I think a lot of folks have been wondering about the future of SharePoint. Is it going away? No. That’s clear to me. I participated in a couple of different research groups focused on understanding News and “Modern” Intranet Portals. It seemed that Jeff Teper doubled down on SPFx and Fluid for Teams and SharePoint. The new offline capabilities for not only native Microsoft Lists, but custom datasources was super exciting and will encourage people to move their data to SharePoint. Looking forward to the near term multiple releases that improve the backend of our data in Microsoft 365 improving performance, structure, accessibility, compliance, reliability and robustness. No one should feel bad that their data is in SharePoint Online.
Here are a few takeaways:
- Go modern in your portals try to keep it out of the box for go forward easiest maintenance
- Use Power Platform for applications for business automation and business integration where SharePoint can be used in variety of different ways, not just storage
- Use SharePoint Framework (SPFx) if you must customize the UX, but ensure the app is built for both Teams and SP
- Offline and low bandwidth capabilities coming to the platform for a richer experience in the browser
- Investments in the Advanced AI with SharePoint Syntex will bring incredible insights, summarization, and allow you to get your head into any data that comes into the platform
- Search improvements will continue to make information more easily accessible and provide insights
- Recent improvements in metadata combined with SharePoint Syntex will add security, compliance, and structure to an unstructured environment and accelerate business process automation and improvements with a variety of structured and semi structured data
- New intelligent storage platform improvements coming
- Patient data compliance support with Microsoft Lists
- Rich UX experiences with Microsoft Lists
- A convergence of Teams and SharePoint UX experiences will continue to improve
- Teams is the preferred UX for accessing SharePoint over time (IMO)
- Improved Site templates, branding experiences, news targeting and portal experiences will continue to improve
- Avoid Classic sites and features get to modern
- Investments have been shipped for modern file experiences including mixed reality and 3D visualization investments with SharePoint spaces
- Updated SharePoint admin center home page with actionable insights
- Recent improvements in visibility on where sites are created from and by whom
- Microsoft 365 has more capabilities for migration for Box
- OneDrive and SharePoint admin center are being consolidated
No SharePoint is not going away, in fact both online and on premises were referenced in Jeff Teper’s session. Lots of research projects in the SharePoint engineering product team on both enterprise and departmental portals and the lists and file storage side help us understand where the investments are going. Healthcare and Education bring virtual applications and scenarios. Just because Teams and Power Platform are getting a lot of attention shouldn’t make you think your data should be elsewhere. It’s in the right place and major investments continue.
Missed the announcements? Mark Kashman collected up many of the SharePoint Admin related ones in a single blog post “SharePoint Admin and Migration Ignite announcements” I wrote up a few of the “Top 10 Announcements from Ignite 2020” and the Ignite Book of News from Ignite has even more. Refer to the Microsoft 365
