Hidden gems at Ignite: A conference guide from the SharePoint product team
Hi everyone! My name is Adam Harmetz and I run the Program Management team for SharePoint team sites, portals, biz apps & dev platform. I’m thrilled to be spending time with the community next week in Atlanta – the fantastic SP community is one of the main reasons I’m still working on SharePoint after joining the team 11 years ago. I sat in on over 17 hours of Ignite content reviews this past week – there is a fantastic amount of great content and the team is working overtime to get everything ready for the show. Of course, as you’d expect there are the various overview sessions (like Jeff Teper’s SharePoint keynote) and here’s a handy graphic Mark Kashman and I are using in our talk that highlights the major overview sessions in each aspect of the modern Intranet: What I wanted to share here was how you can get beyond the overview sessions and into some of the deep dives that often don’t get as much attention. We are doing some unique new types of talks this year and new types of speakers (designers, developers, security experts, accessibility drivers). If you are looking for the hidden gems or interesting spin on a topic, these suggestions might help: Behind the scenes: How we engineer SharePoint. Last time I was on a cruise ship, I paid extra to take the tour of the engine room and the bridge. I’m the type of person who loves to peak behind the curtains, and I know there are many of the same type of people coming to Ignite. We have two sessions for you here: BRK3246 Looking behind the scenes at how we're making SharePoint's front end/UX modern, responsive, and open looks at the client-side, SharePoint Framework-powered front end UX architecture (where the speakers are a design developer and a director of engineering!) and BRK3031 Peak Behind the Scenes of running and building SharePoint Online talks about deployment and back end tech from Zach who manages all our COGs and hardware purchasing. MVP + Product Team == Awesome. There are a ton of MVP talks and of course a lot of talks from the product team, but in a few cases, we decided to team up and join forces! Tejas and Eric are describing the latest How To guidance in branding with BRK3025 – Learn Best Practices for customizing and branding team sites. And I’m teaming up with Laura Roger to talk about the new experiences through the lens of customer adoption with BRK2041 – Get the most out of the new SharePoint. AMAs! I visited the Exchange conference (MEC) a few years ago and was impressed by some of the talks they did where the engineering team just took questions from the audience for the entire time. We figured we’d try it so on Thursday a bunch of us leaders across product, design, and development will answer whatever you ask with BRK2295 – Unplug with the experts on SharePoint and OneDrive. The MVP community is doing something similar with BRK225: Learn from MVPS: panel discussion on all things SharePoint. Build it live on stage! SharePoint has a long tradition of having a bit of fun with a session where we get multiple people up there building cool sites live on stage. It’s a great way to let the product itself do the talking. This time, Jeremy and Emma will be building a team site from the very first “create site” click. Check out BRK2247 – Watch us bring together the best features a team needs to get the most out of the modern SharePoint. Go WAY deep with the new SharePoint Framework. In BRK4015 – Build Client Side Webparts for Microsoft SharePoint, Chaks is going to go as detailed as you can go with SPFx (frankly, I didn’t even know there WAS such a thing as a 4000-level session code!). We did a similar talk at our internal TechReady conference in July and it was ranked the very top Office session of the entire conference. Meet the Security Experts. Five minutes – let alone 75 minutes – with Matt Swann will change your worldview about the cloud. Honestly, if you ever work with him, you’ll see he’s one of those people you’ll remember working with when you look back on your career. Hear from the guy in charge of SharePoint security directly in BRK3032 – Learn how SharePoint safeguards your data in the cloud Talk to coders! Our director of engineering and the development manager of a large chunk of our UX investments will be laying down the knowledge in BRK3026 - Learn how to build a fast, responsive portal in SharePoint Online. Part of coming to Ignite is hearing directly from those who write code – and together Russ and John have decades and decades of experience. Change Management: We’ve heard you! Many of you (including on this very forum), have given us feedback about what you expect from us as we roll out new UX. We added a session on it to both share our strategy and continue the conversation and feedback. If you have opinions on how we roll out new functionality, join Zohar at BRK2297: Learn how we move fast without breaking things by managing change in SharePoint Online SharePoint Dev’s Secret Weapon: PNP. Vesa was recently sharing with me the usage and community engagement stats from the SharePoint Patterns and Practices site and github – they floored me. It’s such a great virtuous cycle and we are starting to bring some of the scenarios from PNP directly into the product based upon our learnings. If you are a SharePoint dev, you must go to Vesa’s BRK2115 – Learn about PNP and the new SharePoint Framework. Geek out on very specific parts of the product. What would a SharePoint conference be without some sessions that dive incredibly deep into one aspect of the product? Three stand out to me here: an entire session just on doclibs with BRK2043 Review SharePoint Document Libraries: what’s new, what’s coming, and when to use what, a session just on the various ways you can create site templates with BRK3027 Learn best practices for creating and managing Site Templates, and a session on our new mobile apps with BRK2037 Explore what’s coming with the SharePoint apps Accessibility and Inclusive Design. At Microsoft, we take designing for all needs and abilities seriously as a core part of our processes. This year at Ignite, we are starting to open up and talk about that work a bit more and provide guidance for you. Melissa, who has been running our accessibility efforts in SharePoint for many years now, has some great guidance in BRK2214 Ensure your intranet sites are inclusive for people with disabilities. There are a lot more talks at the conference, of course (188 tagged with SharePoint) – including some great talks from the community. I didn’t include the community talks here because I didn’t help prep for those, but they are some of my favorite personally to attend myself. If you have any questions about how to maximize your time at the conference next week, feel free to leave us comments!Introducing "Request sign-off" - an approval flow that requires no set up
