and Power BI provide real life, technological advantages when implemented into your organization. Ideas, collaboration, teaching, learning… there is so much to take in! There are over 60 speakers, 70 sessions in 7 tracks, over 400 expected attendees, and 10 countries being represented at this year’s conference.

Many of you are familiar with me as an Office 365 MVP, a Senior SharePoint Architect, Search and ECM expert, and all things SharePoint. Many of you also follow my blog and know I am greatly invested in SharePoint, Office 365, and Microsoft. This is why I am super excited that I will be providing two presentations and one full-day workshop at the NACS! Yes! A full–day workshop!!

The first session under the Administrator track is Best Practices to Manage Mergers and Acquisitions in Office 365. A common strategy in today’s business world is to grow organizations through mergers and acquisitions. Mergers and acquisitions not only provide quick growth, but they allow companies to evolve quickly. With acquisitions, new markets open up for the parent company. Microsoft’s FastTrack program helps companies move to Office 365, but it does not address the complexity of combining and dividing Office 365 tenants and all the features associated with them. Currently, there is no tool in existence to address this or to make it a simple, straightforward migration.

Planning this type of merge and migration requires in-depth planning for features and platforms, including identity, security and compliance, mailboxes, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, power platform tools, planner, and so on. While some features are easier to move than others, it is important to pay close attention to details to proactively prevent issues further down the migration line.

In this session, we will examine real-life scenarios, how to prepare your organization for the migration and implementation, and how to smoothly achieve the goal with a well laid out plan. Join me for this 60-minute session, beginning at 1450h, on Thursday in Room 3!

The second session, under the Business Essentials track, is Build an Internet with Modern SharePoint.  Learn how to leverage Office 365 to build a world-class, modern intranet that spans across multiple features and capabilities, delivering an informative, dynamic, and collaboration-focused intranet to your end-users. This unique and modern site is created by combining flexible power and dynamic AI knowledge inherent in Microsoft Teams, Modern SharePoint Team Sites, Communication Sites, and Hub Sites.

This is going to be an exciting, knowledge-packed, and sneak peek into the future of modern intranets! Don’t miss this session on Friday, Room 5. We will begin at 1100h.

I am super excited that Noorez Khamis and I will be delivering a workshop together about Develop in Microsoft Teams Without Being a Developer! Noorez is also a Microsoft MVP in SharePoint and Office 365 technologies and currently is a Cloud Solutions Architect at Creospark.

This is going to be an incredible workshop! Wondering how the average IT Pro or Citizen Developer can create innovative and modern solutions on the Microsoft Teams platform? No more wondering because we will guide you through some of these processes. In this workshop, we will demonstrate how services in the Power Platform can be leveraged to deliver amazing end-user experiences. These Power Platform services include Microsoft Flow and Microsoft PowerApps. Best of all, it can be done with minimal coding!! We will also teach you how to leverage SharePoint Online lists and libraries as data sources to render amazing experiences in your tabs and apps. We will also address common scenarios building bots and adaptive cards.

Security and compliance are always at the forefront of our planning and implementation processes. During this workshop, we will review and address the issues on how to assign different policies in your tenant. We will also perform these tasks through the Security and Compliance settings as well as through the Teams Admin to show you how you can secure your organization’s Teams Deployment.

If this isn’t enough to get you excited and into your seat at our workshop, then let me entice you with this. You will leave our workshop not only with the knowledge already outlined, but you will have a better understanding of the Microsoft Teams apps, their capabilities, and how you can utilize and leverage these to easily create, propose, and implement your solutions. Don’t miss out on our workshop which begins at 0900h on Saturday in Room 2 and ending at 1700h.

I really can’t stress what a great Microsoft community event this will be! I’m looking forward to facilitating our workshop and speaking to you in the two sessions. But the only way I will see you is if you have registered! If you haven’t, then get to it! You can still register for The North American Collaboration Summit on their registration page (don’t forget to use Maadarani as the discount code to get $50 off).

See you there!!

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: Microsoft Teams: Part 2

As the day progresses and the sessions continue, there are more announcements for Microsoft Teams. Just as exciting as discussed in the previous article, the new additions and enhancements in this article are just as exciting! As mentioned previously, Teams is utilized by users and organizations in many ways and Microsoft not only recognizes this, but it encourages and has focused on these aspects.

