NextGen Portals, Microsoft’s latest ready-to-go intranet solution announced at the 2015 Ignite conference, has begun its release in the past year or so. However, only a couple portals are currently available to end users, and Microsoft is notoriously tight-lipped about new updates and releases to its Office 365 products.
If you’re considering NextGen Portals for your business but are still in the dark about what Microsoft’s next steps are, keep reading to find out about the major offerings on the horizon.
Delve Enhancements
Most importantly, Microsoft plans a series of enhancements to the Delve portal, which provides personalized content to end users from across the Office 365 platform and allows you to discover relevant information, colleagues, and people. The ability to praise people has recently been added to Delve this quarter. Other planned features include:
- The ability to favorite and bookmark content across different areas
- More advanced capabilities to locate people’s work and expertise
- Organizational analytics, or the discovery of organizational content and ability
With Delve, Microsoft hopes to offer a more visual way to discover relationships between people and content. These features are expected to arrive in four to six months.
Improvements to Groups
Another major enhancement, although it’s unclear when and how this will happen, is to Office 365 groups, the shared workspaces that allow collaboration and sharing of emails, files, and events. The team sites capability that existed in SharePoint will merge and become available in a microsite, a relatively simple website with space for articles and some social capabilities. These microsites are expected to be more collaborative in nature, allowing for the easy creation of documents, notebooks, and tasks. Is Office Group the future of social for Office 365? The debate is on and we are waiting on Microsoft to detail its plans for the future of Yammer.
Page Authoring
Today, there are different ways to author content in SharePoint, from wiki pages to publishing pages and team site pages. It’s a very disjointed, clunky experience requiring the use of different technologies. Microsoft hopes to release a new page creation experience as part of NextGen Portals. Authors will be able to post content using a simple editor, similar to Wikipedia, but with a better user interface than in SharePoint. Some of these capabilities have already been made available to end users without any fanfare.
Task Management
Last month, Microsoft announced the availability of a lightweight social task management capability in Office group portals, called Office 365 Planner. Designed for teamwork management, Planner helps to assign, track, organize, and share details on your projects. Planner allows users to see projects visually with cards, images and charts for an at-a-glance understanding of all project aspects. A preview will be available this year but only for First Release customers.
Miscellaneous Improvements
Other enhancements include the release of the “Infopedia” knowledge management portal that will help you to access relevant information with a new search experience. This portal is believed to be early in the works, and its release is perhaps eight to 12 months away in the summer of 2016. There will also be some incremental improvements to the Video and Delve portals that have already been released.
Final Thoughts
Although it’s not always crystal clear to end users and customers, Microsoft has a roadmap for Office 365 and the NextGen Portals. The majority of what we know about the portals comes from what the company has disclosed at Ignite and subsequent conferences. With the scarcity of information available and Microsoft’s discreet releases of new Office 365 features, it’s sometimes difficult for customers to know what’s on the horizon for NextGen Portals. If you’re considering NextGen Portals as a ready-to-go intranet solution, it’s imperative that you keep up to date with the latest news and information so that you can make the right choices for your business.
