The webcast Microsoft broadcast as part of its SharePoint Virtual Summit, which was held earlier this month, saw officials from the tech firm provide a preview of its upcoming features and updates for SharePoint.
The software giant is set to go on offering support for those individuals and enterprises that are using its on-premises SharePoint Server and, with this in mind, it will be launching a brand new SharePoint Server 2016 Feature Pack at some point before the end of the year. This will be the second of these packs that it has released.
However, a significant number of the updates that Microsoft has planned for SharePoint are set to be exclusive to Office 365 and SharePoint Online, with the upcoming Feature Pack starting to provide the necessary component integration for the SharePoint Framework.
Microsoft has indicated that its own figures show that over 60% of the total SharePoint seats it currently has are the online version of SharePoint rather than the on-premises one. Officials from the company state that it is currently being deployed by over 250,000 enterprises, with a rise of 90% in the total number of active monthly SharePoint users in comparison to this time last year. Microsoft has not offered a total user figure for SharePoint, but it has stated that its Office 365 Commercial has over 100 million seats, which translates into nearly 100 million users of SharePoint Online.
When it comes to the product roadmap, Microsoft’s plans include the launch of SharePoint personalised search within Office 365, which means that search results for People will be displayed, as well as those for Files and Sites. The upcoming months will also see the company launching a feature where news, relevant content and recent document recommendations are displayed instantly whenever a user clicks on the Office Search box. Recommendations concerning individuals who might provide related data will also be displayed during searches, based on Office 365 profile information. The feature called ‘People Cards’ that will be triggered will supply relevant information taken from these profiles.
The underlying foundation of Microsoft Graph is what leads to personalised search results. Microsoft has been focused for some time now on incorporating greater numbers of Planner, Teams and Yammer ‘signals’ into Graph, with this having an impact on the People, Files and Sites lists a user will see in his or her Office 365 single tenant SharePoint Home search results.
This personalised People search feature is Microsoft’s planned solution to the issue of providing sufficient capabilities for knowledge management – ones in line with what its officials had previously been expecting to offer via the SharePoint Infopedia portal, which has since been scrapped by the software company.
We always take a very keen interest in the plans that Microsoft has for its SharePoint Server here at WM Reply, as it forms the backbone of many of our award-winning enterprise solutions. If you would like to find out about these in greater detail, give us a call right away.