We are happy to announce a new feature in SharePoint called "Request sign-off". The goal is to provide you an easy way to send an item for approval to someone else. This feature enables an open approval process that allows you to easily record whether or not a document or list item was approved or not. There is no setup required. Request sign-off makes use of SharePoint's integration with Microsoft Flow. You can use it by selecting a file or list item (but not a folder), and then pulling down the Flow menu in the modern library or list UI, and selecting "Request sign-off". This flow will appear alongside any other custom flow that you or others may have added to the library. Once it is invoked, Request sign-off will create a new text column in your library called "Sign-off status". This column will record the state of your request. It works just like any other text column, you can sort, filter or group by it to organize your library. On invocation, this will tell you that it will send an approval request on your behalf, and ask your consent. Once this is provided, you can pick one or more approvers, and write a message to them for your approval request. If you add more than one approver, any one of them can approve your request: The person you sent the approval to will receive an approval request. This will be an actionable message on clients that support it (meaning you can approve it directly from within Outlook). The approver can also provide some comments along with their decision. There will also be a link included that lets the approver view the item in question: The sign-off status column is then updated with the decision, and the person who sent the approval request will receive an email with the comments: By saving you the trouble of setting up a flow and creating a new column to track status, we hope that this feature will make it easy to add a lightweight approval process to your libraries and lists. We expect this feature to start rolling out to our customers in targeted release (previously called first release) after April 9. Barring any issues we will continue to roll it out to the rest of our customers in two phases late April and early May.Update to forms in Modern Lists, including custom forms with PowerApps - coming soon!
We are excited to tell you that we are updating how forms in SharePoint modern lists and libraries are displayed, and you will also soon be able to create custom forms using Microsoft PowerApps for SharePoint lists. We used to navigate to a new page whenever the new, edit or view form was displayed for a modern list. We are moving these forms into a panel that appears on the right hand side of the page (left hand side for right to left languages). This change makes for a much quicker experience for adding new items, as well as viewing and changing existing items in your list. You can still get a link to an item (or the new item form) by using the "Copy link" button that's been added to the panel. The updates to panels will be coming to all of the First Release users and tenants within the next two weeks. We are also very happy to announce that the ability to customize forms for modern lists using PowerApps will be coming to our First Release tenants. This capability was announced at Ignite 2017 and was mentioned in an earlier blog post around reinventing business processes. Please see that blog post for more details. Differently from the panels, custom forms with PowerApps will be available for First Release tenants (not users), since once a custom form is set for a list, it will take effect for all users in that tenant that use that list.PowerApps and Flow buttons are graduating out of preview!
PowerApps and Flow are becoming a more integral part of SharePoint Online with the imminent release of Custom Forms with PowerApps and the Flow Launch Panel. Starting in November, these features will no longer be considered as preview features. If you have the Preview Features switch turned off in SharePoint administration center today, you were not seeing the Flow and PowerApps buttons in modern lists and libraries. Once this change goes into effect, the buttons will become available, regardless of the setting: Flow button in modern libraries, and both Flow and PowerApps buttons in modern lists. The change will start with our First Release tenants, and then move forward into the rest of the production in two waves. We hope to complete the change over the month of November. PowerApps and Flow are still working on completing their certification for government and sovereign cloud environments with stricter compliance requirements, and the buttons will continue to remain invisible for these environments, independent of the preview features switch setting.Add Location Details to SharePoint Data and Content
We are excited to announce a new capability for SharePoint lists and libraries. The new location column allows you to add rich location data from Bing Maps or your organization directory to any SharePoint list or library. You can then filter, sort, and search by any aspect of the location data such as address, city, or state. Creating a Location Column To add a location column, simply click Add Column then select Location You can then name the column and add secondary columns to display, sort, and filter by attributes such as city, state, or country. Now when creating or editing list items, you can search for location data from Bing Maps or your organization directory to associate it with your list item. Once you have added location data for your list items, you can sort and filter your list based on any of the additional columns added during the column creation process. If you want to filter by an attribute you did not include during column creation, it can be added in the Edit Column pane. Adding a new column type to SharePoint is a rare event. We can’t wait to see what uses you come up with for this new column! We anticipate roll out for targeted release will begin by the end of November, with full worldwide release by mid-December. Update: After resolving some issues that were discovered in targeted release, we are now finally ready to start shipping world wide. Location Column will now be available to everyone by Monday
What is going on with LISTS?
