In this post details how requests can be made for extensions to be added to Azure DevOps, and how to approve/ reject them.
What are extensions?
Extensions are add-ons which you can use and add to extend Azure DevOps. Extensions get published to the Visual Studio Marketplace, where they can be kept private, or shared publicly. Anyone can publish extensions from developers to third parties, to Microsoft. There are ways in which you can evaluate whether extensions are safe to use within the organisation, before deciding to install them.
Evaluating an extension
Each extension comes with the following information to help you determine whether it is safe to use it, such as:
Top Publisher badge: The publisher has demonstrated commitment to its customers and the Marketplace through excellent policies, quality, reliability, and support. For more information, go to Top Publisher.
Q & A: The Q & A section of published extensions may answer questions you may have. Also, they’re a good mechanism to engage with the extension’s publisher(s) to have a meaningful dialogue to make yourself comfortable. Use the Q & A information to understand the development, testing, and security practices the publisher follows. It also gives you a sense of the publisher’s responsiveness.
Ratings & reviews: Ratings and reviews indicate how others perceive the offering.Privacy, license, and support policies: See if the publisher has provided them and if they meet your needs or concerns. For more information, go to Safety information.
Approve or reject an extension
When an extension is requested, an email will be sent to the Azure DevOps organisation Project Collection Administrators for approval. It will look similar to this:
A link in the email will take approvers to this page within Dev Ops to review and approve/ reject the extension
Press Approve
To reject, press the three dots … and press Reject
You will be re-directed to the Marketplace to install the extension. Check the correct organisation is selected in the drop-down menu and press Install.
Once installed, you will receive a success message and be directed back to DevOps.
The Microsoft roadmap roundup is a weekly summary of all the newly added items and changes within the Microsoft 365 roadmap, covering SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive and Microsoft Purview. Here’s all the new and updated Microsoft roadmap items from the past week:
Join 339 other followers
Use the links below to switch between each product’s roadmap updates:
Includes updates for SharePoint, SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva.
Launched (6)
Rolling out (1)
In development (3)
🍾 LAUNCHED
SharePoint Syntex: Content Assembly – Create fields from images in documents – With this feature you can create fields by selecting image from documents, while creating modern templates. Roadmap ID:98125
Microsoft Viva: New praise compose experience and praise trends – The praise composer – accessible through the messaging extension pinned to the Teams messaging bar or through the Viva Insights app in Teams – is being refreshed to replace praise badges with emojis and introduce the ability to select gradient backgrounds. Additionally, in the Viva Insights app in Teams, praise trends are being introduced, privately surfacing analytics such as counts of praise sent and received, your top fans and top praises received. Roadmap ID: 101161
SharePoint Syntex: Content Assembly – Create fields from images in documents – With this feature you can create fields by selecting image from documents, while creating modern templates. Roadmap ID:98125
🚂 ROLLING OUT
SharePoint: External File Request in SharePoint Document Library – With the file request feature in SharePoint Document Library, you can choose a folder where others can upload files using a link that you send them. People you request files from can only upload files; they can’t see the content of the folder, edit, delete, or download files, or even see who else has uploaded files. Roadmap ID:103625
SharePoint admin center: Streamlining management of site related information across Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups – SharePoint is updating the site detail panel to include Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups information. Admins that have permissions to SharePoint, Teams and Groups admin centers can now manage all related attributes (membership, group name, description, etc.) from a single site detail panel in the SharePoint admin center ‘Active Sites’ tab. SharePoint admins with SharePoint only permissions will have read-only access to the new attributes. Roadmap ID: 100053
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – February 2023
🆕 SharePoint: Improvements to SharePoint pages authoring – Updates include two changes to the text web part from multilingual proofing to better control over line spacing. Roadmap ID: 117365
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Take action after reflecting on meeting category insights in Viva Insights – Viva Insights customers will be able to take actions such as editing meeting invites or responses directly from the Viva Insights app after reflecting on their meeting category insights to align their time spent in meetings with their goals. Roadmap ID: 117374
Microsoft Viva: Schedule send suggestions from Viva Insights in Teams chat – To encourage adoption of healthy collaboration habits, Viva Insights will display actionable recommendations to align message delivery in Teams chat to recipient work hours. Schedule send suggestions will be automatically displayed for those who compose 1:1 chats in Teams desktop and web after-hours. With just one click, users can schedule chat message delivery to be at the start of recipient work hours and minimize work-related interruptions during personal time. Roadmap ID: 98159
Outlook: View and navigate the organization chart with Org Explorer – Org Explorer for Outlook helps you to visualize and explore your company’s internal structure, work teams, and individual roles. Roadmap ID: 103605
Release – March 2023
🆕 SharePoint: New site theme options – We are adding two new SharePoint themes to our Change the Look menu. The addition of Black and Cerulean will enhance your site customization options for how you want your sites to look. Roadmap ID: 117368
SharePoint Syntex: Content Assembly – Choose fields in modern templates to create document library columns – While publishing modern templates, you can now choose fields that you want to map to document library columns. When documents will get generated, the fields chosen to be library columns will get auto filled by the value entered by the users. Roadmap ID: 98126
Release – April 2023
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Topic engagement analytics – This update will introduce usage and engagement analytics on topics (views, edits, etc.) to the Microsoft Admin Center. Roadmap ID: 88699
Release – November 2023
🆕 Microsoft 365: Information Barriers (IB) upgrading from IB v1 to IB v2 with new capabilities – Information Barriers (IB) V2 brings new capabilities including larger segment scale support, multi-segment support, and flexible people discoverability etc. Existing IB v1 tenants require an upgrade to IB v2 to take advantage of these new capabilities. This roadmap item is intended only for all IB v1 customers. All other customers will get IB v2 capabilities when they enable IB in their tenants. Roadmap ID: 115482
The Microsoft roadmap roundup is a weekly summary of all the newly added items and changes within the Microsoft 365 roadmap, covering SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive and Microsoft Purview. Here’s all the new and updated Microsoft roadmap items from the past week:
Join 339 other followers
Use the links below to switch between each product’s roadmap updates:
Includes updates for SharePoint, SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva.