Conduct Inclusive and Effective Meetings

1. Microsoft Whiteboard: Whether in the same room or working remotely, Teams participants can collaborate and ideate on a digital, never-ending digital canvas. Microsoft Whiteboard is available from the Share Tray in Teams Meetings;

2. Live Captions: Users and participants have different needs, and with Live Captions, differences in hearing and language proficiencies are addressed. This provides an alternate way to follow along and participate with the conversation;

3. Presenter and Attendee Controls: Meeting organizers will be able to pre-define roles for participants as presenters or attendees. Participants designated as presenters will have full control over the meeting. Participants designated as an attendee will not be able to take control, share content, admit people waiting in the lobby, remove other participants, and start/stop recordings;

4. Citrix: Microsoft Teams Calling and Meetings for Citrix virtual environments will be optimized, allowing the delivery of high-fidelity Teams experience for users who are on-prem or for users who are Azure-hosted by a virtual desktop or application;

5. Cloud Video Interop (CVI): The latest partner to the CVI partnerships, Cisco is enabling customers to use Teams meetings with the use of Cisco Webex Room devices and SIP video conferencing devices in the meeting rooms;

6. Direct Guest Join Capability: Working together with Zoom and Cisco, Microsoft is trailblazing a new approach that will enable Microsoft Teams Rooms devices to connect to meeting services through browser-based technologies. As this technology is developed, additional vendors will be added;

7. Collaboration Bars for Microsoft Teams: Working with partners to convert small spaces into online meeting and collaboration spaces, this new category of device is affordable and can be installed and managed with ease. These video conferencing collaboration bars attach to touchscreens, displays, or TVs and provide experiences such as one-touch and proximity join, Microsoft whiteboard, and content sharing. The first two partners to launch are Poly and Yealink;

8. Microsoft Teams Speakerphones: These new speakerphones have a dedicated Teams button that provides seamless interaction with Teams. The first peripheral partner, who also has the first certified speakerphone, is Yealink; and

9. Enterprise Phone System Capabilities: New enterprise-wide phone system capabilities will include emergency calls, administrative control, call queue functionality, call delegation, voicemail management, and music on hold. The Enterprise Phone System also performs Compliance Recording and coupled with the Contact Center, it is suited to be a cloud phone system solution for enterprise clients.

Firstline Workers and Ease of Access to Teams

1. SMS Sign-In: With their phone number and a one-time SMS passcode, Firstline Workers can easily sign into Teams on their personal device;

2. Off Shift Access: IT Administrators will be able to enable this new setting. By enabling this setting, Firstline Workers, when outside of their payable hours, will receive a notification when they access their Teams app on their personal device. The Firstline Worker must provide consent to the notification before they can access their app;

3. Global Sign-Out: It is not uncommon for Firstline Workers to be using shared devices. By providing a global sign-out where the user is signed out at once from all the apps they use on their shift, it secures their sessions while saving time;

4. Delegated User Management: To reduce the burden of identity management on IT, Firstline managers will be able to manage user credentials and approve password reset requests via the My Staff portal; and

5. Graph API: Enhancements will provide a two-directional communication flow between a workforce management system and Shifts to enable enterprise configuration. Customers will be able to integrate Teams with Kronos and JDA with the open-source integration templates on GitHub.

Enable Industry-Specific Scenarios in Healthcare and Other Industries

1. Virtual Consults: B2C virtual consultations can be easily scheduled and conducted via Microsoft Teams and attendees can join through their Teams mobile app or from their web browser. Conducting healthcare consults with patients, conducting interviews, or holding meetings has never been more convenient or easier; and

2. Patient Coordination: Providing health care to patients and patient-centered care requires a secure platform for physicians, nurses, health aides, and other care team members to communicate clearly. In Teams, Patient Coordination is HIPAA compliant with enterprise-grade security. Meeting HIPPA compliance means that patient care can be streamlined by centralizing and digitizing patient information that is accessible to the patient care team for multi-disciplinary meetings, rounding, handoffs, and huddles.

Communication and collaboration are strongly emphasized in this set of enhancements and features for users within a Team, potential Team members, and clients. Super exciting! And we have more announcements in the next article.

Microsoft Ignite 2019 Announcements: Microsoft Teams: Part 1

As we already know, Microsoft Teams is the grand central station for collaboration and business processes for all users, whether internal or external that are associated with that organization.

