SharePoint Roadmap Pitstop: August 2024

Have you been enjoying some time off – dipping your toes in the sand, taking in a walk beside a new river, or dining on a dish you still can’t pronounce and won’t forget? We hope so. And if you’ve been heads down hard at work, we can relate to that, too.

August 2024 brought some great new offerings across a number of engineering teams not vacationing: Microsoft 365 Backup (GA), SharePoint: A new Start experience, SharePoint: New Banner web part, Stream Playlist card on Viva Connections dashboard, Viva Amplify: Video templates, OneDrive: Annotate PDFs (text boxes), Microsoft Lists: Row reorder, Clipchamp: Image background removal, Microsoft Loop components in OneNote, and more. Details and screenshots below, including our audible companion: The Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop: August 2024 podcast episode – all to help answer, “What’s rolling out now for SharePoint and related technologies into Microsoft 365?”

In the podcast episode, you’ll hear audio from a recent live AMA – specifically a question to David Johnson (Principal PM Architect from the Microsoft Digital team) asking him to share one good story and one bad story about managing Microsoft’s Microsoft 365 tenant over the years. As you can imagine, he’s got stories. [Note: You can watch David’s AMA response as a video within this LinkedIn post.]

David Johnson (Principal PM Architect – Microsoft) [middle] answering an audience question during a live event AMA in Orlando, Florida.

And to round it out, we have insights about a few timely events for SharePoint, Planner, Loop, and more. All features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Microsoft 365 as of August 2024 (possibly early September 2024).

Inform and engage with dynamic employee experiences
Build your intelligent intranet on SharePoint in Microsoft 365 and get the benefits of investing in business outcomes – reducing IT and development costs, increasing business speed and agility, and up-leveling the dynamic, personalized, and welcoming nature of your intranet.

Microsoft 365 Backup is now generally available
We’re excited to announce the general availability of Microsoft 365 Backup, and the underlying developer-focused Microsoft 365 Backup Storage platform, delivering capabilities to help you address these growing challenges. Included in this release:

• Microsoft 365 Backup provides performant backup and recovery for your critical active data to maintain business continuity at speeds orders of magnitude faster than with traditional migration-based backup methodologies. 


• Microsoft 365 Backup Storage gives third-party backup developers a way to provide you with the same benefits of the native Microsoft 365 Backup solution through their own integrated application.

FYI | On The Intrazone podcast, we recently worked with one our Microsoft 365 Backup lead PMs from the SharePoint team, Brad Gussin, to showcase two partners and their solutions that extend the Microsoft 365 Backup Storage capabilities. Just scroll back a few episodes on The Intrazone feed to catch up on what Commvault and Veeam offer to further the value of Microsoft 365 with other data sources, all within one interface.

• Learn more about Microsoft 365 Backup (blog by Zach Rosenfield) + launch partners, pricing model, guidance whitepaper, and adoption resources.

SharePoint: A new Start experience
Beyond the core of finding and accessing SharePoint sites and portals within your organization, we’ve designed a new user-friendly approach to creating sites and pages. This new Start experience becomes a central location to refine drafts, review past work, and monitor engagement metrics.

You’ll be able to create personal pages using available templates and/or publish them to a target site as needed, then track all your pages in one place. Effectively a mini pages app within the broader Start experience.

One of our community members and Microsoft MVP, Ami Diamond, produced a nice walk-thru, overview video that gives you a window into what’s possible when visiting and using the new SharePoint start experience:

If you don’t know where to start (a page or site), start in SharePoint – SharePoint Start – aka, the recent update to the SharePoint Start page to create SharePoint sites and pages.

• Roadmap ID: 124824.


• Learn more.

SharePoint: New Banner web part
Based on healthy feedback about the title region of a page or news article, I think this one is going to make a lot of page creators happy. This update means big improvements to the title area at the top of SharePoint Pages and News. You can remove the title area all together; it’s no longer mandatory. SharePoint Page and News authors can choose to add no banners, one banner, or multiple banners to the page. The title area will be rebranded as a Banner web part with new layouts while additional use of banners will function as headings within the bulk of the page.