Launched (6)
Rolling out (1)
In development (3)
🍾 LAUNCHED
SharePoint: Inline playback of videos in Hero web part – When users click to play a video in the Hero web part section of a SharePoint site, the video will play inline. This feature allows users to watch a video without being taken off the SharePoint page and allows users to browse or scroll through the other contents of the page while the video plays. Roadmap ID: 93351
Microsoft Viva: Automatic Topic Relationships available in GCC – The ability for AI to suggest relationships between topics will be available for customers in our Government Clouds. These suggested related topics appear on the topic card, page and answers. This is already available for standard worldwide customers. Roadmap ID: 106765
Viva: Connections Feed – The Viva Connections Feed web part aggregates organizational communication content from sources across SharePoint, Yammer, Stream, Teams, and more into a single personalized feed. We’re introducing a vertical layout to the web part to give you greater flexibility when adding it to SharePoint pages. Roadmap ID: 98108
Microsoft Viva: Viva Connections 1st party apps for Desktop and Mobile available in GCC – Viva Connections desktop and mobile experiences are now available in GCC. Roadmap ID: 101152
Microsoft Viva: Quiet time settings in Teams and Outlook – To help create better boundaries and protect your personal time, later this year Viva Insights will offer the ability to configure quiet time to silence mobile notifications from Outlook and Teams outside your working hours as well as provide personalized insights on how well you are disconnecting. You will also be able to set quiet time directly from Teams and Outlook mobile. Roadmap ID: 85627
Microsoft Viva: Focus mode in Viva Insights – The focus time experience in Microsoft Teams is being enhanced for users with Viva Insights subscriptions. Focus plan users will gain access to a focus mode experience. Focus mode will allow users to set a timer to balance short bursts of productivity with breaks, manage their task list, and tap into mindfulness exercises during their breaks. Roadmap ID: 100977
🚂 ROLLING OUT
Microsoft Stream: Create, view and share playlists in SharePoint – This feature will allow users to organize their video and audio files into a playlist for easy organization, sharing and playback. Users can add any video and audio files to a playlist that they have edit access to. People with access to the playlist and to the files in the playlist can view the videos in order or skip back and forth between items in the playlist. Roadmap ID:109564
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – February 2023
SharePoint: Updates to site themes – We are implementing an update for the Office theme in Classic SharePoint will align the presentation with the application experience. Roadmap ID:101150
Microsoft Viva: Language expansion – Italian and Portuguese – Viva Topics will soon support indexing content and generating topics from documents written in Italian and Portuguese (as well as English, French, German, and Spanish). Topics can be edited and experienced in your language. Japanese and Simplified Chinese. Roadmap ID:100252
Release – March 2023
Microsoft Viva: Controlling Topic highlights on SharePoint – The long-awaited feature to control what Topics get highlighted on SharePoint pages and news posts with an alternative user experience to discover Topics on the page. Roadmap ID:100245
The Microsoft 365 monthly update includes updates and recently recent features across all of Microsoft 365. Press a button to read about an individual technology or continue reading for more. You can take a look back at previous monthly updates here, plus take a look at our weekly roadmap roundup.
In SharePoint: Syntex pay-as-you-go, search transcript for Stream (on SharePoint), add apps to teams when enabling, sensitivity labels inside the sharing dialog, OneDrive sync reports in admin center, sites coverage in search usage analytics
Microsoft Syntex Pay-as-you-go (Preview)
This preview allows you to track unstructured document processing events at no cost to assess usage and estimate costs for a future pay-as-you-go license. Start by entering your Azure subscription in the Microsoft 365 admin center, you will join the preview of the pay-as-you-go functionality for unstructured and prebuilt document processing (formerly document understanding).
Processing events will be sent to the Azure meter in your account so that you will be able to view the pages processed for unstructured and prebuilt document processing models. For the duration of the preview, you will not be charged anything. The billing meter will function only to show you pages processed in your organization.
Search video transcript for Stream (on SharePoint)
This feature allows users who are viewing a video to search for keywords contained in the video transcript. Users can navigate through the search results and click on a portion of the transcript to be taken to the respective spot in the video.
Note: This feature is for searching the transcript of a single video AND people need view or edit permissions on a file to search the transcript.
SharePoint Apps: Add to teams when enabling an app
As a SharePoint Administrator or Global Administrator in Microsoft 365, you can acquire solutions from the SharePoint Store or distribute custom apps that can be used across SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Viva Connections. Microsoft are also improving the process of adding SharePoint Framework solution app to Teams in the modern SharePoint apps site (formerly known as App Catalog).
File sharing experience – sensitivity labels inside the sharing dialog
Sensitivity labels are used to classify and protect your organization’s data. These labels are completely customizable, and admins can apply a label to a specific file based on the organization needs. Microsoft have now added sensitivity labels inside the Sharing dialog, to provide you the ability to see what labels have been applied to your files before sharing them.
If the Admin chooses to set Sensitivity labels for the organization, users who interact with the OneDrive / SharePoint share control will be able to see these labels displayed inside the sharing dialog.
SharePoint sites coverage in Search usage analytics
Microsoft have announced that SharePoint sites are now included within Usage Analytics in the Microsoft 365 Search & Intelligence Admin Center. Visualize insights from queries from your SharePoint-based intranet and other hub and communication sites.
