With this change, Yammer users can be notified in Teams when announcements are made in communities that they are a member of and when the user is @ mentioned in a conversation.
Microsoft SharePoint Syntex uses advanced AI and machine teaching to amplify human expertise, automate content processing, and transform content into knowledge.
As of the Microsoft 365 for Mac November 2020 update, macOS 10.14 Mojave or later is required to receive updates to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote.
SharePoint Migration Tool supports SharePoint Server 2016 migrations (Public Preview) – Migration support from the SPMT now covers SharePoint server 2010, 2013 and 2016. Roadmap ID: 63258
Centralized management for hub permissions – Hub permissions enable you to centralize the management of visitor access to associated sites. Roadmap ID: 65641
🚂 ROLLING OUT
👀 Information Governance: New retention engine for SPO – New retention engine for SharePoint Online, which addresses the challenges with large tenants or tenant that must process large volume of data. Will also enhance reliability and SLAs for retention. Roadmap ID: 63061
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – October 2020
Microsoft Lists: forms customization – Adjust what information shows on the out-of-box forms and include custom header and footer imagery and information. Roadmap ID: 64165
Microsoft Lists: calendar view – Visualize any list with items that use date column information in a calendar view. Roadmap ID: 64167
Microsoft Lists: sticky first column – As you scroll left and right, the first column of your list remains in place; similar to the sticky header that is already a part of Lists. Roadmap ID: 64168
Microsoft Lists: new ‘Integrate’ drop-down menu – Introduction of a new top-level menu item: ‘Integrate.’ To start, existing command buttons for Power Apps and Power Automate will move into Integrate – as they are integrated technologies and experiences. Roadmap ID: 64869
SharePoint lists and libraries: Sticky column in Quick Edit – As users scroll horizontally across a list in Quick Edit mode, the far-left column remains in place – improving context while viewing and editing. Roadmap ID: 64866
Microsoft Lists: rules – Create simple if/then rules based on changes to list information to set reminders and send notifications. Roadmap ID: 64163
Microsoft Lists: comments – Add a comment on a list or list items, including @mention capabilities to draw a person’s attention. Roadmap ID: 64169
Microsoft Lists and SharePoint document libraries: Gallery view – Configure your lists and library items using a dynamic Gallery view – choosing how your documents and list items appear. Roadmap ID: 57304
Microsoft Lists: Updated Person column experience: built on SharePoint – Items within a Person column, in and out of Quick Edit mode, will appear using the new “pill” design format when a person’s photo is displayed. Roadmap ID: 67095
Microsoft Lists: updated Yes/No column experiences – powered by SharePoint – List items with a Yes/No column, in and out of Quick Edit mode, will appear using the new experience design format – making it easier to create and more accessible to consume. Roadmap ID: 67119
Microsoft Lists: Updated Choice column experience: built on SharePoint – Items within a Choice column, in and out of Quick Edit mode for both lists and libraries, will support single, multi-choice, and manual fill as you add items. Roadmap ID: 67097
👀 SharePoint: new experience to add content types to lists and libraries – Custom content types that are available to your SharePoint sites can easily be added to lists & libraries that allow multiple content types. In those SharePoint lists & libraries that allow multiple content types, a new ‘Content type’ option will be available in the ‘Add column’ menu. Roadmap ID: 67164
Updates to site header options – You will be able to choose to show/ hide the site title and a choice between a square site logo thumbnail or a non-square site logo. Roadmap ID: 63776
SharePoint: Auto-News Digest – SharePoint Auto-News Digest sends automated email to employees in you company about the latest News posts that they have not yet read. Roadmap ID: 64685
Set Default Page Templates – This feature will allow site owners to set a page template as the default when a user creates a new page or news post on the site. Roadmap ID: 64529
Configure header, footer and body of a form for lists/ libraries – This feature allows users in SharePoint lists and libraries to add a custom header and a footer to the associated form. Roadmap ID: 63519
SharePoint and Teams: updated Add a Team to a site wizard – Choose the SharePoint content that you want to add as tabs in Teams when you first connect them via the “Add a Team” flow from your site. Roadmap ID: 46990
New SharePoint admin center home page – Updates to the SharePoint admin center to align it to the Microsoft admin center, including more tiles and graphs. Roadmap ID: 57318
Improved page/ news publishing experience – A new pre-publish panel that gives authors an overview of key information about their pages or news posts. Roadmap ID: 63257
SharePoint Online search query volume limits when using app-only authentication – When this change is implemented, queries using the Site.Read.All permissions level or greater will be throttled at 25 QPS. The search query will return with a 429 response and you can simply retry the query. Roadmap ID: 64963
SharePoint lists and libraries: Improved Image columns – Upload a new image – including mobile camera support. You can add a new Image column to lists and libraries. Roadmap ID: 64872
New ways to add SharePoint images – Page authors can now copy and paste images on the canvas to automatically create a new image webpart. Roadmap ID: 65599
SharePoint: Site Performance Page for Site Owners and Editors – The Site Performance Page will display results from the Page Diagnostics for SharePoint tool and the information will be available within SharePoint from site settings. Roadmap ID: 66196
SharePoint: new create list experience – With the introduction of Microsoft Lists, we introduced a new user interface when creating lists from the Lists home page and within Teams. You’ll now see this new experience when creating a new list from within a SharePoint site. Click New List and you’ll see the updated experience to create lists. Roadmap ID: 67137
As communicated in MC217999 (July ’20), with the continued investment in Power Automate as the universal solution to workflow, Microsoft is retiring SharePoint 2010 workflows.
