At Microsoft’s annual conference for SharePoint held in Las Vegas, the American multinational announced the addition of brand new features for both OneDrive for Business and SharePoint.
The presentation from Microsoft started with an introduction on SharePoint Home Sites. The company described these sites with the term “employee experiences” able to integrate fully with the mega-menu currently present in the intranet portals of SharePoint. The sites are in effect landing pages that enable employees within an organisation to both share and leave comments on videos, articles and other materials internally, in line with their designated permissions and role, via either the mobile app of SharePoint’s home view or direct from their desktop.
These new Home Sites for SharePoint are connected to an improved Start Page in SharePoint originally dubbed SharePoint Home. The brand new Start Page is presented with cross-site activity insights, enhanced navigation, document views and also features content saved by users for later.
Improved tools for users
Cortana, Microsoft’s virtual assistant, has now gained conversational artificial intelligence to facilitate user experiences. Microsoft customers will also benefit from easier access to files, organisational charts, contacts, conversations, internal sites, tools and locations via an improved search facility. The brand new search bar offers easier single-click access for users to Microsoft Search, and can also be used to quickly get answers to commonly asked questions.
Along with working in conjunction with embedded solutions found in SharePoint Framework, the search tool also operates freely and effectively with hundreds of apps from third-party providers available in Microsoft Teams.
OneDrive set to offer differential sync
At present differential sync is an option available for users who have files from Microsoft Office 2016 stored within OneDrive for Business. Later in 2019, Microsoft has announced that this helpful feature will be fully available for every type of file stored in OneDrive, not just Office 2016 file types.
Put simply, differential sync is the ability for software to be enabled to sync only the individual parts which are altered in the cloud, rather than replacing the entire file. The benefit of this ability to synchronise is not only an increase in productivity, but that companies will now save valuable time they would have wasted previously waiting for much larger volumes of data to be uploaded.
Customers using web-based OneDrive will now be afforded the capability to preview more than 320 different file types, which will now include DWG AutoCad files and 360 degrees images. With the enhanced support for non-Office-based files, users will be able to post comments. Those working together on projects can make amendments to any of these now available file types using notes.
Enhanced business video with Stream
At the conference Microsoft also announced Stream, its service for business video, has been enhanced on both Android and iOS with far superior facilities for sharing, uploading and recording. Employees will also have the capability to insert quizzes, surveys and polls into videos directly through Microsoft Forums.
If your company is interested in making the most of Microsoft technology for improved collaboration, you can contact our expert team here at WM Reply.