Modern Search in SharePoint Online: The User Experience

What is Modern Search? SharePoint Online users will experience Modern Search, which is Microsoft search in SharePoint (the classic search experience). Modern Search results, generated from the insights of Microsoft Graph, are relevant to each user whereas Classic Search generates results that are geared more towards the organization.  With Modern Search, daily tasks are simplified by relevant content curation for users. For example, users can easily find the correct version of a document to edit, a document that is being worked on collaboratively, or even a presentation to continue editing.

Let’s take a step back and review Microsoft Search. Microsoft Search brings together the action of searching the web and work as one experience on any device and on any browser. Microsoft Search brings the right information, at the right time to the user, including people, groups, conversations, locations, resources and tools, files, and SharePoint sites. Microsoft Search is powerful and the safest way to share information across an organization. In our article, Microsoft Search and SharePoint Search, we delve deeper into the relationship between the two.

By default, both search experiences are enabled. Even though both search experiences implement the same search index to find results, users will experience the different search experiences based on where they are searching from (the launch portal). Users will experience the Classic Search on publishing sites, in the Search Center, and on classic site teams. The Modern Search experience for users will be found on the SharePoint home page, hub sites, communication sites, and modern team sites. A visual cue as to which search is being experienced is the location of the Microsoft search box, which appears in the header bar at the top of SharePoint plus it produces customized content for the user for both Modern and Microsoft Search.

One of the key features of Modern Search is the ability to get back to a previous task quickly and easily. This is done by providing a list of results based on recent activities in Office 365 and they appear in relevant order within the search box, even before any typing begins for the search. As the user types, the search box will update the suggestions automatically. Finding shared files that are used for collaboration are easily searched, discovered, and displayed with the application of advanced query understanding.

Another useful and intelligent feature of Modern Search is the simplicity of placing your cursor inside the search box and then pressing Enter to discover new information. By doing this, the search results will bring the most relevant information to the user. The results are based on the user’s previous activity in Office 365 with the most relevant at the top. Without leaving Search, the user has the capability to explore results to assess if the information is relevant and what they are looking for before accessing it.

Modern Search is dynamic. Leveraging AI, the relevant content harvested will grow, and as the user utilized Modern Search, the more relevant and the more accurate the results will become.  Not only will the content grow over time, but the set of content types that users search for will also dynamically grow, continually evolving to meet each user’s needs.

As a search administrator, Microsoft search can be used to promote information and answers that are targeted to specific groups or teams. Promoted information or answers may include resource tools to complete tasks, policies, company benefits, collective agreements, and more. By showing relevant content, it promotes the successful completion of tasks amongst teams.

Modern Search offers the user a personalized experience with a great user interface, all without the need of it being configured by a search administrator. Rather, any search administration applies to Microsoft Search across all apps.

One key point that differentiates the Classic Search from the Modern Search is that Classic Search can be customized to curate organization-focussed content. The search administrator, by adding custom refiners, can produce customized content on the search results page. On the other hand, the Modern Search experience cannot be customized but it can be tailored so users can find relevant content easily while meeting the needs of the organization.

To customize the Classic Search experience, you would access the SharePoint Admin Center but for Microsoft Search, access would be through the Microsoft 365 Admin Centre. Even though customizing and tailoring are done through two different admin centres, certain aspects of the Classic Search settings will have an impact on the Modern Search experience. Details and explanations of these impacts are discussed in our article Microsoft Search and SharePoint Search.

With Modern Search in SharePoint Online, collaboration on the go is extremely portable. Modern Search is fully mobile-friendly, displaying result pages that fit onto any portable device screen.

Without a doubt, users will have an exceptional experience with Microsoft Search and with Modern Search in SharePoint Online. Which search experience users will have is totally dependent upon their organization’s use of classic or modern sites.

In our next article, Modern Search in SharePoint Online: The Search Administrator, we will review the differences between Modern Search and Classic Search along with the impacts of planning and/or migrating to Modern Search from classic sites.

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.