Microsoft are changing the storage for new Teams meeting recordings to be stored on, and served from, OneDrive and SharePoint (ODSP) – instead of Microsoft Stream (Classic). Customers are able to opt in, opt out, or take no action with regard to these changes.
Q1 2021 – No new meeting recordings can be saved to Microsoft Stream (Classic);
List creation from SharePoint sites will get a visual refresh and users will get the additional capability to create lists from eight built-in templates.
Standard release: Gradually rolling out mid-October through end of October
Microsoft Lists: Lists app in Microsoft Teams – Team members will be able to both create new lists and add existing ones as tabs in Teams’ channels. Roadmap ID: 64162
SharePoint lists and libraries: Fixed row height in Quick Edit – When in Quick Edit, you will see a new layout option “Fixed Height” within the view drop-down menu. Roadmap ID: 64867
SharePoint lists and libraries: Fixed row height in Quick Edit – When in Quick Edit, you will see a new layout option “Fixed Height” within the view drop-down menu. Roadmap ID: 64867
🚂 ROLLING OUT
👀 SharePoint: General Availability of SharePoint Syntex – Microsoft SharePoint Syntex uses advanced AI and machine teaching to amplify human expertise, automate content processing, and transform content into knowledge. SharePoint Syntex will be available as a user-based add-on for Microsoft 365 plans and will be generally available to Microsoft 365 commercial customers on October 1, 2020. Roadmap ID: 67134
Microsoft Lists: ‘Quick Edit’ is becoming “Edit in grid view” – When you want to bulk edit lists items in a list, you would click the ‘Quick edit’ button in the top action bar. We are renaming this button to read. “Edit in grid view”. Roadmap ID: 67136
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – September 2020
SharePoint: new create list experience – With the introduction of Microsoft Lists, we introduced a new user interface when creating lists from the Lists home page and within Teams. You’ll now see this new experience when creating a new list from within a SharePoint site. Click New List and you’ll see the updated experience to create lists. Roadmap ID: 67137
Release – October 2020
👀 SharePoint: Organization Chart Webpart – This webpart allows page authors to generate an organization chart based off of an individual. The page author will have the option to determine how many levels up this org chart goes. Roadmap ID: 67131
SharePoint: Text web parts automatically added to new sections in modern pages – Microsoft are now adding text web parts automatically for you when you add new sections to a modern page. Roadmap ID: 67146
SharePoint: My Feed web part – Make your page or site in SharePoint more dynamic and relevant to individual users by adding the My feed web part. The My feed web part will show a mix of content from across Microsoft 365, based on what’s likely to be most relevant to the current user at any given time. Roadmap ID: 67148
👀 Microsoft 365 compliance center: Auto-apply retention labels leveraging document understanding – Easily assign a retention label created in the Microsoft 365 compliance center to a document understanding model that you created, leveraging the document classification in Project Cortex for dual purposes— business processes and compliance. Roadmap ID: 68690
Release – November 2020
👀 SharePoint: SharePoint spaces General Availability – SharePoint spaces moves from Public Preview to General Availability. Roadmap ID: 67135
👀 SharePoint: Collapsible sections on modern pages – You’ll have the ability to show page sections in an accordion view (collapsed or expanded) or as tabs. The accordion view will be collapsed by default, but can be set to show expanded. Roadmap ID: 67147
Release – December 2020
SharePoint: Audience Targeting capability for Quick Links Web Part – Microsoft are adding the ability to target specific audiences per link within the Quick Links Web Part. With it, you target specific links to different audiences, helping you provide more personalized experiences on SharePoint pages. Roadmap ID: 67115
👀 Microsoft Lists: offline mode – Similar to taking files offline, people will have the ability to take Microsoft Lists offline – so you can work with your information in scenarios where you may have low-to-no internet access. Roadmap ID: 68809
Microsoft Lists: undo / redo – As you work across rows and columns within Microsoft Lists, mistakes will happen and it needs to be easy to recover information. Similar to how you can remove sentences and phrases in a Word document, you will be able to do this in Lists by using the undo button. The same is true in reverse with the redo button. Roadmap ID: 68810
Microsoft Lists: @mentions in comments – Get a colleague’s attention to an item in a list by @mentioning them within list comments. That person will receive a notification and a link that takes them directly back to the item, to review the comment and take the requested action. Roadmap ID: 68811
SharePoint admin center: updated homepage dashboard – Update for the homepage in the SharePoint admin center with more and more cards and graphs appear over time – so you can see insights on files, usage security, recommendations, training and so on. Roadmap ID: 68812
👀 SharePoint admin center: site creation source – SharePoint admins will now be able to see where sites were created from – be it PowerShell, via the SharePoint admin center, from Teams, from SharePoint “Create site” – and to be able to see more clearly who created the site. Roadmap ID: 68813
SharePoint admin center: OneDrive settings – To align with administration integration and consolidation, we’ve moved a number of the OneDrive settings into the SharePoint admin center. Admin will find settings for OneDrive storage limits, notifications, retention for deleted users and sync – all within the SharePoint admin center under “Settings.”. Roadmap ID: 68814
SharePoint admin center – Migration Manager: Box migrations (public preview) – With their recent Mover acquisition, Microsoft are excited to expand capabilities to allow moving content from third-party cloud storage providers starting with Box.com. Roadmap ID: 68816
Release – March 2021
👀 Microsoft Teams: SharePoint home site app – With the new home site app, you can bring your intranet directly into Teams. The app’s icon and name match your company brand and enable employees to discover, navigate and consume your top sites in Teams. The home site app gives employees a window into the rest of the company intranet by using the same global navigation as the SharePoint app bar. Roadmap ID: 66584
(this post was written using a SharePoint 2010 environment)
A while ago I was trying to find a way of getting a list of all user profiles that didn’t have a profile picture uploaded. I searched around online a bit and could only find examples that involved writing PowerShell which I thought was way to complicated a thing to do!