On the ‘Query analytics‘ page, you can now see the top queries, abandoned queries and 0-result queries. SharePoint sites include both classic and modern SharePoint queries, aggregating search query data across Hub sites, Communication sites, team sites, and various search centers in classic mode: at the Enterprise, Site and Basic levels.
OneDrive sync reports in the Apps Admin Center (GA)
Admins now can use the OneDrive sync health dashboard in the Microsoft 365 Apps Admin Center to get an executive summary of everything happening with OneDrive so that you can resolve common issues quickly and focus on other strategic tasks as an administrator.
The dashboard provides you with sync health reports for tracking relevant health issues and advisories, checking the sync status and app version of individual devices, and monitoring Known Folder Move roll out across devices throughout the organization.
In Teams: Teams Premium, Delete chats, expanded reactions, add people to chats @mention, recommended people, receive group chat with RSC, sign language view always-on, approvals as PDFs, Acrobat improvements
Microsoft have announced that Teams Premium is broadly available for preview as a limited trial for commercial customers through the Microsoft 365 admin center. The features under this offering began rolling out this December and will continue to roll out through January 2023. With Teams Premium, you can:
Extend your organization’s brand and company culture across meetings with branding, organization backgrounds, and organization together mode scenes.
Use AI to make the meetings you attend (and miss) more productive and impactful through live translation for captions to remove language barriers and intelligent recap features that offer smarter recordings with autogenerated chapters, AI-suggested action items, and insights to quickly catch up on missed meetings where your name was mentioned.
Apply advanced meeting protection such as Watermark, End-to-end encryption for meetings, and Sensitivity labels for meetings with prevent copy/paste of meeting chat to better protect your virtual meetings.
Deliver a high-quality webinar experience through advanced capabilities to streamline event workflows with registration waitlist and manual approval, facilitate behind-the-scene actions through virtual green room for presenters (separate from attendees) before the event begins, and manage the attendee experience so they only see shared content and participants brought on-screen.
Manage the end-to-end virtual appointment experience with advanced features like text reminders, custom branded virtual appointments, and a centralized Virtual Appointment dashboard for a quick view into schedules, queues, and analytics to keep track of key usage insights such as no-shows and wait time information per appointment.
Organize and easily remove chat conversations you no longer need without impacting other participants in the same chat. Users can now delete 1:1 chats, group chats, and meeting chats if they are a participant in Microsoft Teams. This permanently deletes the chat only for the user, other people in the chat and conversation history for them is not impacted.
Expanded reactions allows users to apply any emoji as a reaction to chat messages! Pick from over 800 Teams emojis to react the way you want. Communicate reactions to celebrate, express your agreement, or emphasize the completion of tasks.
Add new participants to the chat with @mention, removing the need to navigate to the add-dialog. When adding new participants, you can control how much of the chat history to share.
Using AI, Teams chat will assist you in initiating new conversations by recommending colleagues based on your previous collaborations.
Receive all group chat messages with resource-specific consent
The resource-specific consent (RSC) permissions model, originally developed for Teams Graph APIs has been extended for chat and channel scope. Using RSC, you can request team owners to consent for a bot to receive user messages across standard group chats without being @mentioned.
Sign Language View and always-on captions in meetings
Prioritize up to two other participants’ videos for sign language in meetings so they stay visible even while content is shared. Additionally, you can set captions to stay on across all meetings.
Approvals as PDFs can be saved, printed, and transferred
Approval creators can save a completed approval request to a PDF file and have the option to print it. This feature allows customers to easily transfer their proof of approval as a PDF to another system or store it as a file.
Adobe Acrobat streamlines the PDF experience in Teams
Building on the momentum of collaborative apps in Teams, Adobe has released the new integration of Adobe Acrobat into Microsoft Teams. Adobe Acrobat can now be set as the default PDF app in Teams. This makes it easier to share and review PDFs, collaborate with comments and annotations, easily access PDFs stored in Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft OneDrive, and more.
These features are currently available for Teams for Education customers:
Government
These features currently available to Microsoft’s commercial customers in multi-tenant cloud environments are now rolling out to our customers in US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and/or United States Department of Defense (DoD):
View meeting transcripts on Microsoft Teams on Android and iOS for Government clouds – You can now start transcription for your meetings and view meeting transcripts on Microsoft Teams for iOS and Android.
Frontline workers
Frontline workers using shared devices can use Edge and Yammer apps on Android alongside Teams – Microsoft’s shared device mode allows frontline workers to easily authenticate by automatically signing users in and out of all the apps that have enabled this feature. In addition to Microsoft Teams and Managed Home Screen being generally available, Edge and Yammer apps on Android are now in public preview.
Power Apps
In Power Apps: Delegate mailbox approval process, pipelines (preview), Developer tools update
Delegate the mailbox approval process
The Power Apps team have announced that that the mailbox approval process can now be delegated to another user instead of always requiring a Global or Exchange admin. A new security role named Delegated Mailbox Approver is now available. A Global or Exchange admin can assign (delegate) this role to one or more users. A user with this role will be able to approve a mailbox without being a Global or Exchange admin.
Pipelines aims to democratize application lifecycle management (ALM) for Power Platform and Dynamics 365 customers by bringing deployment automation capabilities into Managed Environments in a manner that’s more approachable for all makers, admins, and developers.
Pipelines can be setup and run entirely within Power Platform – with governance, visibility, and safeguards automatically built in so that your business solutions can come to market faster with less effort and higher quality. The system handles all the heavy lifting and ongoing maintenance so you don’t have to.
