Everything You Need to Know about SharePoint – August 2019

Sharepoint Hero

I think this month does a great job of reinforcing that if you haven’t committed to Modern pages in SharePoint yet, you should. Microsoft continues to roll out hot new features for Modern pages and reinforce the message: you need to stop with the old stuff. And the old stuff isn’t just pages but workflows and forms also. Embrace change people. Besides, the sooner everyone moves to Modern we can move onto Post-Modern or some other new era. I am of course kidding but typing Modern so much reminds me what a terrible name it is. Anyway, you want news not my random thoughts so on with it.

Improvements of the SharePoint Page authoring experience

This month Microsoft released a slew of fancy new features to make page creation and editing better including new vertical sections and my team’s favorite Undo and Redo when editing a page. Hooray. Just another reason that SharePoint Online is so much better than on-prem. You are always getting these little nice to haves. You can read more about these updates and the rest of the changes here. The updates should be rolling out to general availability soon.

Reminder that Modern pages will continue to be the push

In the most recent SharePoint Dev Community chat they reaffirmed a few things. One is the continued push to be Modern and to release features that only work with Modern pages. Additionally they reminded us that SharePoint Designer and InfoPath are going away. A couple of takeaways here from me. First off, if you are still building new SPD or InfoPath workflows in SharePoint Online you are crazy. Move to PowerApps and Flow. Secondly, the bi-weekly dev calls are good listening even if you are not a dev. Playing them in the background to steal nuggets or get inspired with new ideas is a great way to go. You can download the recurring invite here.

SharePoint Modernization Scanner

While I was chatting with someone about the reminder to be Modern they also reminded me that back in June Microsoft released the SharePoint Modernization Scanner. What a cool free tool; it does A LOT. It knows about Office 365 Groups, wikis, classic publishing portals, where you InfoPath, and where you use class workflows. Man, sorry I missed this back in June. This seems super helpful!

New Flow actions for SharePoint Document Management

SharePoint Online and Flow continue to add actions and this month they added Check-In and Check-Out. Fancy. Thankfully I don’t do much with SharePoint Document management anymore but if you do, these actions should help. I just double-checked and these two new actions have already shown up in my tenants so hopefully, they are ready to go for you also.

More Web Parts coming to SharePoint

This machine just doesn’t stop. In this month’s installment of more is better for web parts, Microsoft announced several new ones. Overall I would say the theme is very web experience centric. A button and call to action, the Hero web part adds a secondary call to action, a new layout, and more. Just lots of little pieces to turn your page into more of an experience instead of a wall of information. I also like the ability to get emails (yes, I still like emails) for news I might have missed. Read about all of this new stuff here.