Wow! I’m still recovering from #SPC19. In fact it was just yesterday I was speaking at SharePoint Conference, but I wanted to get this blog post out there for those who may have missed the nuggets.

Join me and 6 experts on the Best of SPC Experts Panel When: Wednesday May 29th 11 AM Eastern / 3 PM GMT Featuring 5 MVPs 2 RDs and Microsoft Product Manager.

Joel Oleson MVP & RD – Microsoft Search, OneDrive, Governance, Content Services, Mixed Reality
Eric Overfield MVP & RD – UX, SharePoint Framework
Erica Toelle MVP – Content Services & Records Management
Ryan Schouten MVP- SPFx, Developer, Power Pack and Business Apps
Bill Baer MS Product Manager & MCM Instructor – SharePoint 2019, Geo, Search and Mixed Reality
Paul Swider – Business Apps, Power Pack

>> Register for the Best of SPC Experts Panel

we’ll discuss the announcements and all the announcements, have a fun discussion about the impact and discuss silly or crazy things that happened at SPC.

Microsoft Search (GA) Launch a *massive* UX investment across Bing, Windows, Edge, Office, SharePoint, Office 365, powered by Graph plus AI and Machine learning and personalization and Unified Administration and way more is Shipping – in the words of Jeff Teper the biggest “One Microsoft” project or initiative he’s ever been part of. Personally I spent more time in Search sessions since I didn’t want to miss anything that might impact my “Real Life” Microsoft Search session where I drilled down into things you could do today with Microsoft Search in preparation for more that will be coming out later this year. Microsoft Searches biggest release is now available to targeted release tenants. A ton more investments in image text extraction, video speech to text, and audio speech to text extraction also contribute to the investments.
Download my Microsoft Search Strategy deck that I delivered at SPC.
- Bookmarks, PowerApps, Q&A, Locations all configurable in a new Unified Administration (Targeted release). The new enhanced recommendations will come from the behavior of the people using search. The more it is used the better it will get.
- Windows 10 updates and integration coming later this year
- Search in Office will provide the ability to search for a document and the ability to take parts from those documents and automatically include them in the document, spreadsheet or PowerPoint. (Demo in the keynote showed adding a slide from PowerPoint into a word doc without ever leaving word)
- Announced Public API for search including the extensibility of custom search refiners, connectors, verticals, and filters.
- The best place to start with the new GA “General Availability” of Microsoft Search: http://www.bing.com/business/explore
- An enterprise-wide Microsoft Search experience, from the search box in the suite bar.
- More resources on Microsoft Search
SharePoint Home Sites New Announcement – “SharePoint home sites, a dynamic, engaging, and personalized employee experience for your organization.” Jeff Teper’s keynote had us on the edge of our seats and home sites definitely got a warm intro. You can read more about them on the SharePoint blog post “The intelligent intranet featuring SharePoint home sites” and read more at SharePoint home sites: a landing for your organization on the intelligent intranet
Yammer enhancements announced including Answer Bot and Best Answer and Microsoft Stream Transcription and other enhancements for employee engagement and communications. Read more at Yammer investments add engagement and compliance capabilities
- Yammer built in bot auto-responses for FAQ & Best Answer feature, you can ask a question and then the person asking the question or a group admin can mark the best answer—making the knowledge easier to share and reuse in the future. Additionally, a group can feature intelligent, bot-like responses to frequently asked questions. Record, upload, and share video with updated Microsoft Stream mobile app. Embed a quiz, poll, or survey in a video with Microsoft Stream.
- New Microsoft Stream mobile features, interactivity and more announced at SharePoint Conference 2019
Differential sync announced for all file types! The keynote featured a 1GB bmp file where only text was added in MS Paint and instead of the entire file syncing only the changes or about 1-2MB was synced… it was done in seconds.
Many new OneDrive, SharePoint File enhancements announced for sharing a file quickly, securely and in a compliant way has improved immensely – add a link to an email or teams chat and change the permissions on the fly. Love the new “Request Files” feature. You can create an RFP folder and send it out as a place where people can put documents… it has a built in ability to make it easy to collect files from others. The new “easy-to-read links” will reduce the long ugly URLs we live with and “Popular around me” in the Shared with me section of OneDrive will simplify and enhance discovery. See recent files, your files, frequent shared libraries when attaching a file or sharing a link from Outlook mobile. In addition to updates to annotation options when marking up PDFs you can annotate the PDF to circle items or add notes for you and others. Microsoft Teams Tabs in mobile experiences. In addition, Link to this Slide will allow you to send links to an individual PowerPoint slide. Control sharing settings on groups of sites at once including the ability to expire sharing links across not only the whole site but many.Document compliance enhancements including… SharePoint Online service supports Azure Information Protection encryption on document upload, understands label policies applied to the document, and applies label permissions to document open when the document is in SharePoint or OneDrive. Updated content services white paper, and guidelines for GxP compliance, providing the blueprint for organizations that comply with regulatory regimes like FDA 21 CFR Part 11
Site rename got the biggest clap during the keynote. There’s also more compliance with DLP restricted sharing. Don’t miss the new Adoption kits across Office 365.
Performance enhancements on storage, sharing, and more. Jeff explained SharePoint is the biggest consumer of Azure storage. Data from Microsoft 365 is ten times faster than it was just two years ago. Your user experience has improved in Office 365 is three times faster than a year ago, with investments across our architecture that accelerate your experience even when you are working far from your own data center. After you upload a file, you should be able to search for it in no time. Including now up to 320 previews and new ability to add comments on all file types (not just MS Office). You’ve heard of Machine Learning… Announcing Machine Teaching. Here you can teach the AI what parts of a document are and how to perform otherwise manual tasks for tagging or using document parts. updates to Supervision including new out of the box machine learning models to harness intelligence and identify questionable content
New Architectures from SharePoint 2019 in Azure and SQL Azure to Multi Geo GA 1) In SharePoint Server 2019 we’re providing more flexible deployment options to include support for Azure Stack and SQL Managed Instances. 2) New managed instance support for SharePoint Server 2019 allows you to leverage the benefits of managed instances with SharePoint environments hosted in Azure. Multi Geo Capabilities has released as Generally available what was in preview.
New Developer experiences: New APIs and File Developer Experiences more comprehensive site collection enumeration API, will be coming soon in beta. SharePoint Framework 1.8.2, released two weeks ago, updates compatibility to support Node.js 10. SharePoint Framework 1.9 coming soon, there’s enhancements coming to Microsoft Graph connected controls. In addition to the Windows Community Toolkit which features controls for working with Microsoft Graph and Files, we’re also adding a new Microsoft Graph Toolkit for the web. Fluid Framework – Improvements to development efforts “revolutionary new capabilities for real-time, intelligence-assisted collaboration” announced at build, but demonstrated during the keynote. The keynote demo we saw showed many browser windows at once showing what it could be like with a seamless editing experience. Many low level protocols and experiences have been optimized to make multi user editing better.
Business Apps PowerApps and Flow Improvements – Starting in summer 2019, you’ll be able to use PowerApps to build custom forms for document libraries, building metadata-enriched experiences through SharePoint and Microsoft Teams. Bulk Approvals, New Actions for SharePoint Lists and Libraries in Flow, new document templates and improvements to backstage. You’ll be able to use PowerApps to build custom forms for document libraries, building metadata-enriched experiences through SharePoint and Microsoft Teams.