In Power Automate: Deeper SAP integration, 10 new verified, 13 independent publisher connectors, Power Automate Desktop December 2022 update
Deeper SAP Integration for the Power Platform
The Power Automate team have recently announced the General Availability (GA) of a broad set of new functionality in the Power Platform that will make it easier for organizations running SAP to digitally transform and automate their business processes. Here’s a look at what this entails:
Prebuilt Power Apps for Common SAP Processes
Prebuilt Power Automate Flows for Common SAP Processes
10 new verified and 13 independent publisher connectors
In November, Microsoft launched 10 new verified connectors and 16 updates from different service owners, as well as 13 new Independent Publisher connectors. These connectors have solutions and tools for Commerce, Human Resources, Data, Content and Files, and much more.
In Power BI: Power BI December 2022 feature summary, unified v-cores, dataset refresh cancellation, subscribe to filtered report, enterprise scorecards
Power BI Feature Summary – December 2022
This month’s update includes a variety of new features including: updated DAX functions, updated slicer type formatting, and brought Metrics to the Windows app.
Simplifying capacity management with unified v-cores
The Power BI team have announced a platform update that will simplify the way customers manage Power BI Premium capacities. Starting on December 11th 2022, the team are rolling out changes to unify the concepts of front-end and back-end virtual cores for capacity management.
This change will simplify the model used by customers to both manage capacities and rationalize usage metrics against capacity sizing decisions.
Dataset refresh cancellation now available in Power BI Premium
Earlier this year, the Power BI team released the Enhanced refresh with Power BI REST API, that – in addition to XMLA based refreshes – allows refresh cancellation. However, it requires the refresh operation to be triggered by the API. Today, users can cancel an ongoing scheduled or on-demand refresh using a contextual button in the Power BI service.
The Power BI team have announced a highly anticipated update to subscriptions: you can now create a subscription to a view of a Power BI report uniquely relevant to you. When creating a new subscription, you’ll see a new Include my changes option if you have made changes to the report (e.g., applied filters or selected a slicer value).
Enterprise scorecards with hierarchies and linked metrics in Power BI Metrics
The Power BI team have announced two much anticipated releases in the Metrics experience. With hierarchies and linked metrics, it’s easier than ever to automate your metric values so you can spend less time crafting multiple scorecards and connections, and more time analyzing your metric performance.
Hierarchies is a premium or PPU feature, and linked metrics is a Pro feature. These two features enable easy, large scale enterprise scorecard deployment, allowing automated views of cascading scorecards and linked metrics that show up and are sync’d on multiple scorecards.
The Microsoft roadmap roundup is a weekly summary of all the newly added items and changes within the Microsoft 365 roadmap, covering SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive and Microsoft Purview. Here’s all the new and updated Microsoft roadmap items from the past week:
Join 339 other followers
Use the links below to switch between each product’s roadmap updates:
Includes updates for SharePoint, SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva.
Launched (1)
Rolling out (4)
In development (7)
🍾 LAUNCHED
SharePoint: Adding an app to Teams – As a SharePoint Administrator or Global Administrator in Microsoft 365, you can manage apps that can be used across SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Viva Connections. Some apps can be added to Teams, you can add them on the Apps site. Roadmap ID: 103610
🚂 ROLLING OUT
SharePoint: New site templates – We are introducing 3 new SharePoint site templates dedicated to helping you create sites for your HR department, to showcase Events, and a template powered by Microsoft Syntex to do contract management. Roadmap ID: 102380
Microsoft Syntex: new rules actions – move and copy – Create rules to move or copy files processed by Syntex models based on the extracted value. Roadmap ID: 98111
Microsoft Viva: New landing experience for Viva Connections desktop – Help people in your organization manage their daily flow of work using a customized landing experience in Teams that displays the most important tasks, tools, news, and resources in one central place. The new landing experience offers expanded navigational tools between Viva apps and acts as the home base for Viva experiences in Teams. Roadmap ID: 99917
Microsoft Viva: Meeting category insights coming to the Digest email – The Digest email from Microsoft Viva will include a summary of meeting category insights for users with a Viva Insights subscription, highlighting up to 3 categories in which users spent the most time over the last 4 weeks. Roadmap ID: 98164
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – January 2023
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Goals Audit Logs – Audit Logs will be available in Compliance Center. Roadmap ID: 115480
Release – February 2023
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Goals Bulk OKR Import – Viva Goals allows bulk importing of Objectives, Key Results and Projects using a standard Excel template. Bulk import allows you to take pre-existing lists of OKRs and Projects and quickly add them to Viva Goals. Roadmap ID: 115477
Microsoft Viva: Praise highlights in profile card in Teams and Outlook – With updates coming in February, praises received will be highlighted on a user’s profile card in Teams and Outlook. There are user settings available that prevent praise highlights from being visible on their profile card. Roadmap ID: 109551
Release – March 2023
Microsoft Viva: Topics Adoption Metrics Dashboard – Topics will include a new analytics page, where knowledge managers and admins will have access to a set of metrics that details the health of their adoption. Tenants will have health targets to reach to keep them on track for adopting Viva Topics, as well as recommended actions to perform to drive each metric to healthy. Roadmap ID: 100028
Release – April 2023
Microsoft Viva: Connections News Notifications – Mobile users of Viva Connections will receive a push notification from Teams when SharePoint news is published from sites they follow or visit frequently. They’ll also receive notification if they are @ mentioned in a comment on a news post, or if someone likes or comments on news they have published. These notifications will honor Teams notification settings including fully disabling them and quiet hours. Roadmap ID: 98112
Release – June 2023
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Increased Language Availability for Viva Goals – Viva Goals will support a total of 37 languages. Roadmap ID: 115478
Microsoft Viva: Create more than one Connections experience in the same tenant – This new capability enables customers to create multiple distinct Connections experiences and corresponding home sites within the same tenant. Common scenarios include conglomerates or subsidiaries that require different Connections experiences for different users, each with its own dashboard, feed and resources. Roadmap ID: 99916
The SharePoint Success Site is an extension of the great Microsoft 365 learning pathways site, which allows you to use and create curated playlists within a SharePoint site to offer training and support for users. The SharePoint Success Site is a fairly recent introduction to the learning pathways family and is offered as a standalone deployable option from the SharePoint look book.
