Update (31/01/15): Session spreadsheet updated and now includes 275 sessions.
Those involved with SharePoint, Office 365, Yammer, the communities and the wider industry will already know about the Ignite conference Microsoft has planned for May this year. Microsoft published the conference sessions on the Ignite website this afternoon, introduced through this Office Blog post.
The Office Blog post included a video from Julia White in which she shared what to expect from the conference. She also said in the video “without giving away too much, be the first to see a lot of new technology”, hinting that we will probably see the next versions of SharePoint and Exchange etc. The SharePoint Twitter account also shared the tweet below, with another video (#InBillWeTrust) confirming the next version of SharePoint (SharePoint 2016) will be shared during the conference.
You’ll be pleased to know I’ve done something similar again this year, although this year I’ve quickly gone about it using jQuery. I plan to create and share a bookmarklet but until then I’ve shared the first Ignite sessions spreadsheet for your viewing. The latest version of the sessions spreadsheet and jQuery bookmarklet are shared below.
MSIgnite Sessions Spreadsheet
Javascript via JSFiddle
Fingers crossed I can attend #MSIgnite and have the opportunity to meet the great people I met at #SPC14 again!
This post is part of SP14 Keynote highlights series where I provide some highlights of the next version of SharePoint. These highlights are from the SP24 Conference Keynote that Bill Baer delivered.
SharePoint Site Folders
How many occasions have you tried to access a document in SharePoint, but end up having to click through a long set of links to find it because you can’t remember the URL? OK, this is not an everyday issue, but we do use SharePoint to store documents and we use SharePoint sites to create contextual containers to store documents in. In someways, these SharePoint sites slow us down from accessing documents harder.
In the next version of SharePoint (SharePoint 2016) we might find a new method to access Document Libraries called Site Folders. Site Folders will provide a list of all Sites that we have access to that contain Document Libraries (a.k.a Site Folders or Site Libraries) and will be available from OneDrive for Business.
Users will be able to click-through into individual Sites from the Site Folders page to easily discover Document Libraries each site contains.
I wonder how this will impact how with architect document management solutions. Search is becoming more and more powerful than we are shifting to an era where Information Architecture and Taxonomies become less relevant (or maybe more relevant behind the scenes), time will tell!
I have an idea what Microsoft is trying to do here, watch this space as I’ll provide my own mock-up with an example soon.
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Join me over the next year as I discover more news and information about the next version of SharePoint and Office 16 by following my #Office16 tag.
This post is part of SP14 Keynote highlights series where I provide some highlights of the next version of SharePoint. These highlights are from the SP24 Conference Keynote that Bill Baer delivered.
OneDrive for Business to change the way we distribute and store Outlook attachments
We all do this. We need to send a file to someone via email and we just attach the file to the email and press send.
60% of mailbox storage is allocated to attachments.
What we should all be doing, of course, is saving the attachment to SharePoint and including a link to the attachment instead. Microsoft may be about to make this much easier in the next version of SharePoint and Office (SharePoint 2016 and Office16) by slipstreaming the entire process and integrating Outlook with OneDrive for Business in Office 365.
Attachments will be stored in a “Attachments” folder in the user’s personal library in SharePoint Online, known as OneDrive for Business.
Each attachment will be secured to those on the recipient list of the originating email.
Benefits of storing attachments in OneDrive for Business include reducing overall email storage requirement but what do users care…general they don’t, not about storage requirements anyway. But what about providing themselves and their recipients with the ability to collaborate on attachments centrally and even use Co-Authoring. Imagine how much email traffic will be reduced because everyone has access to the same attachment.
There are times when storing attachments centrally SharePoint 2016 or whatever it becomes will be useful but not in all examples. Most of us are fortunate to live in a very connected world but there are times when we’re not so connected. This exciting change would mean at the time an email attachment would not be accessible, even though the original email is available on mobile for example. I look forward to hearing what others think about this new feature.
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Join me over the next year as I discover more news and information about the next version of SharePoint and Office 16 by following my #Office16 tag.
This post is part of SP14 Keynote highlights series where I provide some highlights of the next version of SharePoint. These highlights are from the SP24 Conference Keynote that Bill Baer delivered.
Updated Command Surface in SharePoint Online
The Command Surface that is available at the top of List and Library pages is being updated in SharePoint Online over the coming weeks. A message about this change has been available in the Office 365 Message Centre (MC4558) for some weeks now.
The change is intended to simplify access to common commands. The commands are now enlarged, include icons and there are additional commands to sync, edit, manage and share documents.
