Office 2013 clients’ connections to commercial Office 365 services will not be supported after October 13, 2020. After this date, ongoing investments in the Office 365 cloud services – including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business – will proceed based on post-Office 2013 requirements
Your users will soon be able to add and delete comments on list items. Users can view all comments on a list item and filter between views that show comments or activity related to an item.
Microsoft Lists: calendar view – Visualize any list with items that use date column information in a calendar view. Roadmap ID: 64167
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: 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
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – November 2020
SharePoint: SharePoint spaces General Availability – SharePoint spaces moves from Public Preview to General Availability. Roadmap ID: 67135
As a general rule I’ve found that most users who are in your M365 tenancy should have OneDrive irrespective of whether they are using it or not.
During a project I was involved with, we were compiling a list of all our M365 users home drive source locations to migrate the data into their respective OneDrive’s. Completing this exercise we found that not everyone in our organisation actually had OneDrive provisioned.
Information online as to the reasons why was scant, with much of what others describe around licensing issues not being applicable in this situation.
When you look at a user’s OneDrive information within the M365 admin center, you will see this:
If a user in your tenancy doesn’t have OneDrive, you will see this message.
I’m not 100% sure why these users are without OneDrive as the accounts checked hadn’t been blocked. However they have not had any sign in activity for the last 30 days – although we have set our retention for OneDrive to be 90 days before deleting so it’s still a bit of a mystery.
The solution
Microsoft have provided documentation on how to pre-provision OneDrive for users in your organization which is exactly what we needed. The documentation details two ways in which you can approach the problem:
Pre-provision OneDrive for users – Create a list of users who need OneDrive > save as a txt file > run PowerShell to provision OneDrive for those users
The script should loop through until it completes for all users in your tenancy. You should see it looping through like in the example screenshot below:
Example of once the PowerShell script has been run, the script looping through each user in your tenancy.
Issues & resolution steps
Before I start describing my experiences of running the script, I am a relative PowerShell novice so forgive my ignorance if some of this is elementary. I had some trouble getting the script to run, which I think was more to do with the cmdlets I had installed (I’ve had a new laptop recently) rather than the script.
Issues with Connect-sposervice
I had issues connecting to the SharePoint admin center, I was receiving an error like this:
Issues connecting with the sposervice cmdlet.
I found this post on koskila.net that is really helpful and may help others with similar issues. In the end I got the script to run by removing the $credential variable at the start of the Microsoft script and connecting to the msolservice and sposervice directly.
With the $credential variable removed, I was prompted to login twice, once for msolservice, and again for sposervice, which then authenticated moved on to the next stage of the script.
Example of my changes to the script to allow me to run properly.
Microsoft will be gradually enabling a modern capability to easily add custom content types to SharePoint lists & libraries that allow multiple content types.
Targeted release: mid-October to late November.
Standard release: starting in December, to complete end of January 2021
SharePoint page authors will soon need to supply required information before a page or news post can be published if one or more required properties have been set up in the pages library.
Targeted release: late October
Standard release: late November; complete early December
Information barriers – Information barriers are policies that can be configured to prevent individuals or groups from communicating with each other. Roadmap ID: 57313
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – October 2020
Microsoft Lists: column settings in Grid view – The capabilities when in Lists “Grid” view (previously Quick Edit) will now allow people to pin a column to the filter’s pane, format the column, show/hide columns, and hide their column(s). Roadmap ID: 68714
Microsoft Lists: Support for thousands separator in Number column – When Lists owners and members leverage the Number column, they can now choose if the comma should appear or not. Roadmap ID: 68716
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).
October 19, 2020 – Enable save to SharePoint
October 31, 2020 – English caption support for recordings in SharePoint
November 1 – 15, 2020 – All new recordings saved to SharePoint
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
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
🚂 ROLLING OUT
N/A
⌛ IN DEVELOPMENT
Release – November 2020
Active time spent reports on SharePoint Site Usage – You can now get reports with aggregated data on the amount of time that users are spending on your intranet sites. Roadmap ID: 57159
Release – December 2020
New leadership connection site template – The template brings together conversations from Yammer, news, resources, and showcases upcoming events. Roadmap ID: 71752
When you are in page edit mode and you choose to move a web part from one portion of the page to another, you’ll now see a ghosting effect of the web part you grabbed, as a reminder of what you’re moving.