At today’s session of Microsoft Ignite 2019, there were some big announcements for Microsoft Teams. These new and innovative enhancements will provide new capabilities to Teams by providing and responding to the dynamic and evolving needs of both users and their organization.

New features to Teams provide users the abilities to customize Team conversations and experiences, manage conversations, tasks and files from other Microsoft 365 apps that are within Teams, conduct effective meetings, provide easier access to Teams for Firstline Workers, enable industry-specific scenarios in healthcare and other industries, manage Teams and protect data with new planning and administration tools, and use Power Platform within Teams to automate workflows, data insights, and integrate custom apps.

The real excitement comes when we look at each of these a little closer but because Teams is evolving so much, we will cover these new features and enhancements spanning over three articles. Now, for the Teams excitement!

Customizing Team Conversations and Experiences

1. Private Channels: Within existing Teams, users will be able to create channels that can be accessed and viewed by select members of that Team. Creating a Private Channel can be accomplished by selecting Private under the Privacy Settings of the new channel;

2. Multiwindow: Streamlining workflows, users in Teams will be able to open separate windows for chats, calls, documents, and meetings;

3. Teams Client for Linux: Teams Client for Linux will support Linux users with calls, chats, and meetings with other members on Teams who are not Linux based. Users who use Linux client at work or educational institutions will be able to install native Linux packages in .rpm and .deb formats;

4. New Messaging Extensions: Available in Teams chat and channel conversations, the new messaging extensions include Polls and Surveys. These can easily be accessed in the chat or channel by clicking the “…” at the bottom of the compose message box, soliciting instant feedback for shared items or questions; and

5. Pinned Channels: Who doesn’t like pinning?!? Pinning channels allows the user to pin their important channels at the top of their Teams list for quick and easy access.

Managing Conversations, Tasks, and Files from other Microsoft 365 Apps Within Teams 

1. Outlook and Teams – A New Integration: In Outlook, the user can now move an email conversation, including attachments, into a Teams chat or channel by clicking on Share to Teams. A conversation can also be shared from Teams to Outlook (reverse of above) by clicking on the More options, the “…” icon, in a conversation. This makes collaboration much easier as it no longer matters where the conversation is taking place.

Missed an activity in Teams? No worries. Actionable emails, missed activity emails, will be sent to the user. These actionable emails will allow the user to respond directly from the email, which shows the latest replies from the conversation;

2. Tasks in Teams: Within Teams, the user’s tasks across Microsoft, such as To Do, Planner, Outlook, and Teams channels, are consolidated to provide a unified view of both personal and assigned tasks. Users will be able to choose the view that works best for them. These views include lists, charts, schedules, and boards. With smart views, the user will see assigned tasks along with the start and due date as well as the priority of the task; and

3. Yammer App for Teams: Accessible within Teams, Yammer communities, live events, and conversations not only provide current information to users but also the opportunity to participate in organization-wide conversations. Users and IT Admins can pin the app on the left navigation rail in Teams, thereby providing easy and clear access.

These updates and additions are focused on the user and their experience in Teams; however, as we know, Teams is multi-faceted and serves users in many fashions. You will discover in the next article how Teams is being leveraged for meetings and Firstline Workers.

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.

SharePoint 2019 New Features

The new features in SharePoint 2019 are based on three themes. These themes involve the users’ experience that is developed through SharePoint Online, content engagement across all platforms, and powerful scaling security and compliance capabilities.

What is new for SharePoint 2019? SharePoint 2019 will have many new and added features that enhance the “modern experience”, making it flexible, mobile, compelling and easier to use, especially for on-prem users. These new features include:

  1. SharePoint Home Page: The home page will provide users with the ability to easily find and access SharePoint sites within the organization. Additional information will include the news from the sites that they are following as well as from suggested sites. If the administrator has given the user permission, the user will have the ability to create new communication sites from the home page. There are three out-of-the-box templates available:

      Topic which consists of four default web parts (Hero, News, Documents, and Events);
      Showcase leverages the default Hero and Image Gallery web parts to visually highlight products, events, and people; and
      Blank which provides a clean canvas so that you can customize with your own modern web parts;

  2. Modern Lists and Libraries: Bringing List and Libraries in parallel with SharePoint Online, the modern experience is now the default for team sites, though Classic is still supported. Users will be able to copy and move files using the command bar as well as add files as links, filter and sort easily, pin documents, and apply column formatting including adding columns and rows to SharePoint Lists with JSON markup.