Using the new SharePoint Banner web part on a SharePoint page – with edit pane open on the right side.

Note: You must enter a page title in the first banner or on the command bar before you can Save and close or Publish the page.

• Roadmap ID: 386904. 


• Learn more.

Microsoft Viva: Stream Playlist card on Viva Connections Dashboard
The Viva Connections dashboard provides fast and easy access to information and job-related tasks. Content on the dashboard can be targeted to users in specific roles, markets, and job functions. And there are numerous cards ready for you to add to your Viva Connections dashboard, including the ability to use the Card designer to create your own interactive dashboard cards.

Now it’s easier than ever to add a Stream Playlist card on your Viva Connections Dashboard; Stream Playlist card to the rescue! Once you add the Stream Playlist card, people will see your curated set of videos as a playable playlist within the dashboard. Great for executive series announcements, HR onboarding, and learning series for upcoming moments and launches.

A Stream Playlist card on Viva Connections dashboard in action when you click the “View” button.

Cards add value and interactivity to your Viva Connections dashboard – pulling information together, dynamically, from across your various apps and services.

• Learn more. Learn how to add the Stream Playlist card. 


• Roadmap ID: 402190.

Viva Amplify video templates
We’ve talked a few times about how Amplify benefits from it sitting atop the SharePoint pages platform. And here is another example repurposing the Stream video page templates we noted a few months ago. In Microsoft Viva Amplify, you can now create and highlight videocentric publications, like Teams meeting content or executive messages, with new video templates.

Now when you work within an existing Amplify campaign or create a new campaign, you’ll have the option to select View more templates where you’ll find the following video templates:

• Starter: Start with a video, add other web parts, and share your story. 


• Training (pictured below): Share your training videos and other content. 


• Recap: Highlight your event with video content. 


• Message: Broadcast your message and related content.

What you’ll start with when using the Training video template within Viva Amplify.

When selecting Use this template, a new publication is created that can be saved as publication in the campaign to be edited and published, or it can be edited and saved as a Campaign template.

• Learn more. 


• Roadmap ID: 398979.

Teamwork updates across SharePoint team sites, OneDrive, and Microsoft Teams
Microsoft 365 is designed to be a universal toolkit for teamwork – to give you the right tools for the right task, along with common services to help you seamlessly work across applications. SharePoint is the intelligent content service that powers teamwork – to better collaborate on proposals, projects, and campaigns throughout your organization – with integration across Microsoft Teams, OneDrive, Yammer, Stream, Planner and much more.

OneDrive: Annotate PDFs with text boxes
Now you can annotate and save PDF files with text boxes for files stored in OneDrive and SharePoint. Just open a PDF in File Viewer and select Edit. Use the Add Text command on the left side of the screen to insert text. When finished, click Save changes in the top left corner to exit Edit mode and save your changes to the PDF in place within the file, where it was originally stored.

Annotate a PDF stored in OneDrive or SharePoint – Adding typed text in a new text box.

• Roadmap ID: 387807.

Microsoft Lists: Row reorder
This is a feature for when you want your list to look just right – in that right order. Instead of having to add an extra column to get tricky with ascension or descension of numbers and dates… now you can simply grab a row, or multiple rows, to reorder List items using the drag and drop action. This effectively creates a custom sort of your items so you can start your list, reorder your list, and not feel bound to some immovable or hacked custom order.

Drag and drop one or multiple Lists rows to create your preferred custom sort order.

Drag. Drop. Done.

• Learn more + a new blog.


• Roadmap ID: 380183.

Clipchamp: Image background removal
Easily remove and customize the background of any image in seconds using the smart AI-powered image background removal. You essentially make the background of an image transparent without sacrificing their original PNG or JPEG image quality.

Now you can upload and improve your images to add to your videos, with no additional software required. Consider replacing the background of a marketing images to help the product stand out. Or remove unwanted distractions in the background of images and then add text behind the subject to give depth and context to your video.

