Christmas is all around us and it's been busy in the world of SharePoint — something we can all relate to at this time of year... So, here's some of the key additions we think should know about.
We know that an intelligent intranet powers employee experience, organisational alignment and cultural transformation. The heart of the digital workplace, an intelligent intranet provides shared content and solutions for collaboration, connects people and content across teams and silos to harness collective knowledge, and drives employee engagement and communications.
Our Percy intranet is integrated with the SharePoint start page, so any time users hit the SharePoint link in the top left next to the waffle menu, they’ll see the start page with the branding and navigation of your Percy site. A menu item is added to the Percy home site navigation which allows users to easily switch between the two.
Search is improved with an enterprise-wide Microsoft Search experience right from the search box in the suite bar.
Tip: Add a logo to your suite bar and set the link to your Percy site. This way it’s only ever 1 click away!
Not technically a December update, but it’s taken us some time to explore and experiment with this feature. This will allow you to move your Percy intranet from where it is i.e. ‘/sites/wherever’ to the root site. Moving the root site to a specified URL of your choosing.
We have intentionally kept away from deploying Percy to the root site, mainly because it wasn’t a true modern site (until recently) and we found many tenants had used their root site for different things, quite often testing out features and we found this to cause issues when trying to deploy Percy on top.
If you’re interested in moving your Percy site to the root of your tenant, get in touch and we can advise. It’s not a 5-minute job I’m afraid due to restrictions around the process and will require some downtime of your Intranet, which we’ll do our best to accommodate.
We all know the save for later button that can be seen at the bottom of news articles, well this is now possible with documents as well.
Clicking this icon will make it easy to get back to the document from either the “saved for later” view in OneDrive as shown above, or in the SharePoint start page, now easily available from new Percy SharePoint home site. (See how it’s all coming together!).
PowerApps have been possible in SharePoint lists for some time now, it’s now possible to bring the enhanced capabilities that PowerApps offers to document libraries as well.
If you’re working with some rather large lists or just prefer a clean slate to focus this is a small, but helpful little enhancement.
A toggle button to simply show or hide the navigation and header of the site, so you get more screen real estate for your data.
We’re soon heading to a place where it’ll be easier to list what’s not possible with the popup card that appears when you hover over a document. Conversations have now been added in to the mix as well.
This is quite an interesting one we think. It’s not quite sharing in reverse, but it’s close! From a folder in your OneDrive you can hit the ‘Request files’ button and either grab a link or add a list of people who will receive the link via email.
Upon hitting this link people can upload files directly into your folder. And no, they won’t be able to see any other documents uploaded!
A use case could be requests for quotations or somewhere for everyone to upload their signed version of a document, although of course you’d be using Percy's Policy Acknowledge in that scenario!
This uses Microsoft Information Protection-based encryption associated with a sensitivity label. The encrypted files are treated much like regular files and users can open and edit them in Office on the Web and get modern experiences like co-authoring.
Applying a sensitivity label to a Word document from within Microsoft Word.
SharePoint recognises sensitivity labels applied to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files in SharePoint and OneDrive and enforces the settings that correspond with each label. When you download a file from SharePoint or OneDrive, the sensitivity label travels with the file and the settings remain enforced.
From an IT perspective, you govern these encrypted files with Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies and eDiscovery - all the enforcement you would expect are available per your governance plan and design along with greater productivity flexibility for people who continue to work with the sensitive files.
Good question! Believe it or not, this is an abridged version of all the updates that come to SharePoint and OneDrive throughout the month, we look at each one and pick out ones we believe are most interesting to you, our clients.
We are also looking at what we can do with them to enhance our offering to you through Percy. Is this something we can bake into the platform, are there extensibility options that with some developer wizardry can make for a really neat feature?!
Well, it’s that’s time of year! Christmas is upon us, so we’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! It’s been an extremely exciting year here at Perspicuity and we can’t wait for a little down time to re-charge and get ready for the same again next year.
❤ Perspicuity