It’s that time of the year again where thousands convene on Orlando for the annual Microsoft Ignite Conference. It has become one of two major events for the Office 365 team to further their roadmap for the various products that make up the Office 365 suite.
I attended last year, and it was the most announcements I’ve encountered in a short period since the old days with major SharePoint versions being announced every three years. All of the applications of Office 365 got significant attention including SharePoint, Yammer, Office 365 Groups and more. Let’s go through some of the things I’d like to see at the conference this year.
Evolution of Hub Sites
The addition of Hub Sites to SharePoint Online was a good start, but its implementation has left a lot to be desired. The new site-collection based architecture of SharePoint modern sites have left traditional features of a site/sub-site model including content type and security inheritance a thing of the past.
I would like to see Microsoft address how to share settings both in security and content assets like metadata across modern sites in a seamless way. Right now, existing features like the Content Type Hub to publish content types across site collections have not aged well as SharePoint has matured.
SharePoint Search Development
The new approach Microsoft has taken to SharePoint search has left a lot of our clients frustrated. Many clients are used to a lot of extensibility and options in previous incarnations of SharePoint, and the modern search experience removes almost all of that and instead focused on Graph-powered search results.
Even if Microsoft doesn’t take a new direction towards more customization options, at the very least the search experience needs to be re-tooled to be clearer and powerful. It is the bare minimum, and that is not what clients have to come to SharePoint for in the past.
Continued Focus on Microsoft Teams
It’s not hyperbole to say that Microsoft Teams may be the most exciting addition to the Microsoft collaboration platform in years. Originally, it seemed like it would be a paltry competitor to Slack, but it has since matured significantly. Microsoft has recently released a free version of Teams, and it seems poised to take an even bigger stage in Office 365.
This year Teams has received significant additions to it to bring it up to parity with other aspects of the platform such as surfacing now all the filtering, viewing, and extensibility options of SharePoint Online inside of a Teams interface. I’m excited to see this product mature as clients continue to adopt the product.
Further Extensibility in the SharePoint Framework
The SharePoint Framework is the go-to method to extend SharePoint and also further aspects of Office 365 (such as using those customizations in Teams). However, the options that are available to developers has been minimal compared to the wide array of options we had in the past.
We still can’t add custom page layouts, utilize metadata inline on pages, extend sides other than a header and footer in a modern SharePoint page, and more. I look forward to the day I don’t have a client cringe on adopting modern sites because there isn’t a customization option that was available in classic sites that’s not available in modern.
Concluding Thoughts
This year will no doubt be another intense stream of announcements, and it will only continue to make Office 365 not just a great option for organizations but the best option at that. As Microsoft continues to evolve the story behind Office 365 (like they did last year with “inner” and “outer” loops), we can only be more excited about getting our clients in the platform. Plus, there’s much more like Teams is now fully functioning to replace Skype for Business, but hopefully there will be more guidance on how to make that possible.
Withum will continue to cover the announcements so stay tuned!
