What’s to come in SharePoint
It’s been about 3 years since Microsoft began transitioning from the “Classic” SharePoint experience into “Modern”.
The fundamentals of being able to deliver an engaging and modern experience for employees in the world of intranets are in place within the native platform. It’s relatively easy to create a great looking SharePoint site, add content and promote information to employees.
Whilst many organisations will still require additional products, accelerators (like Fresh) and components to deliver an enterprise grade intranet experience. Microsoft continually add new value to the native experience.
At Ignite this year amongst many other announcements Microsoft have introduced a number of new SharePoint features and functionality.
Amongst the volume of new things shown there were a couple of “Early next year” releases that appear frequently on the list of requirements for many of our customers.
Modern support for multi-lingual
A couple of new features were demonstrated enabling users to view pages in alternative languages, appearing to be specified elsewhere these page languages have associated roles for a translator. With translations enabled new and modified pages initiate workflow to notify translators that work is required.
Translations are created in the page itself and a page compare utility can be used for editors to see variance and alterations between pages.
For many organisations the multi-lingual support itself may not be a requirement but the page comparison and framework that will be in place could add value.
Visual Page diffing and version comparison
As noted above the ability for editors to view mark-up changes between versions of pages is incredibly useful in organisations with multiple content editors and teams.
Selecting versions and identifying in the page itself what has changed – text, images and web parts looks to provide a step forwards for content management.
Longer term roadmap
A very, very short sharp look at the longer term roadmap identified a couple of other areas of (sometimes heated) debate with customers in the form of custom fonts, tenant wide global navigation and calendar experiences.
These will all be interesting areas to see evolve over the next 12 months.