    By combining the powers of SharePoint 2019 and OneDrive, Libraries has a modern sharing experience with an updated and intuitive UI. Previous syncing and integration issues are now solved so that tasks, like creating new folders, saving documents, and uploading files in SharePoint and/or OneDrive, can be done at any time and from anywhere;
  3. New Team, Site Pages: As the communication site, users and teams can share messages, news, broadcasts and they can also display stories. With the new Hero web part, five items with text, image, and links can be displayed, drawing attention to the most important content;
  4. New Pages: Comprised of web parts, new pages are fully customizable to the needs of the user. Users will have the ability to add Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents, images, feeds like Yammer, site activities, and embed videos;
  5. Modern Search Experience: Using intuitive logic, the modern search experience will suggest relevant content before the user enters a keystroke. The results update as the user types in the criteria. The search results page shows an overall of search results and is grouped by type;
  6. Lists: The modern lists simplify how users and teams create, curate, and interact with the information. Individuals and teams will be able to share, access, and collaborate around structured data. Additionally, information from other systems can be leveraged into SharePoint to support business processes.

True to its purpose, SharePoint continues to support collaboration between teams and individuals in their organizations. As SharePoint updates to 2019, there will be some features in 2016 and 2013 that will be deprecated and these six features will be:

  1. Aggregated Newsfeed: The tile in the app launcher and the option to implement the newsfeed capability will be removed. The existing aggregate newsfeed will become read-only. The suggested solution is to use communication sites and Microsoft Teams;
  2. Custom Help: The existing engine in SharePoint will be removed in the future. For the Microsoft legacy on-prem SharePoint help engine, it will be updated and will synchronize with O365;
  3. SharePoint Designer 2013: SharePoint Designer 2013 will continue to function with SharePoint Server 2019 until 2026 where support will officially end. Alternatives include PowerApps and Microsoft Flow and both are available via the on-prem data gateway;
  4. Multi-Tenancy: Inline with migrating services to the cloud, multi-tenancy capabilities are building dependencies on cloud technologies, and for on-premises environments, these capabilities are not available. Due to costs and complexities of providing on-prem alternatives, multi-tenancy will no longer be available;
  5. Visio Services: Rendering based on Silverlight will no longer be supported effective October 12, 2021. Switching to PowerBI is the recommended solution; and 6. Code-based Sandbox Solutions: These customization packages deployed at the site collection level have already been removed from SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online. They will be removed from SharePoint 2019. SharePoint add-ins are the suggested alternatives.

Summarizing the added new features and the deprecation of others, is a handy cheat sheet below:

Credits: ShareGate.com

The Modern Experience is not only here to stay, but it is being integrated into SharePoint 2019. If an older version of SharePoint on-prem is being used, it is highly recommended that the upgrade to SharePoint 2019 be implemented. With nearly all the modern functionalities available, it will bring on-prem up to par with SharePoint online. With SharePoint 2019, user experience and collaboration become modernized with greater ease of access and use for individuals and teams. 

SharePoint Fest Chicago

Chicago Fest Chicago is December 3rd, 2018, a full week packed with workshops, breakout sessions, Ask the Experts panel, and podcasts. This is one of my favorite conferences, and I am honored this year to present 4 sessions:

  1. OneDrive, the next Collaboration Hub
  2. Increase Office 365 Productivity with Azure Automation
  3. SharePoint modern vs. Classic: when to move and why
  4. Tips in migrating to SharePoint 2016 or Office 365, to avoid migration headaches

There is a great lineup of speakers, so make sure you check out the agenda and register for this awesome conference.

You can use Maadarani100 code and get a $100 discount.

SP Fest Code

SharePoint and Microsoft Flow – Part 1: Automating Business Processes

Microsoft Flow and Automating Business Processes

As technology progresses, more and more companies are relying on automated business processes within SharePoint. Microsoft Flow connects with hundreds of services and with recent enhancements, it provides the capability not only to customize Flow Templates but to share them in the Microsoft Flow Template Gallery with the public (the world) by exporting them or keeping them private within your organization by importing them into your organization’s private Custom Flow Template Gallery. Through this type of worldwide and corporate collaboration, the extensive gallery helps to create and modify flows based on approved and contributed flows, thereby preventing the “re-inventing the wheel” cycle. They can also be used as a learning tool where the flow can be reviewed to see how it was created so that it can be modified to your organization’s needs.