While this is not a new feature to SharePoint, it does demonstrate the continuous investment and development that is happening in Office 365 and SharePoint Online. Better still it is a further example that Microsoft is listening to customers – in this example, how commands were not easily accessible and hidden in the ellipsis menu.
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Join me over the next year as I discover more news and information about the next version of SharePoint and Office 16 by following my #Office16 tag.
This post is the first of my SP14 Keynote highlights series where I provide some highlights of the next version of SharePoint. These highlights are from the SP24 Conference Keynote that Bill Baer delivered.
“Shared with Me” coming to SharePoint
Something to look out for in the next version of SharePoint (possibly SharePoint 2016 or Office16) or even soon is a summary of documents and folders that have been “Shared with Me”. It appears that the “Share with Me” page is already available in SharePoint Online, however, the summary of folders shared with you isn’t.
It’s pretty self-explanatory but a list of documents or folders that have been shared with you will be displayed in your OneDrive for Business site.
I wonder if this might extend to include scenarios such as multiple environments or Office 365 sites, to create a true consolidated view of files that have been shared with you. I’m always searching my inbox to find emails from colleagues where they have shared files with me in one single place for this information would be well received.
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Join me over the next year as I discover more news and information about the next version of SharePoint and Office 16 by following my #Office16 tag.
In this post, I share information about On-Premises SharePoint, highlights of SharePoint 2016 and see how Outlook attachments (bye-bye) are changing as we know them.
Firstly I’d like to congratulate the SP24 Conference (#SP24Conf) organisers for delivering an awesome conference this week. The format was new and a challenge for those involved I’m sure. It worked very well aside from the twenty-first-century hiccup or two. I look forward to the next one when the crew have all recovered and caught up on their sleep. Maybe I might be able to get a speaker slot next time where we might hear more about SharePoint 2016!
I managed to stay up for three sessions before calling it a night (a late one at that – 2 am UK time. I was delivering an Azure briefing at the Microsoft Offices in London the next morning. But I did manage to attend five other sessions towards the end of the day. Hopefully, in a few weeks, we will have access to all the sessions when I’ll try to watch as many sessions as I can when the time arises.
SharePoint 2016 highlights and more…
I’d like to share some highlights I learned during the SP24 Keynote that Bill Baer’s delivered. It’s important news for all those involved in the industry to hear at this time. More importantly, it demonstrates again that Microsoft is continuing to share more and more with us long before they would have done before.
SharePoint On-Premises lives on
With Microsoft investing so much in their Cloud products whether that’s Office 365 or Microsoft Azure, many have thought that time had been called for the On-Premises version of SharePoint. Well, that time is not in sight – not yet anyway!
So the next version of SharePoint that we’re shipping in later 2015 will in fact not be the last version of SharePoint server that we ever ship.
Sure we’ll see features and changes to these Cloud products more often especially Office 365, long before we see them On-Premises. We might not see some features at all but Bill said, “Microsoft will continue to develop in On-Premises for as long as there is demand for it”. SharePoint 2016 is not going to be the last.
We are going to continue to ship SharePoint server on-premises as long as there is a demand for SharePoint server on-premises!
Not only that but SharePoint 2016 will ship towards the end of 2015.
In late 2015 we are going to launch another version of SharePoint server to our on-premises audience.
SharePoint 2016 highlights
On top of the On-Premises news, Bill also demonstrated features from the next version of SharePoint – SharePoint 2016. Here are some highlights from the Keynote:
The close integration with Yammer was clear once again and more Office Graph functionality seemed to be visible since the demonstration during the SharePoint Conference 2014 (#SPC14).
We also learned about Remote Index. This will make it possible to push On-Premises Search Indexes to Office 365 to provide a single search experience and result set. A unified search index in Office 365 along with Office Graph will create an awesome experience for end-users.
Outlook is the first program that many of us launch on a typical working day yet we have many other sources of information. Expect to see changes to Outlook that will help us access this information and deliver more than just email to us.
A further change to Outlook and SharePoint 2016 that we’ll see in the next version is the removal of email attachments as we know them with the help of OneDrive for Business. Users will continue to attach files to their emails but they’ll be saved to their OneDrive for Business Document Library and shared with all to, cc and bcc addresses via a URL in the email. This is a really exciting change and I look forward to discovering more about soon. The net result is users will have continuous access to the latest files and can use features such as Co-Authoring.
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Join me over the next year as I discover more news and information about the next version of SharePoint and Office 16 by following my #Office16 tag.