Announcement made in SharePoint Conference 2019

SharePoint Home Sites

SharePoint home sites are the landing sites for your organization. This new type of communication site brings together news, events, content, conversations, and video, in order to reflects priorities and brand. This is a complete, built in intranet right there in Office 365. News and content can be personalized, engaging videos can be incorporated, intelligent search is built in, and there is accessibility and responsiveness across devices.

SharePoint Start Page

The start page is all about “me”, and will contain content relevant to yourself, with items such as featured links, recent documents, and saved files. This is the personalized place that anyone can go, to see what they are working on, and quickly access their files and favorite sites.

SharePoint site renaming

Now you can change SharePoint site URLs right from within the SharePoint admin center! Although this seems like a small update, there has been a lot of buzz about this one, and a resounding excitement from SharePoint Admins.

OneDrive Improvements for Business Processes

Some new capabilities have been introduced, in order to make your life easier when working on files and collaborating. You can request files from others from within OneDrive, link straight to a specific PowerPoint slide, and @mention people in comments in Office files. Also, the Outlook mobile app also has some improvements to make collaboration easier, such as the ability when sending an attachment, to pick from your list of recent files, without the need to download to your device before sending.

Live Events in Yammer

Live events can be created and streamed from within the Yammer interface, using Stream. Viewers of your events can stay engaged by having threaded conversations before, during and after each event. Videos can now even be recorded and uploaded from within the Stream mobile app.

SharePoint Search updates

Search from wherever you are. Whether working in Microsoft Office on the desktop, mobile app, or within SharePoint or OneDrive, you are able to find what you need. Microsoft Search is behind these new updates to SharePoint Search. At the end of this year, there will be the ability to create custom refiners, custom verticals, and display templates. There will be more extensibility, more scale, more content types, inline @Office help assistance, machine teaching, and more. The search index will also be faster. This means that content will be searchable within 15 seconds of an addition or change. Custom adaptive cards and sources are also coming, as well as the ability to curate search results, with administrator approved results that appear at the top.

Interactive quizzes, polls and surveys in Stream videos

People are more engaged with videos that they watch, when there is a capability to interact with them. Now you will be able to do things like add a survey to a recorded departmental meeting, quizzes for training videos, and even provide assessments for employees to fill in.

OneDrive differential sync

Differential sync for all files in OneDrive and SharePoint will be coming later this year. This means that when synchronization is occurring, only the parts of the files that have been changed, will sync, as opposed to the entire file. This saves time and network utilization.

Microsoft Teams / SharePoint Integration Improvements

Now you can work in SharePoint libraries within Teams, with the full library experience, including metadata columns and column formatting. Work in libraries within Teams, in the same way, with the same SharePoint interface and menus that you are familiar with.

Multi-geo capabilities

Now, with the new multi-geo capabilities for SharePoint and Office 365 groups, you can store your sites’ data in one or more worldwide locations that you select. The purpose of this is to satisfy data sovereignty requirements for those locations.