SharePoint Content Services

Microsoft offers Enterprise Content Management (ECM) Services for Office365, OneDrive, and SharePoint.  Content Services manages the entire life cycle from document creation, sharing, consumption, knowledge, repurposing, records management, disposal, and archiving. By holistically embracing the whole document lifecycle from creation to archiving to disposal, content services management has become people-centric. As an integral part of content services management, policy and security is not only intelligent, but is simple and automated.

 

What is Content Services?

An excellent example of explaining Microsoft Content Services is comparing the actions of content management to the lifecycle of money and a bank. Imagine that the files you create (your data) is the money that you are earning. When you bring your files for storage and management with Microsoft Content Services, it is very much like bringing your hard-earned earnings to the bank for depositing into your savings account. When you need to access it, the data is always accessible, just like your money. Once your data is stored, it becomes not only accessible to you, but to those who you allow access to, similar in fashion to the funds that are deposited into the bank. The bank coordinates how the funds are shared and with whom, and Microsoft Content achieves the same goals of coordinating the file sharing amongst authorized users, devices, and features in the organization, and with external providers.  Collaboration and access are targeted to a specific audience (your teams), and to prevent unauthorized users from accessing your files and data, security is put in place to keep your data safe and secure, just like at the bank for your money. Harvesting the files, like a withdrawal, will place the files in either an archive repository or they will be permanently deleted. What we have explained are the four actions of Content Services Management in SharePoint:

1.  Create: create, collect and classify content

2.  Coordinate: enrich libraries with Tenants, Flow and coauthoring

3.  Protect: manage compliance, lifecycle, DLP, encryption and eDiscovery

4.  Harvest: search, manage and dispose of content

 

What Creates Content Storage?

Content creates the need for storage, and the function of the content defines the type of storage required. The function of the content can be categorized as perpetual (always there), policy driven (response to administrative and/or IT behavior), and user-centric (response to user activities like collaboration and sharing). These three categories form the enterprise content services platform.

The platform on its own, is not functional, but by layering applications on top of it, it becomes functional. These applications are not only developed by Microsoft but are also built and developed with Microsoft partners. Through partnering, content can be provided on a range of devices from mobile to desktop, regardless of the operating system. In addition, if the content is stored in the cloud, then users on any device will be able to access this content.

 

Announcements

There are some amazing new features and enhancements with Content Services Management at Microsoft that were announced at Ignite 2018.

Tap: based on Microsoft Graph, and used in Office clients, Tap allows you to “reuse” document sections, that have been indexed, into new documents. In addition, metadata can be inserted as quick parts

Intelligent Search: based on Microsoft Graph, and spanning across Office365, it can be personalized to your work network, harvesting and curating knowledge that is more applicable to your projects for resourcing and collaboration. Fully functional across all devices, it provides knowledge no matter where you are working and no matter which platform you are working off of. Private, compliant and trustworthy

Central Asset Library: a central repository for approved images, such as headers, galleries or webparts, and it allows you to register one or more document libraries that are available in SharePoint

File Card: for every document that is indexed, AI extracts from the document, relevant information and terms. These are then shown on an index card that appears when you hover over the document in the library. The file card provides pertinent information that allows the user to make the decision to open it to read or to continue to the next document. Looking to see what information resides in a document without opening it is one of the best new features for users. Additional flexibility is added as the user can edit and supplement with document metadata plus key points can be edited in SharePoint

Mobile Capture: documents and images can be scanned into SharePoint or OneDrive with the OneDrive mobile app.  Users can add custom metadata when saving the files directly to a SharePoint library, eliminating the need to retag images inside a browser

Document Templates: default templates are always available, but now there is the ability to upload documents and duplicate it with the New menu in document libraries to create new and custom document templates

Predictive Indexing: add indexes to libraries and lists of any size with a maximum of 30 million items

Modern Document Sets: work with document sets in SharePoint with the modern user experience

PowerApps Integration and SharePoint Libraries: use SharePoint libraries as the data source to build apps and forms

Updates to Taxonomy APIs: using REST-based APIs from Managed Metadata Service, develop, design and create solutions that consume content types and terms

Flow for Document Management: in Office 365, move and copy files by leveraging Microsoft Flow including the generation of shareable links while maintaining the integrity of the metadata