New ghosting effect when dragging & dropping web parts in modern SharePoint pages.
Manage default policy duration for expiring guest access
Rolling out now, admins will be able to create policies to revoke guest access to SharePoint sites and individual OneDrive’s after a defined period of time. Site admins will also receive notifications via email of upcoming guest user access expirations.
NOTE: this policy does not apply to guests who already have access to sites, documents, and files before this setting is applied. After a guest loses access to a site, any user with the ability to share content externally can re-invite the guest to each document or item as needed.
Expiring guest access for SharePoint and OneDrive.
Microsoft Search in SharePoint and Office.com will now include results from Power BI. This means search results will show Power BI reports, dashboards, and workspaces, which can be important content to be discovered.
NOTE: Microsoft Search administrators can disable this feature in Microsoft Search settings through the Microsoft 365 admin center.
Microsoft have increased their efforts to improve the performance of Teams to allow it to continue to scale across devices and differing levels of internet connectivity. Here’s a summary of the updates:
This feature was rolled out as part of the new multi-window experience. In order to take advantage of this new view, users will need to turn on the new multi-window meeting experience.
Large gallery view in Teams is now available in the new multi-window experience.
Microsoft have improved the pre-join meeting experience for Teams meetings including easier discovery of audio, video, and device configurations before joining a meeting.
As part of the latest enhancements to reverse number lookup in Teams, the caller name will also show up in your activity feed, call history, and voicemail.
Microsoft have announced a series of new feature updates to Microsoft Teams phones that are available now in version 1449/1.0.94.2020071702:
Redesigned Home Screen: A new, simple view providing up-to-date information about your calling and meeting activity, reminders of your current and upcoming meetings, and access to quick actions like replying to missed calls and listening to voicemail.
Customize Quick Access to Apps: Set the default views for your phone by pinning and re-ordering your apps suited to your needs.
Auto accept incoming meeting and call requests: Teams phones can now be provisioned to automatically accept incoming meetings nudges and calls, allowing instant, hands free connection to incoming join requests.
Dedicated Teams button: new and upcoming Teams phones will have a dedicated Teams button to quickly launch Teams app on the device home screen.
Updates for both the Windows and Android versions of the Teams Rooms app, including:
Microsoft Teams Rooms on Windows, app version 4.6.20.0 now available
Live captions: Meeting participants joining from a Teams Room can now view live captions turned in a Teams meeting. In-room participants can also turn live captions on or off from the center of room console. Captions will appear at the bottom of the meeting experience shown on the front of room display.
3×3 gallery view: Meeting participants can now view up to nine participants in the meeting gallery view, shown on the front of room display.
Direct Guest Join with Zoom Rooms (Preview): Teams Rooms and Zoom Room devices can now connect to each other’s meeting services via embedded web technologies. This will reduce the friction you experience when trying to join calls from external partners or clients who may not be using the same meeting service.
Microsoft Teams Rooms on Android, app version 1.0.94.2020062501 now available
Pin video: Now you can pin the video stream of a meeting participant from the Teams Rooms device, keeping the pinned user’s video visible in the gallery. This “pinned view” is only applied to the gallery view in the meeting room and not to other meeting participant’s views.
Support for structured meeting role and roster controls: Allows meeting organizers to assign meeting roles (presenter and attendee) from the Teams Rooms experience, enabling participants to take specific actions associated with those roles (e.g. mute participants, present content, etc.)
Managers, leaders or teachers now have an easy way to check in with how their team or students are feeling — either in general, or about a specific topic like work-life balance, the status of a project, current events, or a change within the organization.
IT or Teams admins can install the Reflect extension from GitHub and make it available to their users in the message extension menu.
Microsoft Whiteboard is integrated within every Teams meeting, enabling meeting participants to join in. Recent updates include the ability to add sticky notes and text to a canvas, making it easier to contribute if you’re using a device without a digital pen, and added the ability to move and re-order objects on the canvas through a simple drag and drop gesture.
Walkie Talkie is a push-to-talk experience that enables instant and secure voice communication over the cloud, turning your personal- or company-owned Android smartphones and tablets into a walkie-talkie. It reduces the number of devices you need to have while providing clear communication free of radio interference, static and no distance limitations in range.
Integrations between Teams and RealWear allow field workers to remain 100% hands-free using a voice-controlled user interface while maintaining situational awareness in loud and hazardous environments.