So this post will show how you can easily export user profile data from SharePoint, apply some excel filters to find all users without a profile picture.
This method applies to all on-premises versions of SharePoint, but also will work for SharePoint Online.
Get user profile data
To get started, open the Excel desktop app
Press Get Data > From Other Sources > SharePoint List
Enter the root site collection URL for your SharePoint environment
Press OK
Press the From SharePoint List option within Get Data in Excel.Enter your root site collection URL here.
This will open a navigator window, which will display all the available lists within the root site collection.
Scroll down until you find the UserInformationList
Click on it and a preview will load, scroll across the preview and make sure you can see the Picture column
Press Load
Make sure you select the UserInformationList and that the Picture column is visible.
NOTE: at first I was using the Get Data > From Web option but that only brought back the first 30 rows from the UserInformationList.
I didn’t want to increase the view limit as there are thousands of rows to display but I found that the way described doesn’t have that issue.
Now this will take a little while to download all the rows if you have a fair few users, but you’ll see when its finished in the right-hand Queries and Connections pane as it shows you the number of rows downloaded once complete.
Filter your data
The first thing to note about this data is that it does also contain some stuff you wont need. With my list data I noted that I had SharePoint security and domain groups, service accounts and other general use/ non-user accounts listed. Here are some of the filters and logic I applied:
Filter the Picture column to only show blanks
Filter the Content Type column to only show Person
Or filter the ContentTypeID to only show the corresponding Person content type ID
Filter SIPAddress to only show rows with an organisational email address
That’s all there is to it, a pretty quick and super easy way to get a list of all user profiles without a picture 🙂
Well Microsoft Ignite 2020 has not failed to disappoint so far with cool new and innovative announcements across Microsoft 365 cloud. I’ve decided to do a special edition M365 monthly update covering all the announcements so far. I’ll keep updating this post as Ignite week goes on.
One of several exciting announcements coming out of #MSIgnite2020 is that of SharePoint Syntex. Syntex uses advanced AI and machine teaching to amplify human expertise, automate content processing, and transform content into knowledge. Syntex will be available from October 1, 2020.
Project Nucleus will use intelligent sync to a database to keep a cache on the client that our web apps use to deliver a leapfrog in performance. Project Nucleus will allow you to accomplish common tasks, like column sorting and grouping, at blazing fast speeds and even enable you to work offline, with all changes synced when you reconnect to the internet.
In what appears to be the answer to a global hub site navigation menu, the SharePoint app bar allows you to create a consistent navigation experience to every site in your intranet, bringing in tailored related information.
Microsoft Teams Meetings recordings and Microsoft Stream will be built on new storage innovations in SharePoint in the near future. SharePoint will bring consistent capabilities for sharing, search, analytics, compliance, and developer extensibility to these experiences. Your employees will be able to easily access their recordings in OneDrive after the meeting.
Prioritise important news and announcements to appear at the top of news feeds across Microsoft 365 with news boosts in SharePoint. You can boost the visibility of a news article for a set time, until an employee has seen your content, or until a viewer has seen the item in their feed a set number of times.
Templates have been readily available from the SharePoint look book for some time. But now you can easily select and customize built-in templates, right from within SharePoint and apply them to any existing SharePoint site to give it new superpowers and a beautiful design.
Understand your reach, impact, and engagement across Microsoft 365 by using new analytics in SharePoint, such as dwell time on content, heatmap views of interaction, and automatic analytics digest powered by AI. Combined these insights with analytics in Yammer, such as enhanced Community Insights, Live Events, and Question and Answers.
Several improvements have been announced around the updated admin center homepage and actionable insights, site visibility improvements, additional migration options and bringing OneDrive settings to the SharePoint admin center.
The new SharePoint admin home page showing several cards: Site search, Active users, and Service health.
At Ignite, Microsoft announced the general availability of automatic expiration of external access, roll out starting today (22 September, 2020).
You can now simply set an expiration, say 30 days, for external access in your organization. From the day an external guest user got invited to a site or a file, the timer starts and the access is automatically revoked upon expiration.
SharePoint site collection admin manages the external access expiration for a site.
External sharing policies with Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labels
Also announced areexternal sharing policies with Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labels, coming soon in public preview. You can now associate external sharing policies to the sensitivity labels making it even more powerful to achieve secure external collaboration with frictionless experience to your users.
