The Future of SharePoint, 2017 Edition

This year’s Microsoft Ignite conference in Orlando Florida, was the place to be for anyone interested in SharePoint and Office 365. An enormous number of announcements were made covering almost every aspect of the Office and Office Servers.

Microsoft continued the 3 year release cycle for SharePoint, announcing SharePoint 2019 will be released mid-2018. That’s right, a new server release of SharePoint for On-premises users. Microsoft Exchange 2019 server was also announced, which is good news for those businesses who prefer to say on-premises.

Office 365 had more news than it is humanly possible to keep up with. Here are some of the big items to look forward to:

SharePoint

• News sites – mobile notifications, save for later, news digests, publish to Teams
• Hub sites – global activity rollups, global search scopes and more
• Communication sites – custom layouts and Yammer integration
• Web-parts – lots of new web-parts for Modern sites including Forms and PowerApps!
• LinkedIn integration – better profiles and expert search
• Dynamic Record identification and management
• Better photo and image search – indexing written content in images
• Multi-geo support – one tenant across multiple geographic locations
• Improved mobile experiences
• Conditional formatting of lists
• New Admin console
• SharePoint 2019 Server for on-premises users

PowerApps and Flow

• Did I mention PowerApps web-parts for SharePoint?
• A clear announcement that PowerApps will replace InfoPath
• Document Approval for SharePoint and OneDrive for Business
• PowerApps web-parts for SharePoint

OneDrive for Business

• One place to see all your files – OneDrive, SharePoint and Groups!
• Multi-geo support – one tenant across multiple geographic locations
• OneDrive Client for Mac
• End user file restore (30 day backup)
• External Sharing without needing a Microsoft Account with one time use codes
• Files on-demand

Teams

• Add SharePoint pages to Teams
• Push news from SharePoint to Teams
• Connect Office Groups to Teams
• Link existing SharePoint Team sites to Teams!

Security and Compliance

• Site level conditional access policies
• Service level encryption where the user (tenant owner) has the keys
• End-user mass content restore – great if you need to bulk recover documents

There have been a huge number of announcements and chances are I have missed a few. It’s a really exciting time for us SharePoint and Office 365 people!