The Office 365 Flow engine automates tasks between Office 365, SharePoint, and third-party services whether they are on-premises, in the cloud, and even if they are not part of Microsoft’s catalogue.

Who can create and edit Flows? If the Flow connects to a modern list or library, then anyone who can add or edit the modern list or library will have the ability to create Flows from the Flow drop-down menu.

What is the Microsoft Flow Template Gallery?

The Microsoft Flow Template Gallery features hundreds of Flows that have been created by Microsoft that are available to be reviewed, used, or modified to create a customized flow for your organization. There are flows that have been created for SharePoint, OneDrive, Office365 Outlook, Twitter, Dropbox, Yammer, and more (in fact, a total of 226 unique services!). 

The Gallery also features Flows that have been created by the public. These Flows are submitted to Microsoft and are then reviewed and are either approved prior to being added to the Gallery Collection or rejected and deleted from the pending for approval list. This is truly a global effort to collaborate by bringing, featuring, and sharing the most useful fluid Flows from around the world. There is bound to be one that you can use as the launching point for yours, or perhaps, you could use it as is.

There are many types of Flows that are grouped in collections, including flows for sales and marketing, receiving on-the-go information, improving productivity, streamlining and improving the HR process, easing software development, automating tasks that occur in the classroom, and more.

There are five types of Flows:

  1. Multi-step Flows: perfect for repetitive tasks;
  2. Approve Requests: create, use, and share approval workflows that provide the opportunity for process requests with quick responses;
  3. Conditional: make decisions in your workflow when certain conditions are met (if this happens, then do this);
  4. Utilize On-Premises Data: connects you to on-premises data and cloud-based services; and
  5. Security: prevent data breaches by customizing and/or using built-in data loss prevention policies.

Each Flow is triggered by either an action or by a connection. There are eight SharePoint Triggers in Microsoft Flow including actions affecting an item or file, such as when it is created, deleted or modified, and when a file’s properties are created or modified. Examples of services that can act as triggers include emails, completion of forms, information entered in a table, or the use of a hashtag.

The templates in the Gallery will already contain the trigger (the connector) to trigger the workflow for one or more actions with optional conditional or transformational functions. Conditional functions will cause an action to occur only when something is true while the actions consist of the work that the flow performs. In SharePoint, there are 29 actions available within Microsoft Flow that allows you to create and update files, extract data, use this data, and more.

Because Microsoft Flow connects with hundreds of services, it is important to search for the SharePoint templates only. An image of all applicable application connectors will be visually displayed on the template page. In addition to the search function, there is the ability to refine the search further by employing the filter options to view flow templates of certain types such as notification flows, data collection flows, etc.

By integrating Microsoft Flow with SharePoint, the capability to schedule Flows to run at different time increments for each action allows greater customization for the flow. You can also action all the items at once and this is quite convenient when actions are based on a date field.

Sharing Microsoft Flow Templates

There are two options to sharing Flow templates that you create. How you want to share depends upon whether you want to share with the world-wide Microsoft Flow community in the template gallery or strictly within your organization in its own customized template gallery.

There are two scenarios for sharing flow templates. The first is to create, export, and submit the flow to Microsoft. If the flow is accepted after being reviewed, it will be uploaded and will be available to the public in the Microsoft Flow Template Gallery. If your goal is to share with the world, then this is where you want it to be featured.

The second is to create, export, and submit the flow to your organization’s Custom Flow Template Gallery. To maintain data security, or keep proprietary connections secure, flow templates in your organization’s Custom Flow Template Gallery are only accessible by users within your organization.

The Flow Template Gallery, whether publicly shared or shared internally, is part of the organization’s system to encourage collaboration and creativity with users investing their time to create innovative solutions. By integrating various applications, such as Yammer, users are able to provide and receive communications from other users, especially feedback on flows to help improve and streamline them.

In the next instalment, Building a Flow Resource Community, we will discuss the importance of creating and supporting a Flow Resource Community for the users in your organization. We will also look closely at the resources and layout that should be included in the Flow Resource Community. We will also delve deeper into the process of creating and submitting custom flow templates to the Microsoft Flow Template Gallery or to your organization’s Custom Flow Template Gallery.