Recently, we had a discussion with a former customer about the feasibility of migrating from their current collaboration environment to Microsoft’s Office 365 Cloud platform. It was made clear during our conversations that any potential cloud migration would not be undertaken until some time – probably about a year – in the future.
One of the issues with this, and planning for a cloud migration this far in advance, is that the Office 365 platform is likely to change in that time frame, especially as SharePoint – where a lot of the content would be stored – is currently going through a transition period from its “classic” to “modern” design. For anyone who is not aware of the evolution of Office 365 and the changes SharePoint has gone through already then this_link should help.
This raised the question ,”Well, what are Microsoft’s plans for Office365?”. To answer that question I have decided to write a quarterly blog to cover the updates that will affect our cloud migration projects and potential customers taken directly from the road map for Office 365, beginning with the changes that are scheduled to be rolled out by the end of this year.
Yammer
- Yammer tab in Microsoft Teams – The ability to add a Yammer tab to Microsoft Teams will allow Easier access to Yammer communities
- Yammer Conversations web part for SharePoint – New web part to add a fully functional native Yammer feed to any modern SharePoint site.
Integration between Yammer and SharePoint/Teams will be important to us going forward as this could remove the need to use the “classic” discussion board app for conversation style content.
SharePoint & Microsoft Teams
- SharePoint and Teams: connect site to a Team in one click – Further SharePoint integration with Microsoft Teams, if you’re group-connected team site is not connected to a chat-based hub for teamwork, then it’s just one click of the new Connect to Teams button in the bottom-left corner of your site that gets you one.
This is quite a major change, as now a Team and a SharePoint site can be closely integrated which will allow SharePoint pages to support part-to-part communications allowing you to easily build composite apps that can also be surfaced in Teams. Soon you’ll be able to add a SharePoint list as a tab in Teams, so you can share data with your group, as well as custom solutions built as SharePoint Framework web parts. You’ll also be able to add Teams apps to SharePoint sites, bringing a breadth of apps to your intranet.
SharePoint
- Broadcast news and announcements across the organisation – this feature was supposed to be released in the summer of 2018 so I won’t hold my breath
- @mentions in page comments – When viewing a news article within the SharePoint mobile app, you can now directly @mention a person from within your organisation and they will be notified – aka, drawn into the article and your response to further engage on what’s happening around you.
- SharePoint pages: custom thumbnails and descriptions – you will now be able to choose both a new thumbnail and page description within page details: Previously, modern pages would automatically select the first image and generate a description for a page to use in search, highlighted content, and SharePoint News. Now you can customize these components to further manage how they appear in various places to your viewers.
- SharePoint web part: personalised web parts – Give a personalised experience to your site and page visitors – so they see the content that is theirs, and meant for them to experience. When using personalised web parts, people will see their recent sites, their recent documents and news tailored for them. You can personalise any page or news article. When you add a personalised web part to the page, it is aware of who is signed in and gives them a unique, relevant experience to the content and information you are promoting to them.
- SharePoint organisational news: ordering of news articles -Within the News web part for SharePoint sites, there will be a new capability to decide what order the news appears in when viewers land on the page highlighting news articles. Now with the new cloud migration software, you will be able to highlight high-value content more easily knowing it will be most and/or first visible among the breadth of news being published within a site.
- SharePoint web part: YouTube embeds
Microsoft Teams
- Enrich your private chat experience with screen sharing – you can now share your entire desktop or a specific window directly from a private chat session. You can even let the other party take control to collaborate on content together.
For a full list of features on the roadmap regarding cloud migration software you can visit this link.
Take the next step!
A division of T-Systems, Vamosa Technologies specializes in content migration to cloud, on-premises and hybrid cloud systems. With two decades worth of experience of customer migrations, Vamosa Technologies has worked with a comprehensive range of leading enterprise content management systems. To learn more about services from Vamosa Technologies, please read our case studies and whitepapers or contact us.