Microsoft Information Protection sensitivity labels with external sharing policies.
Governance insights for files in SharePoint, OneDrive, and Teams
You can now see access centric insights for your top sites with most sensitive documents and over shared sites. Insights allow you to validate the access policy settings such as unmanaged device and external sharing are appropriate for your security posture and as needed take actions and tweak them in SharePoint admin center.
SharePoint admin center and data access governance insights.
Data loss prevention (DLP) policy for blocking anyone links for sensitive content
Microsoft have announced a new DLP policy rule to block anyone with the link option for sensitive content, generally available now. Administrators can now configure DLP rules with an action to block sharing and access to the sensitive content using anyone with the link.
Microsoft 365 DLP policy blocking ‘anyone with the link’ sharing option.
Powered by continuous access evaluation, unified session sign-out is now in public preview. With one click in Microsoft 365 admin center, you can now sign out a user instantly from all their sessions on all devices, including both managed & unmanaged devices.
Microsoft 365 admin signs out a user from all sessions on all devices.
Now generally available, information barriers for SharePoint and OneDrive allow you to but arriers in collaboration and communication between certain set of users in your organization to avoid conflicts of interest.
SharePoint admin experience to manage information segments for sites.
The new home site app brings the power of the SharePoint home site and an organization’s intranet directly into Teams. Coming later this year, the app name and icon match the brand for the users organization and can be pinned to the app bar in Teams.
Now generally available, Teams templates let you choose from common business scenarios and industry-specific templates to get started with teams quicker. Administrators can also create custom templates for your organization, helping you standardize team structures, reveal relevant apps, and scale best practices.
Info pane, pinned posts and new conversation button in channels
Available now, the channel info pane provides an at-a-glance summary of active members, important posts pinned by members, and other relevant information in each channel. Changes are also being made to new channel conversations versus replying to existing ones more intuitive with the new conversation button.
A new search experience in Teams, powered by Microsoft Search and available late this year, will make finding messages, people, answers, and files faster and more intuitive.
Brings mobile access to the lists you own and the lists others share with you. Create new lists, edit list items, and easily share lists with other people. The Microsoft Lists app for iOS also supports offline and Dark Mode.
View and edit your lists, regardless of whether you’re connected to the internet. With offline mode, you can instantly sort, filter, group, add, and adjust items—especially long lists—with performance gains all around.
With new Together mode scenes coming this calendar year, you can transport your team to a variety of settings that can help set the tone and create the experience for your meeting, whether it be an auditorium, a conference room, or a coffee shop.
Coming later this year, custom layouts allow for a more dynamic content viewing experience and enable presenters to customize how content shows up for participants during a meeting.
Meeting recaps help teams stay on track and keep work moving forward after a meeting for both participants and for those who were unable to attend a meeting. Coming this year, a recap with the meeting recording, transcript, chat, shared files and more will be automatically shared in the meeting Chat tab and viewable in the Details tab for each meeting.
For more structured meetings, such as customer webinars, meeting organizers can use event registration with automated emails to make it easier to manage attendance. And after the meeting, view a detailed reporting dashboard that will help understand attendee engagement.
Microsoft are simplifying the calling experience with a streamlined view that shows contacts, voicemail and calling history at once, making it easier to initiate or return a call with a single click.
Also coming soon, collaborative calling enables customers to connect a call queue to a channel in Teams.
While there isn’t a limit on the number of people in a Teams tenant, team membership is currently limited to 5,000 members. Later this year we’ll increase this to support up to 25,000 members per individual team.
Approvals will become generally available in October enabling user to easily create, manage, share, and act on approvals directly from Teams. Approval flows can start from a chat, channel conversation, or from the Approvals app.
Wellbeing features and productivity insights – powered by MyAnalytics and Workplace Analytics – are coming to Microsoft Teams starting in October. Additionally, new personal wellbeing experiences including a virtual commute to add structure to your remote work day and Headspace guided meditations to help you unwind will be available in the first half of 2021.
Developers will soon be able to integrate their apps into Teams meetings and create scenarios that have deep awareness of the meeting context – including roster, roles, and permissions.
Add to OneDrive, a much-awaited feature that we’re rolling out in public preview with the option to opt-out. Now, when someone shares a folder with you in OneDrive, Microsoft SharePoint, or Microsoft Teams, you can easily add a shortcut to that shared folder, either from Shared with me or your shared libraries, in your OneDrive to easily find it later.
You can now relocate your file from an individual OneDrive site to a SharePoint shared library to extend its reach to a broader group of collaborators.
Offline edit support for Office docs in OneDrive for iOS
e will soon be supporting the ability to edit Office documents you have marked for offline use in OneDrive mobile app for iOS. Once offline, simply tap ”Edit” or “Open in Word” to start editing. Then, pick up right where you left off once online. This feature will be available later this year.
Admins will soon be able to monitor sync adoption and health. With the sync admin reports, admins will have access to machine sync insights on a per user basis and can check sync status and sync app versions of individual devices.
Rolling this out to Microsoft 365 Monthly Channel, Targeted, in late September (previously July), signatures will be stored in the user mailbox and will be available on any devices running Outlook for Windows.
