SharePoint

Last month, Microsoft held its SharePoint NA conference; here's a wrap-up of all the key announcements for the month of May.

Microsoft made a ton of announcements at this week's SharePoint conference in Las Vegas. If you're an Office 365 tenant administrator, the health of SharePoint Online and what it and OneDrive for Business can do is important to you. Among all the fluffy stuff about intelligent intranets, there was some good news about improvements in administration, security, and network utilization, all of which will help other Office 365 apps too.

At the SharePoint Virtual Summit, Lori Wright and Jeff Teper share the latest innovations and solutions for file collaboration, process transformation, employee engagement and communications, and AI-powered search and discovery.

Jasper Oosterveld, Microsoft MVP & InSpark Modern Workplace Consultant, discusses a new release for the modern SharePoint news experience. The ability to create templates.

Office ProPlus Version 1904 boasts new privacy controls and Microsoft has documented how it thinks about required and optional data collected from users. Office 365 still lacks privacy controls for the server apps. It remains to be seen if customers will be happy and consider that Microsoft has solved the GDPR issues identified in the Dutch DPIA report in November 2018.

For SharePoint fans, this month brings improved online teams restore features, sticky headers, and PNP makes the platform prettier.

Microsoft announced the Files Restore feature for SharePoint Online on April 22. It's the kind of news we can expect as the SharePoint conference draws near, and it's good news for Office 365 tenants. Some backup vendors might not be so keen as Files Restore makes it a tad harder for them to sell their backups. Small Office 365 tenants also got the news that the new SharePoint Admin Center is becoming the default. The new portal might even be ready soon.

Two themes this month. PNP PowerShell is awesome and got more awesome and what is old is new. The PowerShell is pretty self-explanatory but the old is new is fun. We get back connected web parts (circa 2003), we can do templates, and the News capability (which reminds me of 2003 portals) are all covered… Read More

Office 365 retention policies help organizations keep information for as long as needed. But retention consumes storage. This isn't a problem for Exchange Online, but it is for SharePoint Online, because files held in the Preservation Hold Library are charged against the tenant storage quota. This isn't a reason to not use retention policies, but you should be careful.

While it was a slow month for SharePoint news, there are still several things you should know that occurred this month to stop on top of the latest information about the platform.

How you can extract news from multiple SharePoint Sites into one centralized news digest.

Office 365 Groups and Teams make SharePoint much easier for people to use, with the price paid being the imposition of the groups permission model on SharePoint. On the upside, everything is very simple. On the downside, the permissions assigned to group members might not be what you want.

With January coming to an end, SharePoint had quite a few announcements this month; here's your wrap-up.

Most Office 365 users might be unaware of SharePoint's Document ID service, which generates unique document identifiers for documents in a site. That's OK, because records management is not the kind of subject that turns everyone on. But business situations do occur when document IDs might be useful, which is why I went looking at how this SharePoint feature works.

Even though the year has come to an end, it was a busy month for SharePoint announcements.