Earlier this year, Microsoft released updates to Microsoft SharePoint 2016 and SharePoint Online in Office 365. If you aren’t familiar with SharePoint, we wanted to go into a review of all the new updates the platform has seen this year, and explain how they can make using SharePoint 2016 better and easier than ever.
SharePoint
One of the first changes automatically noticed is the new landing page for SharePoint that is visible in the app launcher, along with Mail, Calendar, there are also sites the change was made to the landing page to make it easier than ever for users to navigate the sites.
SharePoint Home
The left navigation is giving you the sites you currently follow – the same way you have sites in the mobile app above. Next, there are recent sites you have accessed but are not marked as “follow.” We then have Links.
The main page is split into two different sections, Frequent and Suggested. Understandably the “Frequent” describes the sites you actively visit, and “Suggested” are recommended sites based on your activity. The home page is based on the Office Graph (linking people, documents, and email together), so it will always look a bit different based on the individuals’ work and the files they access.
Each site comes with a board (as they are known in Delve) showing recent information but also the template type such as Group, Blog and Video Channel.
If you are a heavy user of SharePoint in your organization, this can be a great way of accessing the content that is important.
New SharePoint Sites
Published content can be added to team sites, and it helps to form news from your organization. You will be able to see this news both in a mobile app but also in the browser. Using the office graph, you will be able to see blogs, news articles, and other information as it is published, keeping you up-to-date. The responsive design of the new team sites, blogs, and pages helps to form the content at the screen size of your choice without any additional work. With the SharePoint Framework (a new development model), your SharePoint partners and app providers will be able to build into these allowing you to have both your news but also information from external sources such as your MIS.
Creating Sites has become easier and will also provide an Office 365 Group, so you receive all of your content, lists and files along with the communication
There are two options. A team collaboration site or a publishing site – the team site will create the Office 365 Group for your team while we didn’t get to see the publishing template.
Team sites have taken a new name. What do you get when you mix team sites and the modern Office 365 Groups? That’s right, modern team sites! You can still create your normal document libraries, lists, and add metadata to sites, but we get a few other options. A new main feature sees it is the ability to spotlight content from the site in the news and activity area of the site.
These are also shown on the mobile experience, and documents and pages can be pinned to the top for news, and activity is drawn up by the power of the Office Graph.
Pages
Pages in the new sites are easy to create and very similar to Sway without all the styling. Easily add a banner, content, documents, document libraries, and other web parts to the pages. A manager can create a page on a particular service or product that allows workers to get the documents, images, and other systems that integrate with SharePoint all in one page (a little bit more than what Sway offers). It will also build the page as a responsive design so it can easily be read in the SharePoint app.
Lists
Lists have become easier to manage, filter, and edit with a quick view, a fly out option to update the metadata but also the ability to create your views that can be accessed in the browser PowerApps.
PowerApps
PowerApps allows you to generate an app automatically, customize is, create an app from scratch, and share and run apps that you create or that others create and share with you. You can use built-in connections, or ones built by your company to connect PowerApps to cloud services such as Office 365, Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, Dropbox and OneDrive and on-premises systems including SharePoint, SQL Server, Oracle databases, SAP and more.
Microsoft Flow
Microsoft flow gives you the ability to create a simple, automated workflow between your favorite app and services to get notifications, synchronize files, collect data, and more. You can easily create all of these in the browser using these new features in Office 365.
Conclusion
With all of the new additions and changes to SharePoint 2016, it’s becoming easier than ever to navigate and customize for your specific needs.
For more information on a SharePoint solution for your company, contact Biz Technology Solutions, Inc. at (704) 658-1707 or info@biztechnologysolutions.com