Expected to roll this out to the Monthly Channel, Production, in late October (previously August).
On October 19, 2020, we are changing the way users contact support directly in the OneDrive Sync application and leave Feedback for our engineering team.
Microsoft are going to begin rollout of a naming update to highlight that the focus of this connected experience is to make Data Analysis simpler, faster and more intuitive.
Use these buttons to switch between each product’s roadmap updates.
SharePoint
Launched (0)
Rolling out (0)
In development (1)
🍾 LAUNCHED
N/A
🚂 ROLLING OUT
N/A
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – October 2020
👀 SharePoint: Organization Chart Webpart – This webpart allows page authors to generate an organization chart based off of an individual. The page author will have the option to determine how many levels up this org chart goes. Roadmap ID: 67131
tarting on October 1, 2020, we will enable the 2020 Release Wave 2 across our global customer base. Your production environments will receive the mandatory update during one of the scheduled maintenance windows, based on your region.
Microsoft Lists: visual updates for Quick Edit – In Quick Edit, you’ll see new grid lines, an improved on-hover experience, themed color bars on the side of list items, a “Create New Item” button and updated column header drop-downs. Roadmap ID: 64871
SharePoint lists and libraries: updated Quick Edit row selection – When in Quick Edit, people will see an updated way for selecting single or multiple items in a list or files in a library. Roadmap ID: 64868
SharePoint lists & libraries: new rich-text editor (RTE) for text fields – A newer, richer experience when a person creates a multi-line text field for a SharePoint list or library. They now will have the option to enable the rich-text editor (RTE). Roadmap ID: 63176
SharePoint lists and libraries: Rename title column – Users will be able to rename the title field column and see the name change appear consistently in grid view, when in Quick Edit and on the associated view and edit forms. Roadmap ID: 65146
🚂 ROLLING OUT
SharePoint lists and libraries: Fixed row height in Quick Edit – When in Quick Edit, you will see a new layout option “Fixed Height” within the view drop-down menu. Roadmap ID: 64867
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – September 2020
Microsoft Lists: updated Yes/No column experiences – powered by SharePoint – List items with a Yes/No column, in and out of Quick Edit mode, will appear using the new experience design format – making it easier to create and more accessible to consume. Roadmap ID: 67119
Azure CDN video caching for SharePoint and OneDrive
Microsoft have introduced improved streaming perofrmance for videos stored in SharePoint and OneDrive. Frequently accessed videos will be streamed from the Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN)closest to the user to optimize the playback experience. At all times data will remain within the Microsoft 365 compliance boundary.
Site owners, members and visitors will now see a Share command when they are viewing a list, even when they do not have any list item selected.
Site owners can grant other users access to the list and can specify whether what permissions to grant. Other users (e.g. site members and visitors) cannot directly grant other users access to the list, but they can use the dialog to send an approval request to site owners if the site is set up to allow access requests (enabled by default).
Several improvements have been made to the image column, including the ability to add an image to a list or library using the list itself or a library form. Also, when users are browsing the list on a mobile device, they will be able to upload an image – including taking a photo with the device’s camera.
Add an image to a list items using the improved Image column capabilities.
When you move a file to a new location in Microsoft 365, you will have the option to continue sharing the file from its new destination. A simple pop-up to confirm and keep moving forward.
The new link match permissions just like the source location and we send your collaborators an e-mail that notifies them that the file has been moved.
When you move a file to a new location in Microsoft 365, you will have the option to continue sharing the file from its new destination.
Made available through the Microsoft Look Book, these SharePoint site templates are designed for schools and universities. Each brings together news, events, highlighted content, quick links and more, pre-configured and designed with a specific scope and audience for a variety of Education scenarios.
SharePoint site template: “School home page” – across several screen sizes.
The new Tasks app in Teams provides a new unified view of tasks and assignments from across Microsoft To Do, Planner, and Outlook, helping you consolidate and prioritize your tasks.
there is also an added, new List view with the ability to edit multiple tasks at once, Graph API and Power Automate integrations, and task publishing capabilities to come.
Microsoft have added new features to Whiteboard in Teams to make it easier to keep the creative process moving forward virtually. You can now quickly add sticky notes to a canvas, making it easier to contribute if you’re using a device without a digital pen.
You can now also move and re-order objects on the canvas through a simple drag and drop gesture.
Stay focused throughout the day with Microsoft Teams. Whether you are free for a quick chat or presenting in a meeting, real time presence increases the accuracy of your status so others know when to reach out.
Meeting recording storage for areas where Stream is not available
A new admin setting will allow you to turn on meeting recordings if Microsoft Stream data residency is not yet in country. If this setting is turned on, Teams meeting recordings will be saved in the data center closest to the region.
Optimised Microsoft Teams Experience for VMware Horizon 8
VMWare Horizon 8 now offers enhanced audio and video experience for Microsoft Teams. The optimization pack helps provide better user experience and improved productivity for those leveraging Microsoft Teams across Horizon virtual desktop (VDI) and published application environments.
First, The Windows collaboration display by Avocor is the world’s first and only Windows collaboration display certified for both Microsoft Teams and Azure.
Avocor’s AVW-6555 provides seamless integration with Microsoft Teams video and audio-conferencing capabilities immediately with a Teams-enabled computer.