How to provision
There are two ways to provision the SharePoint Success Site, either directly from the SharePoint look book, or via the learning pathways site itself.
Provision via the SharePoint look book
The SharePoint Success Site is dependent on the learning pathways site, so you will need to provision that first, or make sure that it is updated to the current version. More information on how to update the learning pathways solution can be found here.
You will need to be a global administrator to provision the SharePoint Success Site (described as tenant admin in the look book)
You will need to have an app catalog site in your SharePoint environment. More details on how to create an app catalog site can be found here
You will need to be an app catalog administrator to provision the SharePoint Success Site
Provision via the learning pathways site
Navigate to the learning pathways site in your SharePoint environment
From the navigation menu > select Learning Pathways Administration
Press the ellipsis … > add content pack
Select the SharePoint Success Site
This will then take you through to the SharePoint look book to follow the steps as described above
Once provisioned, the SharePoint Success Site will be deployed as a separate communication site within your environment. The site uses a content pack installed in the learning pathways site, which will be displayed within the site.
Issues and troubleshooting
Learning pathways errors in the SharePoint Success Site
When I tried to provision the SharePoint Success Site it didn’t work as seamlessly as I expected. For me, after provisioning the site via the SharePoint look book I received the following error across all pages displaying the learning pathways web part:
“Microsoft 365 learning pathways has a configuration issue. Ask your administrator for assistance. [Administrators: Please see the browser console for detailed logs. For technical assistance check out the issues list at https://github.com/pnp/custom-learning-office-365/issues.%5D“
Microsoft 365 learning pathways error.
To resolve this:
Navigate to the learning pathways administration page
Press the ellipsis … > add content pack
Select the SharePoint Success Site
A message will appear asking if you have already provisioned the SharePoint Success Site > press complete
This will configure your SharePoint Success Site to consume the newly added content pack and will display correctly.
The Microsoft roadmap roundup is a weekly summary of all the newly added items and changes within the Microsoft 365 roadmap, covering SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive and Microsoft Purview. Here’s all the new and updated Microsoft roadmap items from the past week:
Join 339 other followers
Use the links below to switch between each product’s roadmap updates:
Includes updates for SharePoint, SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva.
Launched (7)
Rolling out (2)
In development (12)
🍾 LAUNCHED
SharePoint Syntex: Provide a document card view for applied Syntex document understanding models – A new library view setting to display extracted model information in a tile view. Roadmap ID:88704
SharePoint Syntex: Content center site design available in Look Book – A Syntex content center site design will be available for provisioning from the SharePoint look book online. Roadmap ID:88705
SharePoint Syntex: Import sample contracts library – This feature enables customers to import a sample contracts library with a document understanding model already applied. They can use this library as is or explore and adapt it for their scenario. Roadmap ID:88707
SharePoint Syntex: Flow template to send customized email after file classification – Flow template to send customized email when file is classified by a Syntex model. Roadmap ID:88709
SharePoint Syntex: Manage contracts in Syntex with automatic tagging and lifecycle management – Manage contracts in Syntex with automatic tagging and approval workflows, automatic clause generation and lifecycle management. Roadmap ID:88713
SharePoint Syntex: Content assembly – Convert your existing docs into templates and generate new docs from list data or manual entries. Roadmap ID:88717
SharePoint Syntex: Content type to advanced metadata search – Use content type classification to find files using advanced metadata search. Roadmap ID:88714
🚂 ROLLING OUT
SharePoint: Private drafts for SharePoint pages and news – We’re adding the ability to create private drafts for pages and news posts. A private draft is visible only to the page author, the people the author chooses to share it with, and site admins. It’s great for creating and editing content that’s not ready for others to see except the people you want to collaborate with. Roadmap ID:85629
Microsoft Viva: Topics in Yammer – Display topic highlights and access topic cards in Yammer conversations. Roadmap ID:72184
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – January 2023
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Power BI and Viva Goals integration – Automatically update Viva Goals (Key Results, Projects) with data from Power BI Report. Roadmap ID:109490
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Elevated Teams Integration – Fully featured Viva Goals app in Team, complete with check-ins within the app. Roadmap ID:106126
Microsoft Stream: Create, view and share playlists in SharePoint – This feature will allow users to organize their video and audio files into a playlist for easy organization, sharing and playback. Users can add any video and audio files to a playlist that they have edit access to. People with access to the playlist and to the files in the playlist can view the videos in order or skip back and forth between items in the playlist. Roadmap ID:109564
Release – February 2023
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Leadership Corner in Viva Engage – this space is an employee’s personalized hub to discover (leader discovery & suggested leaders), see content from (leader stories, activity feed, & sponsored campaigns), and engage with (AMAs & AMA history) their leaders. For more on leadership corner in Viva Engage. Roadmap ID:109575
SharePoint: External File Request in SharePoint Document Library – With the file request feature in SharePoint Document Library, you can choose a folder where others can upload files using a link that you send them. People you request files from can only upload files; they can’t see the content of the folder, edit, delete, or download files, or even see who else has uploaded files. Roadmap ID:103625
SharePoint: Updates to site themes – We are implementing an update for the Office theme in Classic SharePoint will align the presentation with the application experience. Roadmap ID:101150
SharePoint Syntex: Contracts Management In-product site template – This template will enable licensed Syntex users to apply a Contracts Management site template directly from the in-product apply a template UX. This site template include automatic data classification and extraction, a preconfigured content assembly model, templates and preconfigured workflow. It also includes learning material around how to use and extend this template to customize it for your own use case! Roadmap ID:98138
Release – March 2023
🆕 Microsoft 365 admin center: Send email notifications from your own domain – Notifications that cannot be sent from a user’s email account can now be configured to use your own custom verified domain instead of the Microsoft default domain. Roadmap ID:103628
SharePoint:Create pages and news from the SharePoint app bar – Now you’ll be able to start creating pages and news as an action from within the SharePoint app bar. This means, no matter where you are in SharePoint you can jump right into the content creation process and stay in the flow of work. Roadmap ID:98143
Release – April 2023
SharePoint Syntex: Image tagging – Automatically recognize thousands of standard objects and automatically tag the file with recognized items. Roadmap ID:88715
Release – July 2023
SharePoint on Stream: Inline playback of videos in SharePoint Highlighted content web parts for grid, carousel and filmstrip layouts – When users click to play a video in a Highlighted content web part (Grid, Carousel or filmstrip layouts) section of a SharePoint site, the video will play inline. This feature allows users to watch a video without being taken off the SharePoint page and keeps the video playing while users to browse/scroll through the other contents of the page. Roadmap ID:98091
SharePoint: Create more than one home site – Create customized landing experiences for all audiences in your organization with the ability to create up to 10 distinct SharePoint home sites. Multiple home site experiences in SharePoint means you’ll be able to target content to specific groups more seamlessly for scenarios like conglomerates, different departments, roles, and regions. Roadmap ID:99916
In this post we demo the ability to download approvals in Microsoft Teams as PDFs for filing, printing or transferring.