You can now can create customized Praise badges to express their culture and values when recognizing successes and fostering comradery. Praise badges can help improve workplace culture and job satisfaction, from corporate headquarters to Firstline Workers.
Create a custom praise badge in the Teams admin center.
Screen share from chat allows you to immediately start sharing your screen in a one-to-one or group chat. This entry point was previously governed by the AllowPrivateCalling policy. If this policy was disabled, users weren’t able to screen share from chat.
This will now be governed by the ScreenSharingMode policy.
“Only Me” Admin Policy for all Organizer Meeting Options
IT Admins can apply a policy that defaults “Only Me” to allow only educators (or the meeting organizer) to enter the meeting and keep students in the lobby until the educator admits them.
Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) connections in the digital classroom
Now with Social and Emotional Learning badges in Praise and new SEL sticker pack for OneNote, educators can encourage the development of these critical life skills while in a remote or hybrid learning environment.
NOTE: The SEL sticker pack for OneNote is available now, SEL badges in Praise coming soon.
Social and Emotional Learning badges in Praise and the new SEL sticker pack for OneNote.
Educators now have the option to choose a presenter mode in Microsoft Whiteboard in Teams. This allows for more flexibility to either present the digital whiteboard with Read-Only access for students, or to allow (or adjust) student access when it’s time to have the whole class collaborate.
Now students will be able to hone-in on the materials being presented in their online class. When a teacher is sharing their screen, students can choose “Focus Mode” from the “…” menu so that only the content shows without any distracting videos.
The SMART Learning Suite app gives teachers the power to create, edit, deliver, manage and share interactive lessons directly within Microsoft Teams, enhancing instruction from the platform and workflows they already use.
Sideloading and custom (line-of-business) apps are now available in GCC. GCC tenant administrators can decide whether to upload a custom app to their tenant environment and publish it to their tenant app catalog.
Data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities in Microsoft 365 government clouds will be extended to include Microsoft Teams chat and channel messages, including private channel messages.
If your organization has DLP, you can now define policies that prevent people from sharing sensitive information in a Microsoft Teams channel or chat session.
A new home screen for the OneDrive iOS launched this month. The new home experience will help you quickly pick up where you left off on recent and offline files and easily re-discover memories from the past.
Users who create or upload Word, Excel, PowerPoint or any other type of file to OneDrive or SharePoint will now get email notifications whenever someone else leaves a comment on their file.
Microsoft are enabling users to be able to turn off comment notifications for individual files in the details pane. This feature is also incorporated in sharing emails as an actionable message action.
With the Surface Duo now generally available the OneDrive app is now also available for the device. Surface Duo and OneDrive enhances multitasking with drag-and-drop functionality as well as the built-in PDF editor for book-like reading and mark-up experience.
Power BI embedded as system dashboard in model-driven apps (preview)
Power BI embedded as a system dashboard in the Power Apps model-driven app is now in public preview. This enables adding a reference to an online Power BI report or dashboard as a system dashboard.
Power BI embedded as system dashboard in model-driven apps.
Now in public preview, GitHub actions will allow developers to create their own software development lifecycle (SDLC) workflows when building Apps, Flows, Virtual agents, connectors and other assets backed by the Common Data Service on the Power platform.
Customize Teams with built-in Power Platform capabilities (preview)
Teams customers can make and use custom tabs, personal apps, chat bots, and more using a powerful onboard data platform and approachable low-code tools from the Power Platform.
The public preview of embedded Power Platform capabilities in Microsoft Teams is now open.
New solution import experience with connections and environment variables
The Power Apps team have announced a broad set of new ALM capabilities for importing solutions. In addition to these modern new interfaces, now you can establish connections as well as set values for environment variables while importing solutions.
Environment variables are now generally available.
New solution import experience with connections and environment variables.
Last month, Power Automate saw the introduction of nine brand new connectors to the connector line-up, taking the total to 400 out of the box connectors!
Azure AD Identity Protection: Azure AD Identity Protection is a tool that allows organizations to discover, investigate, and remediate identity-based risks in their environment.
CDK Drive Customer: CDK Drive Customer is an API published by CDK Global and can be used it to search, view and update existing records, or create new customers.
CDK Drive Service Vehicles: CDK Drive Service Vehicles is an API published by CDK Global and the connector will help you maintain vehicle details on the service vehicle record and keep it up to date.