Then we have new offerings by Logitech, who now have products that support Microsoft Teams Rooms powered by HP.
Logitech now offers Microsoft Teams Rooms powered by HP.
Skype for Business Online connector consolidating to Teams module
Microsoft are simplifying the Teams administration experience with a single PowerShell module that includes complete management capabilities for Microsoft Teams and Skype for Business Online, by introducing full functionality of Skype for Business Online Connector into the Teams Module.
This means that Skype for Business Online Connector in the Skype for Business Online PowerShell, which has been a separate product that contains many cmdlets needed to manage Microsoft Teams, now has been consolidated into a single PowerShell module.
Microsoft have announced that the Teams App Submission API is now generally available. This new Graph API allows all users at any organization to develop on the platform of their choice and submit their apps into Teams with zero friction.
Teams App Submission API is now generally available.
Roster updates from School Data Sync automatically update the Class Notebook roster
Now, School Data Sync (SDS) updates automatically flow to the OneNote Class Notebook! Previously when SDS made roster updates, they would not happen until the educator went and clicked on the “Class Notebook” tab in the Class Team.
Set channel specific collaboration and content spaces
Available now, educators can set Channels in class teams to create sections in Collaboration Space or Content Library, which is especially helpful for educators who like to use channels as separate units. While in a class team, go to the Class Notebook and click “Manage Notebook” to choose which channel a new Section will go.
This allows the educator to create a “read-only” Content Library or student editable “Collaboration Space” specific to each unit and channel.
Now an educator has the option to set Channels to create sections in Collaboration Space or Content Library.
Now in the OneNote Class Notebook or the Staff Notebook, the “Teacher Only” section group will be enabled by default. This saves some extra clicks for this more private view.
IT admins can leverage communication compliance policies and AI models to automatically detect inappropriate content, then review and choose to delete.
Messaging containing offensive or harassing language and adult, racy, or gory images can be automatically flagged then removed from the Teams chat or channel by the IT Admin. This is not supported in private channels or in communications sent by guest users.
Automatically detect inappropriate messages and choose which ones to remove.
Build an interactive classroom with education apps
There are several third party apps that can be used within Teams to assist in finding ways to keep students engaged and learning throughout the day. All the available apps for engagement, communication, content creation and content & curriculum can be found below.
Prezi Video is an example of one of many apps available for Teams to quickly create engaging live or recorded class presentations.
New lobby setting: only the organizer joins the meeting directly for GCC
A new lobby setting is coming to Teams Meeting Options. We are adding “Only me” as an option to the “Who can bypass lobby?” setting. Once enabled, only the organizer will be able to join the meeting directly. Everyone else, including people from within the same organization, will be sent to the lobby.
New experience for launching instant channel meetings for GCC
Meet Now buttons in Teams channels will have a new home. You will soon find them in the Channel header where you can easily find and launch the meeting.
Improved Teams meeting join launcher experience for GCC
When you click on a Teams meeting join link, you will now see an optimized and improved join experience. You will be prompted with an option to join on the web, download the Teams client, or join with the native Teams client. This will result in faster and more confident meeting join.
New policy to prevent upload of profile picture for GCC, GCC High, and DoD
Teams desktop and web experiences will honor the Outlook on the Web mailbox policy setting that can control whether users are able change their profile pictures. This applies to GCC, GCC High, and DoD tenants.
You can now get information about issues you encounter when working with related tables, entities, controls and components on a form by accessing the Monitoring Tool inside your model driven Power App.
The tool can help identify if the issue you are seeing is designed out of box or is due to a customization in the application and provide details that can help you understand why there are issues. To launch the tool just log into your Dynamics or Model Driven app and add &monitor=true to the end of your URL. This will add an icon onto the app header toolbar. Click on the icon that looks like the one in the circle below.
After making improvements to the cascade assign and delete options last year to reduce timeouts, the Power Apps team are making similar improvements to merge operations.
Just as with assign and delete, merges will happen in the background. When a merge operation is run, if you are on build 9.1.0000.20463 or greater, instead of waiting on the submit screen until the job is completed which can take several minutes, you will instead be informed this will be handled in the background.
Power Apps checker now analyzes modern web syntax (up to ES9)
To ensure Power Apps checker continues to broaden analysis coverage as languages evolve, we recently migrated our web language rules to an ESLint plugin and now offer support for ECMAScript 2018 (ES9) syntax plus ES6 globals.
Power Platform Build Tools now generally available
Now generally available, Power Platform Build Tools allows anyone to setup DevOps for low-code and pro-code application development for Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents and other components supported by CDS solutions.
The GA release also introduces support for Multi Factor Authentication with the introduction of Service Principal Authentication.
On-premises data gateway August 2020 update is now available
The August update for the On-premises data gateway (version 3000.54.8 ) includes an updated version of the Mashup Engine, which will match the Power BI Desktop August update.
This will ensure that the reports that you publish to the Power BI Service and refresh via the Gateway will go through the same query execution logic/run-time as in the latest Power BI Desktop version.
AutoML now supports applying models in PQO Function Browser
Analysts can now apply any Power BI AutoML model to entities in any dataflow in the same workspace using PQO function browser. With this new capability, users don’t need to be an owner of the dataflow that has the model. They can use models created by others in the same workspace.