Introduction
Microsoft introduced the ability to save, print and transfer approvals as PDFs in late 2022. With this feature, approval creators are able to save a completed approval request to a PDF file and have the option to print it. At the time of writing, there was very little online about this feature, or what it looks like – so here it is in action!
Demo – save a PDF from approval
There are several ways to trigger a new approval, via Teams chat or channel message, the approvals app or via Power Automate to name a few. In my example, I created a Teams channel approval:
Note: There’s a brief delay after sending your approval before it appears within your activity feed, or the approvals app (approx. 5 minutes). Once it does, you are able to go ahead and approve/ reject it. You cannot save approvals as PDF whilst they are in the ‘requested’ state.
Once the approval has been completed, you can either view the details of the approval (if a channel message) or open the approval up from the approvals app in Teams.
Approval details via the Teams channel message.Approval details via the approvals app.
Once your approval is open > press Save as PDF.
A PDF export of the approval window will download into the local downloads folder on your device. The output will look something like the below:
Current limitations
There is no way currently to change the download location of the PDF or change the behaviour. It would be nice it it was configurable to set it to save to a OneDrive location potentially.
There are no standard approval triggers related to this functionality in Power Automate. Again, for the same purpose as above, it would be good to be able to leverage this functionality via Power Automate to route the downloaded PDF to a OneDrive/ SharePoint location.
The Microsoft roadmap roundup is a weekly summary of all the newly added items and changes within the Microsoft 365 roadmap, covering SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive and Microsoft Purview. Here’s all the new and updated Microsoft roadmap items from the past week:
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Includes updates for SharePoint, SharePoint Syntex and Microsoft Viva.
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In development (5)
🍾 LAUNCHED
N/A
🚂 ROLLING OUT
Microsoft Viva: Topics in Yammer – Preview – Display topic highlights and access topic cards in Yammer conversations. Roadmap ID: 72184
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – January 2023
Microsoft Viva: Viva Connections Customer Facing Analytics – The customer facing analytics module will allow customers to understand the usage metrics for their instance of Viva Connections. and will help them gauge the health of their VC deployment. Roadmap ID:93367
Release – February 2023
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Praise highlights in profile card in Teams and Outlook – With updates coming in February, praises received will be highlighted on a user’s profile card in Teams and Outlook. There are user settings available that prevent praise highlights from being visible on their profile card. Roadmap ID: 109551
🆕 Microsoft Viva: Engage Premium Analytics – New advanced personal, community, and leader analytics to better understand engagement, reach, insights, and sentiment in communities and storyline posts in Viva Engage. Roadmap ID: 109574
🆕 Microsoft Stream: Create, view and share playlists in SharePoint – This feature will allow users to organize their video and audio files into a playlist for easy organization, sharing and playback. Users can add any video and audio files to a playlist that they have edit access to. People with access to the playlist and to the files in the playlist can view the videos in order or skip back and forth between items in the playlist. Roadmap ID: 109564
Microsoft Viva: Discover experts and answers from Topics – Questions on topics will receive automated answers or get referred to subject matter experts. Feature ID: 72188
The Microsoft 365 monthly update includes updates and recently recent features across all of Microsoft 365. Press a button to read about an individual technology or continue reading for more. You can take a look back at previous monthly updates here, plus take a look at our weekly roadmap roundup.
In SharePoint: Tenant URL rename GA, New site templates, streamline site info SP admin center,
SharePoint Tenant URL Rename – General Availability
This capability is now generally available to organizations that have less than 10,000 total sites (including OneDrive and SharePoint sites). With the tenant rename capability, you will be able to have the SharePoint domain in all site URLs updated to the new name you choose and continue with that new name going forward.
The SharePoint team are introducing 3 new SharePoint site templates dedicated to helping you create sites for your HR department, to showcase Events, and a template powered by Microsoft Syntex to do contract management.
SharePoint admin center: Streamlining management of site information across Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups
SharePoint is updating the site detail panel to include Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 Groups information. Admins that have permissions to SharePoint, Teams and Groups admin centers can now manage all related attributes (membership, group name, description, etc.) from a single site detail panel in the SharePoint admin center ‘Active Sites’ tab.
