Microsoft Ignite Recap - Fall 2021

Admin Updates

SharePoint Server Subscription Edition

First preview was announced summer 2021. It is now in General Availability. With the subscription edition you can migrate N-2. It is now licenses and more tightly tied to the Cloud.

Migrate Workflows

Added support for on-prem to the cloud. It is now possible to migrate workflows through the SharePoint migration tool.

Private Channels in SharePoint Admin

Now when you look at your active sites, there will be a column that shows the private channels each site has. This addresses the issue of keeping them private but making them discoverable for admins.

Visualization of private channels in SharePoint admin center

When we see people move to the cloud the admins often are concerned about what is being shared where. Now there is a report with the ability to see which sites are sharing with everyone.

Microsoft Teams Integration Updates

In the past two years the usage of Microsoft Teams has skyrocketed due to work remote and hybrid work scenarios. There were a lot of announcements around integration between Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, and Yammer.

SharePoint/Teams Update

Right now, you can edit pages in Microsoft Teams, but you can’t create them. They did announce the ability to create content from Microsoft Teams, which is great for our site owners. This will roll out January 2022.

OneDrive/Teams Updates

There is the ability to link a SharePoint library into your OneDrive with “Add to OneDrive” though you are currently limited to having this as a top tier folder. This will soon be available to add into folders, so users are able to nest and organize their SharePoint library links.

Visualization of My Files in OneDrive

The “add to OneDrive” link will be added to the Teams file viewer as well, so users will be able to add SharePoint document libraries to OneDrive from Teams.

In OneDrive, they’re going to be adding the ability to share to Teams from the “Share Dialog” menu.

Lastly, all your meeting recordings in Teams go to OneDrive, and by the end of the year, the video recording will be embedded with transcripts and comments, as well as a Table of Contents for anything presented with PowerPoint live.

Microsoft Teams Create Update

A new Create app is going to be added into Microsoft Teams. Similar to the create experience you have in Office.com upon logging in and seeing all the recent documents where you have the ability to create anything in Microsoft 365. It can be a SharePoint page, a OneNote Notebook, Excel Spreadsheet, etc.

Visualization of create experience in Microsoft Teams

Yammer/Viva Updates

In the future, Topics in Yammer and Viva Topics will be integrated once you have a premium Viva Topics experience.

Visualization of Topics integrated into Yammer

Viva Topics Updates

They announced new user experiences:

Yammer in preview by year end
Outlook Web Access in preview by year end
Teams by end of first quarter 2022
Topic cards will work in primary work surfaces

There will be additional capabilities for user opt-in/opt-out, related topics, segments, and types for grouping topics.

Microsoft is focused on improved analytics and Topic Center improvements for more rapid publishing. For the analytics we are expecting to see the ability to see all sites where I am identified as an expert or see all sites where no expert is identified.

Generally available by the end of the year will be French, German, and Spanish content crawls.

There were a few adoption tools released at Ignite: Use Case Catalog and Hackathon. Viva Topics is set up like Wikipedia so one of the first thoughts when setting up Viva Topics is “how do we get people involved.” The Hackathon has some tips on how to begin that company involvement.

Other Viva Updates

All Microsoft Viva components are available in general availability:

Viva Topics (knowledge base)
Viva Insights (health and well-being)
Viva Learning (micro learning)
Viva Connections (extensibility option)

The Viva components are available as a suite:

Ignite special of $9/user/month until August 2022 when it will be $12/user/month

Not specific to Viva connections but related to extensibility, SPFx 1.13 was released to general availability. With that comes the new Dashboard page Layout and new Dashboard web part which gives you the ability to start including ACEs (adaptive card extensions). There is a new PnP repo for the ACEs samples so you can try them in your dev environment.

Microsoft Loop in Teams

Microsoft Loop, previously Fluid Framework, was announced at Ignite and it’s going to be a much bigger thing, but right now the only thing you can do is add little components through Microsoft Loop in Teams. It contains live typing from anywhere, real-time and users can see who is doing what. This would work well for a group that is brainstorming. This is one of those products where Microsoft is throwing it out there and more use cases may come later.

Visualization of Microsoft Loop in Microsoft Teams

Profile Customization w/ AAD & Graph

In private preview, you will now have the ability to display AAD properties including Custom attributes 1-15 on the People card that shows up across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. You can go into the setup and turn on different properties from AAD that you want to show. There could also be third-party content that come through graph-search connectors.

Visualization of customizations on user profile card

To get third-party data in for a connector that Microsoft did not put out there, the early way to do that is to sync profile data into SQL then set built-in graph connectors to get that data and bring it into search.

The Search Profile can also be extended with the exceptions that:

Not all profile properties are available
People Card only shows on web apps
Can only enrich existing properties
UPN must index properties in SQL so it knows what piece of data goes with what user

Visualization of customization in People search results