Within Clipchamp, select the background removal effect. Your image background will automatically start removing using AI technology.

A few quick IT notes:

• This feature is available by default for all Clipchamp users (meaning this does not require Clipchamp Premium access). 


• This applies to Clipchamp for Windows and Mac desktops and to Clipchamp on the web. 


• This feature is opt-in only and the data handling practices are fully compliant with Microsoft Trust Center overview.

• Learn more + blog.


• Roadmap ID: 388485.

Loop components in Microsoft OneNote
OneNote has always been a great structured location to organize your personal and team information. And now you can enhance the collaborative aspects of OneNote by bringing unstructured, collaborative content from Loop components in Teams and Outlook into OneNote notebooks, fostering real-time collaboration and sharing.

Adding a Microsoft Loop ‘Task list’ component onto a OneNote notebook page.

You can both create and insert Loop components into your Microsoft OneNote notebook. Navigate to Insert > Loop to create a new component or paste a link to an existing component to have it show up on live and in sync within your OneNote canvas.

• Learn more. 


• Roadmap ID: 379968.

Related technology
Microsoft Loop | 5-Part Learning Series
Learn everything about Loop, from the initial vision of collaborating on smaller bits of information and content, to learning the basics of how to use it, to discovering its project management superpowers, how the team is incorporating Copilot into Loop, and more.

Three screengrabs from the first three episodes of the Microsoft Loop | 5-Part Learning Series.

Parts 1, 2, and 3 are now available to view on demand:

• Pt.1 | “Meet the makers: The story behind Microsoft Loop”


• Pt.2 | “Almost everything you need to know to start with Microsoft Loop” 


• Pt.3 | “Level up your project management with Microsoft Loop”

Up next: Part 4, “Meet Copilot in Loop” | Wednesday, Sept. 4th at 10am PDT.

And then the giant 90-min “AMA: Live Video Q&A with the Loop team” | Thursday, September 12th from 10am – 11:30am.

Learn about the full learning series and get Loop’ed in!

Upcoming Microsoft Planner moment
“Microsoft Planner: What’s new and what’s coming next” | Sept. 17th, 9am-10am PDT.

Join the Planner product team to hear about recent updates to the new Planner and a sneak peek about what’s coming next on their roadmap. Their experts will showcase key new capabilities and improvements of the new experience, including demos on how to leverage Copilot in Planner, new Baselines to stay on track, web app updates, integration with Whiteboard, and more. And there will be a live Q&A AMA portion during the live broadcast, too – so bring your questions.

“Microsoft Planner: What’s new and what’s coming next” | Sept. 17th, 9am-10am PDT | aka.ms/NewPlanner/WhatsNext

Make a task to join this upcoming Planner moment live!

• Register today.

SharePoint Embedded tour | September 2024
The SharePoint Embedded product team is coming to New York City and London in September! These are all-day events in each city to learn how SharePoint Embedded can deliver Copilot, Collaboration, Compliance, and Core Enterprise Storage for your document centric apps. Learn new ways to build file and document centric apps. Get hands-on coding experience with this new technology and learn how to build your own custom app. Hear from others who have implemented SharePoint Embedded solutions. And get insight into the SharePoint Embedded roadmap.

SharePoint Embedded tour | September 2024 in New York City, New York, USA and London, UK.

• New York City, US 
  
  
  
  • Date: Thursday, September 12th, 9AM-7PM 
  
  
  • Where: Microsoft Offices NYC Times Square 
  
  
  
  


• London, UK 
  
  
  
  • Date: Thursday, September 26th, 9AM-7PM 
  
  
  • Where: Central London
  
  
  
  

These are great opportunities to learn more and connect directly with the SharePoint product team.

Register today.

CommunityDays.org “Community Calls”
We have a new portion of the CommunityDays.org site dedicated to you guessed it – Community calls. This is a collection of monthly calls hosted by Microsoft product teams and community members. You’ll find calls covering Viva, OneDrive, Microsoft 365 Champions, Power Platform, Dynamics 365, various dev-focused calls, etc.