Attention Views and Bulk Edit: summarizes the items in a library requiring metadata where the metadata is incomplete or not entered by the user. It also shows the location of the missing metadata, making it easy to add this information. This is time saving as you do not have to review line by line to see what and where the metadata is missing. You can either enter the data, or you can notify the owner to fill in the data  

SharePoint Server 2019: targeted at on-prem clients, modern lists and libraries are deployed with bulk edit, attention views, filter panes and more

File Plans: implementing Excel-based formats, import, manage, and classify multiple retention rules

Label Analytics: for each applied retention rule, analyze usage, trends and content

Metadata-Driven Labels: retention labels can be automatically applied to content with rules based on metadata and content types

Immutable Labels: to meet special regulatory requirements, a document is tagged with an “immutable” mark or label. This marks it as undeletable and irreversibly unchangeable

There are many exciting enhancements and new capabilities rolling out for SharePoint, Office365, and SharePoint Server 2019. From the time saving file card, to the repurposing of document information with Tap, to the retention of metadata and links with file management, SharePoint and Office 365 continue to revolutionize the platforms for office collaboration amongst teams in your organization.

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

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

Engaging Employees

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

Video Streaming

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

Modern Portals

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

Hub Sites, Your Intranet, and Modern SharePoint

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

Microsoft Teams and SharePoint

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

Collaboration – Office 365

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

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

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

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

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

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

SharePoint On-Prem

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

SharePoint Page Approval Flow

With Microsoft Flow integrated with SharePoint, leveraging the power of Flow to manage page approvals become a snap. At the end of July 2018, Microsoft began rolling out the new SharePoint page approval flow for all modern SharePoint pages.

Simply described by Microsoft: “When a new page is submitted for approval everyone on the approvers list will receive an email.  Anyone on the approvers list can approve the page. When approved, the page will be published for all readers and the approval status of the page will be Approved.”

How Does this Work?

The standard publishing process for a site can be configured by a site owner on the approval page. The site owner can configure Page Approval Flow from the menu of the pages library. By adding the Page Approval Flow, new and updated pages will not be published instantly. Instead, the publication will occur once the approval flow is completed.

Creating a Page Approval Flow

Navigating from the SharePoint Site Pages Library:

1. Located on the command bar menu is the Flow drop-down menu. Select an item and click the Flow drop-down menu;

2. There are four Configure page approval flow options available:

a. Request sign-off;

b. Create a flow;

c. See your flows; and

d. Configure page approval flow

Additional flows that you created for this library will also appear in the drop-down;create-page-approval-flow.png

3.  When choosing Configure Page Approval Flow, prompts will appear on the right-hand side of the library page. The Submit SharePoint Page for Approval has several sections to it.  

The first section is to Create the Flow approval. The first portion requires the name of the Flow to be entered. The second portion requires the addition of one or more people to be added as Approvers.

 

https://melihubb.files.wordpress.com/2018/08/create-sharepoint-page-approval.jpg

 

 

The second section consists of the Details, which is where the above quote is taken from. The third section lists where this Flow will connect to, including Approvals, SharePoint, and Notifications. The fourth section visually shows the permissions that are assigned. If these are all satisfactory, then choose “Create” to create the Page Approval Flow;

4.  Once the Flow is created, the Publish button that appears on pages will be replaced with a Submit for Approval button;

5. Click Submit for Approval. Upon clicking this button, a dialogue box will appear prompting the submitter to add a message. Click Submit to submit the Page Approval Flow;

page-approval-approve.png6. An approval message is then sent to all the people that were configured as Approvers in the second section. Within the email is a link to the page.

 

Approvers have two options.

 

The first is to approve the page, which is then published and the status in the pages library changes to Approved.

 

The second option is to reject the page and the status in the pages library changes to either Rejected or Draft Status, so it can be reviewed and reworked.

 

Approvers can approve or reject the page from either the email (if action items are enabled for emails) or open a new page from the email to review and approve/reject in SharePoint. 

 

By integrating Microsoft Flow with SharePoint, another layer of control is granted to site owners to ensure that pages are approved before being published. With this type of control, pages containing communication to teams are ensured to comply with corporate and project requirements while providing the necessary communication for collaborative teamwork.