Cloudmersive Video and Media: The Cloudmersive Video and Media Service was created to enable customers to effortlessly convert videos, audio files, and media between different file formats at scale and on-demand.
GetAccept: The GetAccept sales enablement platform can help sales teams close more deals faster with AI powered dealscore and sales coaching, coupled with sales automation and e-signing.
IN-D Payables: IN-D Payables is an AI-based invoice processing bot that can smartly extract things that matter most, like PO number, invoice number, and more, from millions of invoices in no time.
Microsoft 365 compliance: Microsoft 365 compliance solutions help you discover, protect, and govern your data, address regulations and standards, and mitigate insider risks.
MotaWord Translations: MotaWord enables professional translation of your documents into 95+ languages with blazing speed. It’s a pioneer of collaborative translation and works with 18000+ professional translators to empower your business in the international stage.
Nitro: Nitro Sign is an eSigning tool that allows you to get your documents electronically signed faster and more securely.
Announced at Microsoft Ignite 2020 but now in preview, Power Automate Desktop enables coders and non-coders alike to automate processes and tasks across desktop and web applications, bringing the value of Softomotive capabilities directly into Microsoft Power Automate.
How to automate desktop-based tasks with Power Automate Desktop.
Now in public preview, Connection References is a new concept that makes it easier for customers to maintain a level of abstraction between flows and the connections used by them. Connection references are particularly useful when moving flows across environments, updating flow definitions, automating deployment pipelines for secure, and healthy Application Lifecycle Management.
The September 2020 update for the On-premises data gateway (version 3000.58.6) includes updates for the Mashup Engine, .Net Framework, dprecation for Kerberos SSO and more.
The Power BI team have announced new Power BI integrations for Microsoft Teams to make it easier to discover and use data within your organization, including:
New Power BI App for Teams that helps you view and work with Power BI content
New Teams Search experience to find and open Power BI content
New Teams Chat experiences to quickly find and share Power BI content
Using the Power BI app for Microsoft Teams to view a report, find an insight, and start a chat about the data with a colleague.
Several updates in this month’s feature summary including updates for analytics, reporting, mobile, service, modeling, data connectivity plus many more!
Deployment pipelines is now generally available, with some new additional features: incremental refresh support and the creation of pipelines from the workspace page.
Now in preview, smart narrative visualizations help you quickly summarize visuals and reports by providing relevant out-of-the-box insights that are customizable.
Using this feature creators can add narratives to their report to address key takeaways, point out trends, edit the language, and format it to fit a specific audience.
More changes are being made to the ‘new look’ of the Power BI service, including navigation updates to give you more space to work with your content, provided options for report authors to configure their page navigation, updated the action bar for quicker access to common actions, and more.
A new, simplified action bar within Power BI is just one of the ‘new look’ updates.
Two new actions are available for the Power BI connector in Power Automate. Now, you may easily leverage the Power BI export API for either Power BI reports or paginated reports in your Power Automate workflows.
These new actions make it easy for anyone to quickly export their Power BI content in a variety of supported formats and scenarios.
Export to file for Power BI Reports (preview) and Export to file for Paginated Reports (preview) are available now.
Several updates are being rolled out for paginated reports in Power BI, including new authentication type support for Azure SQL DB and Azure Synapse, Common Data Service data source support, improved multi-value parameters support for DAX and more.
Power Virtual Agents within Microsoft Teams (public preview)
The Power Virtual Agents team have announced the Public Preview of deep integration between Power Virtual Agents and Microsoft Teams. Users can easily create their own digital assistants within Teams and make them available to their colleagues to chat with.
And better yet, this functionality is included with your existing Teams licenses and the bot creation experience is embedded within Teams itself – empowering all of your employees to easily build and share bots within Teams.
Power Virtual Agents within Teams (public preview).
Power Virtual Agents is HIPAA, SOC, ISO, and CSA compliant
Power Virtual Agents is now covered under HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) BAA (Business Associate Agreement) and is a Core Online Service in the Microsoft Online Services Terms (OST).
Power Virtual Agents also acquired System and Organization Controls (SOC), International Organization for Standardization (ISO), and Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) certifications which are required by enterprise customers.
The first product from Project Cortex – SharePoint Syntex is now generally available. SharePoint Syntex uses advanced AI and machine teaching to amplify human expertise, automate content processing, and transform content into knowledge.
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
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In development (1)
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⌛ 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