Note: SharePoint admins with SharePoint only permissions will have read-only access to the new attributes.
Modern FAQ – The Modern FAQ app provides users a better way to search for the answers to the questions they have in mind.
Smarter Event Booking – Smarter Event Booking allows you to create events and offer them to your users for registration.
Teams
In Teams: Accept/ block chat invite, scheduled send, start chat with groups, view chat history via search, unread toggle, upload documents via e-signature approvals, 1-click instant poll, PSTN dial-in breakout rooms, 7×7 videos, modern meetings on web, screen pop for incoming PSTN, transcription for calls on Android
Accept or block a group chat invitation from an unmanaged user
This feature brings the ability to accept or block a one-on-one chat from an unmanaged user that already exists in Teams. Microsoft are extending and additional safety layer for Teams users to also accept or block a group chat invitation from an unmanaged user.
Similar to delaying the delivery of emails in Outlook, you now can manually select the future date and time you would like a chat message to be delivered. Users can simply right-click the send button to schedule send and have the confidence their message will be delivered as scheduled.
Start a Teams Chat with Distribution Groups, Mail-enabled Security Groups, and Office 365 Groups
You will now be able to start a Teams Chat with Distribution Groups, Mail-enabled Security Groups, and O365 Groups. This feature will respect the limits on members in a group chat, currently set to 250 members.
Click on search message results to view the entire chat conversation history
Users who click on the chat message search result will now be presented with the entire message thread, regardless of the age of the message. This update creates efficiency as it ensures the user has the full context of the conversation.
Users will now find it easier to view, triage and catch up with their unread chat message notifications by easily turning on the unread toggle button in their activity feed panel. Alternatively, users will also be able to turn off the unread toggle to view both read and unread notifications.
Upload documents from OneDrive for E-signature Approvals
When creating an e-signature request in Approvals, users can now upload a document to be signed from OneDrive for Business directly. This enables access to your document from anywhere and on any device.
Defined binary responses to get immediate answers to your spoken poll question (yes/no, thumb up/down, heart/broken heart). Presenters can launch these polls without preparing in advance – say your question out loud then click the corresponding response icon.
Admins can enable this policy in the Teams Admin Center, so that on acceptance of a PSTN call, an automatic browser launch can happen alongside Teams, displaying relevant information (CRM data, case data, etc.) to the user. This feature can also now be turned off in user settings.
Automatically view up to 49 videos (7×7) in Teams meeting
With this update, users will be able to automatically see up to 49 videos (7×7) on their screen by default without an explicit action. The actual number of videos seen by a user will depend on hardware/device capabilities.
The modern meeting and calling experience will be available for Teams on the web in Chrome and Edge browsers – including improved pre-join, dynamic view, and the updated control bar.
Transcription for calls on Microsoft Teams for Android
Transcription for 1:1 calls and group calls is now available on the Teams app for Android for whenever you’re on the go or just don’t have a notepad handy.
These features are currently available for Teams for Education customers:
Updated Assignment List view for Teachers/ students – The Assignments list for teachers and students has been updated to a set of tabs for easy view of upcoming and past assignments.
Grade Trends and Distribution view in the Gradebook – In the Gradebook for Assignments, we’ve added the average grade for the class, all assignments, and for each student.
OneNote Class Notebook viewer for Teams Mobile – Through this new feature, users will be able to open and view OneNote notebooks right within their Teams Mobile apps.
Instant Poll in Teams Meeting – With Instant Poll, users can launch a pre-defined binary question (Yes/No, Thumbs Up/Down, Heart/Heartbroken) with just a single click in the Polls side pane during a meeting.
Intelligent chat message translation in Teams for iOS and Android – When you receive a message in Teams that is not in your preferred language, Teams asks if the text should be translated to your preferred language
Open Existing Whiteboards in Teams Meetings – Pull up the whiteboard you prepared before class with Open existing board in Teams meetings, and save time by no longer having to start your whiteboard from scratch.
Embed online videos in Whiteboard in Teams – Avoid fussing with Tab and Window switching that interrupts the flow of a meeting by including supplemental videos directly on the whiteboard with embedded online videos.
View Parent Contact Details on Teams Mobile – From the Parent App, teachers can now view a list of each student’s parent or guardian contact details listed in a Contact Card.
Assign Seats in Together Mode – With this latest innovation, meeting organizers and presenters can now assign seats to participants in Together mode.
Career coach updates – A few steps within the Career Coach set up and customization requirements in Teams Admin Center (TAC) have been reduced and transitioned into optional steps to simplify upfront configuration load on IT admins.
Government
These features currently available to Microsoft’s commercial customers in multi-tenant cloud environments are now rolling out to our customers in US Government Community Cloud (GCC), US Government Community Cloud High (GCC-High), and/or United States Department of Defense (DoD):
Connectors in GCC – Teams Connectors, which support webhook integrations, will be made available in GCC.
Casting from Teams desktop client to Microsoft Teams Rooms in GCC-H – For quick ad-hoc sessions that don’t require setting up a formal meeting, users can leverage Teams casting to wirelessly connect to a Teams Room and display content from the Teams desktop client (Windows and Mac). Users can broadcast their screen and cast content stored locally on their computer or accessible via Office 365.
Power Apps
In Power Apps: Formula repair (preview), 25% of new customer licenses, new ways to share ideas, release of modern learn page, developers tool update, table support for message/ individual publish, SharePoint virtual table updates, custom/ new views & forms on AAD user table, custom multi-table lookups support virtual tables, locked tabs on mobile apps, optimised command bar on tablet apps
Formula repair now in preview
With formula repair, now you may skip some of the troubleshooting effort as whenever you have a formula error, Power Apps will try to come up with a fix suggestion leveraging the power of AI. Once there’s a fix, a single click on the apply button will help you get rid of the error.