Screenshot | Community calls page on CommunityDays.org site – a collection of monthly calls hosted by Microsoft teams and community members. CommunityDays.org/calls

Community calls are open to anyone. They offer recurring opportunities to connect with members of the community and Microsoft ecosystem. Community calls are places to learn technical skills from experts and discover information on programs, activities, and events.

Visit CommunityDays.org/calls, find a topic of interest, and join in.

Inside Track: How Microsoft Digital uses SharePoint Premium at Microsoft
At Microsoft, we use SharePoint Premium capabilities to access, share, and co-create documents for more than 600,000 sites with 350 million pieces of content and more than 12 petabytes of data. It’s at the core of everything we do, from places like where my team of 15 people share their work, to being home to our very largest portals, where the entire company finds news and performs common tasks.

“SharePoint Premium represents a shift in how Microsoft Digital approaches content management, not just as a new technology but as a new way of working. It’s about integrating AI capabilities into daily practices to automate mundane tasks like tagging content, making it more discoverable, and keeping it up to date. This integration aims to make content management a part of daily habits and routines, ensuring content remains relevant and useful.” – Stan Liu (Senior product manager and knowledge management lead at Microsoft Digital)

Example Taxonomy Tagging – the Location column auto-populates based on the term store within your tenant.

Read the full article on Inside Track by Jason Kellington.

ClearBox “Intranet and EXP” 2024 report
The latest edition of our intranet and EXP report, Version 3.3, is out and it’s free. It assesses every category of the intranet — including stand-alone software, in-a-box products for SharePoint, employee communication platforms, and the new breed of employee experience platforms that offer desktop and mobile apps.

The ClearBox team also reviewed SharePoint in Microsoft 365 – including Viva Connections, Engage, Amplify, and Microsoft Teams – to give you a baseline when considering using it as is and/or enhancing capabilities by adding an ‘in-a-box’ intranet product.

The latest edition of the ClearBox Consulting “Intranet and Employee Experience Platforms (EXP) 2024” report (v3.3).

You can download the full report now to review 20 leading intranet systems. And again, it’s now free. We send kudos to the ClearBox team, Sam Marshall, Suzie Robinson, Andrew Marr, and Wedge Black for compiling this dive deep review to help you discover options to create or update your intranet.

Download the full, free report from the ClearBox website.

September 2024 teasers
Psst, still here? Still scrolling the page looking for more roadmap goodness? If so, here is a few teasers of what’s to come to production next month…

• Teaser #1: SharePoint: Brand center [Roadmap IDs: 124838 & 375495] 


• Teaser #2: Rewrite SharePoint pages with Copilot in SharePoint Text v1 [Roadmap ID: 124840]

… shhh, tell everyone.

Helpful, ongoing change management resources

• “Stay on top of Microsoft 365 changes” 


• “Message center in Microsoft 365 ” 
  
  
  
  • Install the Microsoft 365 admin app; view Message Center posts and stay current with push notifications. 
  
  
  
  


• Microsoft 365 public roadmap + pre-filtered URL for SharePoint, OneDrive, Viva, and Stream roadmap items. 


• SharePoint Facebook | Twitter | SharePoint community blog | Feedback 


• Follow me to catch news and interesting SharePoint things: @mkashman; warning, occasional bad puns may fly in a tweet or two here and there.

Thanks for tuning in and/or reading this episode/blog of the Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop – August 2024. We are open to your feedback in comments below to hear how both the Roadmap Pitstop podcast episodes and blogs can be improved over time.

Engage with us. Ask those questions that haunt you. Push us where you want and need to get the best information and insights. We are here to put both our and your best change management foot forward.

Stay safe out there on the road’map ahead. And thanks for listening and reading.

Thanks for your time,
Mark Kashman – senior product manager (SharePoint/Lists) | Microsoft)

The Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop – August 2024 graphic showing some of the highlighted release features.