AutoML now supports applying models in PQO Function Browser.
Header/ navigation improvements in the Power BI Mobile apps
The Power BI team have announced improvements to the navigation in the Power BI mobile apps to make it easier for our users to understand their content hierarchy and to navigate between items quickly, aswell as making it easier to share relevant content with colleagues.
Improvements to the header in Power BI mobile apps.
The Power BI team have added a new tenant setting for Power BI admins to choose if users can create classic workspaces. This helps organizations control workspace creation more effectively and prevent unwanted workspaces from appearing in Power BI when Office 365 groups are created.
Allow Power BI Admins to block classic workspace creation.
Multiple data lakes support inside Dataflows in Power BI
The Power BI team have announced improvements to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (ADLS Gen2) support inside Dataflows in Power BI. This includes support for workspace admins to bring their own ADLS Gen2 account, improvements to the Dataflows connector in Power BI, take ownership support for dataflows using ADLS Gen2 and also minor improvements to detaching from ADLS Gen2.
Multiple data lakes support inside Dataflows in Power BI.
Share and collaborate on your bot with subject matter experts
Power Virtual Agents now allows you to share your bot with your teammates, allowing multiple contributors to edit and manage your bot. Subject matter experts in a team can collaborate together on a bot. For example, a customer support bot can now have different subject matter experts working on refund related topics vs. topics related to membership.
Share and collaborate on your bot with subject matter experts.
One of the most common requests for Power Automate is to enable a way to trigger a flow when a column is modified in SharePoint. That wish has now been answered as the Power Automate team have announced the new “When an item or file is modified” trigger.
The “When an item or file is modified” trigger that lets you filter to just the list or file modifications, making it much simpler to create a flow that’s tuned to the right events.
The new “When an item or file is modified” trigger in Power Automate.
The Power Automate team have announced the new “for a selected message” trigger enables any Teams user to create a custom message action to start a flow from any message in Teams.
July 2020 saw seven new connectors added to the Power Automate platform, with now more than 20 new connectors added to the ecosystem in the last three months!
Provision users to Azure AD from SAP SuccessFactors
With the integration between Azure AD and SAP SuccessFactors, you can now automate user access to applications and resources so that a new hire can be up and running with full access to the necessary applications on day one. The integration also helps you reduce dependencies on IT helpdesk for onboarding and offboarding tasks.
Manage and secure all your SAP apps from Azure AD.
Streamlined process for FastTrack for Microsoft 365
Microsoft have streamlined the process for requesting assistance from FastTrack for Microsoft 365. FastTrack is a benefit that comes with your Microsoft 365 subscription, at no additional cost, for customers with eligible plans of 150+ licenses.
Streamlined process for FastTrack for Microsoft 365.
Recently I came across an issue with a SharePoint 2010 publishing site. The site had a page on it that was being edited and after a series of web parts were added, crashed and would no longer load. An additional issue here was that there wasn’t another, recent version of the page to restore to.
So, in the steps below detail how I was able to access the page using web part maintenance mode and delete the problem web part:
Navigate to the problem page’s URL
At the end of the URL add ?contents=1
This will then open the problem page up in web part maintenance mode. From here you are able to close, restore defaults or delete web parts from your page
NOTE: make sure you page is checked out before trying this else you won’t be able to make any changes.
Select the web part(s) which you think are causing the issue
Now select to either close, reset or delete the web part. I chose delete
A warning message will appear > press OK
Modern SharePoint
When writing this post I wondered if this method of accessing web part maintenance mode still worked for modern SharePoint – the answer was no! When you try to open a modern page using ?contents=1 you get this:
Opening modern SharePoint pages in classic maintenance mode won’t work.
However, after reading this handy article from Microsoft about maintenance for client-side web parts in SharePoint Online I just switched my query to ?maintenancemode=true and it worked!
Modern web parts have there own query to append to the page URL to access maintenance mode.
Different to the classic example, modern web parts when in maintenance mode show summary, manifest and data tabs with information about each web part.
If you wish to delete a web part from this view you will need to edit the page and delete it from there, then republish like in the example below:
Deleting web parts in maintenance mode within a modern SharePoint page.
SharePoint URL’s
There are loads of URL’s that either I can never remember or haven’t come across that are listed here. However I wanted to keep a list of them on my site just for reference:
I warned you September was going to be crazy for the roadmap roundup! Quite possibly the most updates we’ve had in any given week.
I’ve noticed that many of the roadmap items were first recorded back in May 2020 and haven’t changed much other than the modified date, but I’ve included them in any case.