Power Apps licenses 25% off for the first year for new customers
There is a new 25% off offer on Power Apps Per user licenses. New customers of Power Apps, who don’t have any Per user licenses already, can save 25% on their first year. The offer is available now through March 31st, 2023. To purchase, speak with your Microsoft representative, or contact a Microsoft specialist or CSP partner from the Power Apps pricing page. Click on Contact Sales.
New ways to share Power Apps community forum ideas
As of November 29th 2022, Power Apps Ideas is now on a brand-new platform powered by Dynamics 365 Customer Service Community. On top of providing our community with a brand-new interface to share ideas, the migration will enable our product teams to be much more responsive to user feedback and better integrate your ideas into our product roadmap.
The Power Apps team have announced the release of the modern Learn page in Power Apps. The new Learn experience has consolidated content from all Microsoft resources to help with your onboarding and upskilling journey.
Power Platform Developers tool – October 2022 update
The Power Apps team have shared the October update for the Power Platform Developer tools. With this update, we are releasing some capabilities that have been in high demand by the developer community including: command line updates, solution pack, unpack and sync, Azure DevOps/ GitHub actions and more.
Tables now support configuring Messages and individual Publish
Messages (also known as displaystrings) are messages seen in the Dynamics apps built on Power Apps. You can now configure these messages to match your own names for tables and direct users to do the right thing in various situations when they are presented with these tailored messages. You can also translate these messages into any of the languages installed in your environment.
With this update we’re also bringing a Publish command to the table level, meaning you can publish changes made to Forms, Views or Messages at the table level – avoiding a Publish of the whole solution (or all customizations). This will mean you can publish just your changes and complete that faster than publishing everything all at once.
Improvement to SharePoint Virtual Tables – Multi-Select choice fields and Boolean fields
Multi-Select choice fields and Boolean fields in SharePoint Lists are now fully functional in Dataverse virtual tables. You can see all options labeled properly, Dataverse allows for multiple option selection, filtering of the column to display rows now works properly.
Customize or create new Views and Forms on the AAD User Table
The AAD User virtual table previously did not allow users to modify which fields are displayed in views and forms, and users were unable to build custom views and forms. This restriction has been relaxed and users can modify forms and views or create new forms and views using any of the available AAD User fields.
Custom Multi-Table Lookups now support Virtual Tables
Custom Multi-table lookups allow users to build a lookup that retrieves data from multiple tables at once. An out of the box example is Customer that looks up data from Account and Contact. Users can build their own lookups using SDKs or the APIs to have custom multi-table lookups.
Tables can only participate in one of these lookups if they are not already part of an existing multi-table lookup.
Until now, only local tables could be one of the referenced tables. Now Virtual Tables can be used as a referenced table. This includes the out of the box AAD User Virtual Table.
App makers can now choose to lock the form tabs at the top as they scroll. Form tabs will always be visible and will help users to visualize and update data in larger form context. This also provides ability to switch tab at any time.
The command bar for tablets mobile application is at the bottom of the screen and can only display four commands. With this change app makers can configure tablet command bar to be displayed at the top and utilize full space to show more commands.
In Power Automate: 7 new verified, 16 new independent connectors, Power Automate Desktop update, new process mining capabilities
7 new verified & 16 independent publisher connectors released in October 2022
There were 7 new verified connectors and 7 updates from different service owners released in October, as well as 16 new Independent Publisher connectors. These connectors have solutions and tools for Commerce, Finance, Social Media, AI, Lifestyle and Entertainment and much more.
New process mining capabilities within Power Automate (Preview)
Microsoft have announced the preview of new process mining capabilities from Minit available in process advisor within Microsoft Power Automate. In this update, the process advisor powered with Minit introduces templates that enable customers to seamlessly drive powerful business process insights from cloud flows in Power Automate as well as insights from Microsoft Power Virtual Agents and other systems of records like SAP.
In Power BI: On-premises data gateway release, Power BI November 2022 feature summary, paginated reports support in Power BI Pro, new cache refresh settings Power BI Premium, save copy of report & collapse navigational pane
On-premises data gateway November 2022
The Power BI team have announced the release of the November update for the on-premises data gateway (version 3000.150.11). This version of the gateway 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 November version of Power BI Desktop.
The Power BI team have announced support for paginated reports in Power BI Pro. Now, Microsoft Power BI customers have the flexibility to create and consume interactive reports as well as paginated reports using Power BI Pro.
Paginated reports are traditional operational reports best used for multi-page list-type reports for operational processes with document-like output requirements. One key benefit of paginated reports is that they are programmable which gives report authors more flexibility and control of the structure and formatting of their reports.
The Power BI team have announced that ClientCacheRefreshPolicy is now a configurable property for your Power BI Premium workspaces. Admins can override scheduled cache refresh settings for an entire workspace, improving the performance of their semantic models.
The default behavior in the Power BI service is to automatically cache dashboard, tile, and report queries upon refresh to provide an optimal report viewing experience. For enterprise semantic model deployments, where hundreds of reports and artifacts are built from a single Power BI dataset, automatic caches may cause performance issues. With the ClientCacheRefreshPolicy property, admins can disable the automatic cache refresh setting to optimize the behavior of their Power BI datasets.
Save a copy of a report/ collapse navigation pane in organizational app
After listening to customer feedback, the Power BI team have decided to bring back the feature in the org app that allowed you to save copies of reports. App consumers who have build permissions can now save copies of reports to their “My workspace” from the app. Further, app authors can now by default collapse the app navigation pane for their app consumers. Enabling this feature would allow your app consumers to land on full screen mode.
SharePoint Stuff 