All of the sudden, one of our SharePoint Lists has completely changed its appearance and function. It has more of the new list style now. We have to change this back to retain its functionality immediately. I found this post about the change https://oneminuteofficemagic.com/2024/05/10/new-list-view-layout-in-sharepoint-online/comment-page-1 Apparently using Power Automate to add something to a List no longer works. Thanks for breaking a workflow that's been the core of our operations for over three years. THIS IS AN ABSOLUTE DISASTER. I CAN NOT BELIEVE MICROSOFT IS ADMINS OVER SO HARD LIKE THIS. GIVE US BACK SHAREPOINT LISTS!! THIS IS UNUSABLE!!!! OUR ENTIRE ORGANIZATION RUNS OFF SHAREPOINT LISTS AND NOW WE CAN NOT USE IT. WHY DO YOU INSIST ON INCREASING COMPLEXITY AND DECREASING USABILITY? STOP MAKING MY JOB HARDER EVERY SINGLE DAY. {edited by admin}Configuring approvals for lists and libraries
We are adding a new menu item under the Flow menu that will let customers configure the type of approvals they would like to use in their lists and libraries (Request sign-off, or Content approval), or turn approvals off altogether. We have added this feature based on the feedback that we received for the rollout of the Request sign-off feature, where some customers preferred to use the Content approval feature which changes the visibility of the current item based on the approval status, and there are fixed approvers for a given list or library, or other customers had other custom flows configured for their list or library, and did not want to have Request sign-off to become a source of confusion for their users. To make changes, as site owner, you will be able click on Flow->Configure flows in the command bar of your list or library: Then in the panel that appears, pick the approval method that you'd like, or turn approvals off altogether: The new configuration panel will become available for our Targeted Release customers in early September, and then go to the rest of our customers. We expect to complete the rollout by September 19. Please continue to keep the feedback for our features coming, and tell us how we can make SharePoint work better for you.
Column formatting now rolling out to first release users
Hi all, I would like to update you all on the rollout progress of the column formatting feature. Today, we begun rolling this feature out to first release users. All first release users will have the capability by the middle of next week (Wednesday, November 8th). After that, we'll begin rolling out to first release tenants. All tenants worldwide will have this feature by the end of November. Here are some handy links to help you get started with column formatting: My session from Ignite 2017 where I talk about many of the new capabilities in lists and libraries, including column formatting. Skip to 29:50 to view the portion of the talk devoted to column formatting. Column formatting overview - a high level overview of the column formatting capability Column formatting reference documentation - complete technical documentation on the capabilities provided, including many samples that will help you get started Community sample repository - this is a Git repository where you can contribute useful samples that demonstrate how to use the feature, or accomplish common user scenarios. We've seeded this repository with some of the samples from our reference documentation, and we're hoping to see lots of submissions from the community. We are very eager to hear your feedback on this feature, and hear your suggestions on how we can make it more useful.Shipped to First Release: Flow integration for SharePoint document libraries
I am happy to announce that we shipped Flow integration for SharePoint document libraries as well as the ability to launch flows interactively to our First Release users and tenants today. If you are a First Release user, or have your tenant marked as a First Release tenant, you should be seeing a Flow button in the command bar of your modern document libraries. This integration helps your users automate repetitive tasks such as moving an email attachment into a document library folder, sending a selected item for feedback, posting to Yammer, or integrating files with other Microsoft or third-party services that Flow can access. We will continue to make Flow integration better for document libraries over the coming months. Some of our plans include better support for all SharePoint data types, new actions that allow for sharing items, and new templates that make use of these additional capabilities. This is also a great time to review some of the guidance on the governance for Flow as mentioned in our announcement: We recommend that Office 365 Admins review the data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities for Microsoft Flow. All Office 365 Admins can sign into the Flow administration site without the need for any additional licenses, and set up rules that determine how data can flow between different Office 365 components (such as SharePoint, Outlook, Yammer) and other Microsoft and third party services. If you need more specific guidance on DLP and controlling user access to Flow, please check out our blog post announcing the general availability of Flow in Office 365 from last year, which covers these frequently asked questions. We will monitor the usage patterns and telemetry, and continue rolling out these features to our production users over the coming weeks. Next step will be to roll it out to 50% of production tenants. Please give these new features a try and let us know what you think.