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Download SharePoint site usage data in Excel – SharePoint site owners and members will be able to download their site’s 90-day usage data in an excel report, directly from the Site Usage page. Roadmap ID: 66395
Cumulative analytics for Hubs in SharePoint – Hub owners can now analyze aggregate usage analytics for their SharePoint hub sites, including all associated sites. Roadmap ID: 57160
SharePoint: PowerApps integration with SharePoint libraries – You can now use PowerApps to build custom forms for document libraries, extending metadata-enriched experiences throughout SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. Roadmap ID: 57303
SharePoint and Microsoft Teams: new Files experience – With the new Files experience, you will be able to add and manage custom columns, sort and filter files with custom views, trigger workflows, and sync files to your PC or Mac. Roadmap ID: 30548
Use Flow to approve hub-site joins – Require an approval from a hub administrator before allowing other sites to be connected. Roadmap ID: 30552
🚂 ROLLING OUT
👀 Microsoft Lists: Lists app in Microsoft Teams – Team members will be able to both create new lists and add existing ones as tabs in Teams’ channels. Roadmap ID: 64162
Global reader role in SharePoint admin – SharePoint admin center now supports the Azure Active Directory built-in “Global Reader” role. Roadmap ID: 59984
People cards for SharePoint list and library web parts – Now, when you see a person’s name or face within a SharePoint List or Library web part, you can hover over it and reveal their people card. Roadmap ID: 57814
Information barriers (private preview) – Now in private preview, Information barriers are policies that can be configured to prevent individuals or groups from communicating with each other. Roadmap ID: 57313
SharePoint admin: Improved edit panel to manage site settings – Microsoft releasing a new panel experience which will make it easier to view and manage more site properties, like how you would edit from within the site itself. Roadmap ID: 57314
Increased site collection limit – You can now have up to 2,000,000 site collections per tenant, up form 500,000. Roadmap ID: 57316
Conditional formatting rule builder with new rich-text capabilities in lists – You will have the ability to use If/Then logic to format rows and columns based on attributes like numerical, date, etc. Roadmap ID: 57305
Updating classic SharePoint team site home pages to the modern template – Classic SharePoint team site home pages that have not been customized will be automatically updated to a modern home page template. Roadmap ID: 60405
Easy page and news publishing experience from sitepages library – Adding the ability to easily publish and republish a page or news post from the sitepages library in a site via the command bar or the file card experience. Roadmap ID: 61191
SharePoint Migration Tool supports SharePoint Server 2016 migrations (Public Preview) – Migration support from the SPMT now covers SharePoint server 2010, 2013 and 2016. Roadmap ID: 63258
SharePoint: Stock Images – Free to use stock images will be available in the SharePoint image file picker. Roadmap ID: 59834
Query alterations using SPFx for custom results page – Allows for query alterations in Microsoft Search for custom results pages with the SharePoint Framework. Roadmap ID: 57135
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – September 2020
Microsoft Lists: forms customization –Adjust what information shows on the out-of-box forms and include custom header and footer imagery and information. Roadmap ID: 64165
Microsoft Lists: calendar view – Visualize any list with items that use date column information in a calendar view. Roadmap ID: 64167
Microsoft Lists: rules – Create simple if/then rules based on changes to list information to set reminders and send notifications. Roadmap ID: 64163
Microsoft Lists and SharePoint document libraries: Gallery view – Configure your lists and library items using a dynamic Gallery view – choosing how your documents and list items appear. Roadmap ID: 57304
Microsoft Lists: comments – Add a comment on a list or list items, including @mention capabilities to draw a person’s attention. Roadmap ID: 64169
Microsoft Lists: Updated Person column experience: built on SharePoint – Items within a Person column, in and out of Quick Edit mode, will appear using the new “pill” design format when a person’s photo is displayed. Roadmap ID: 67095
Microsoft Lists: Updated Choice column experience: built on SharePoint – Items within a Choice column, in and out of Quick Edit mode for both lists and libraries, will support single, multi-choice, and manual fill as you add items. Roadmap ID: 67097
Set Default Page Templates – This feature will allow site owners to set a page template as the default when a user creates a new page or news post on the site. Roadmap ID: 64529
Configure header, footer and body of a form for lists/ libraries – This feature allows users in SharePoint lists and libraries to add a custom header and a footer to the associated form. Roadmap ID: 63519
SharePoint lists and libraries: Improved Image columns – Upload a new image – including mobile camera support. You can add a new Image column to lists and libraries. Roadmap ID: 64872
Release – October 2020
SharePoint: Share a page to Yammer – The ability to share a modern SharePoint Online (SPO) page to a Yammer community will be available in the page actions bar. Roadmap ID: 66183
Starting December 1 2020, Yammer Groups API endpoints will only support the usage of Azure Active Directory (AAD) tokens. Yammer Groups API endpoints will no longer support the usage of Yammer OAuth tokens.
In MC215678 (June 2020), we announced that Microsoft To Do would support list sharing between personal Microsoft accounts and work or school accounts. We paused the rollout to incorporate your feedback. We are pleased to announce we are moving forward with this feature.
As originally announced in MC218984 (July ’20) automated external email forwarding is a tactic attackers use to exfiltrate data out of an organization. To counter that, we are updating our outbound anti-spam policies.
28 August, 2020
MC220853
SharePoint
Launched (0)
Rolling out (0)
In development (2)
🍾 LAUNCHED
N/A
🚂 ROLLING OUT
N/A
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – December 2020
SharePoint spaces: Touch device support – SharePoint spaces will enable users to interact with a space using touch interactions in addition to the mouse and keyboard based interactions currently supported. Roadmap ID: 67107
SharePoint: Portal Launch wizard in SharePoint PowerShell – The Portal Launch wizard available via SharePoint PowerShell is designed to configure the deployment waves when launching a new site. Roadmap ID: 66162
SharePoint Stuff 