I recently returned from a long vacation this summer of 2019, and of course I was curious about what happened last month in SharePoint Online and in my dev tenant that is stated as First Release. Although I know that SharePoint Online and other services in Office 365 is constantly being updated, all from small and minor changes by daily bases to complete new long waited functionality every month or quarter, I was pleasantly surprised about some new great stuff, and I thought I should share my point of views about this for my readers.

I was particularly curious about the update that now gives us a more advanced filtering in the Highlighted Content Web Part by using KQL for content related to sites, this is one thing I really have looking forward too, this was useful back in the classic publishing sites with the old good Content Search Web Part, I worked with this a lot back at that time for my customers. To get this even better, I hope that we will also be able to create our own templates, similar to what we could do with Display Templates for this web part, let’s hope that this will be possible soon in some upcoming update. Anyway, I also saw that we now can use CAML queries that are addressed for documents in document libraries, interesting that the CAML language is still around, but why not? I will definitely analyze the possibilities for KQL and CAML for this web part more detailed later, and maybe it can result in an upcoming blog post with some hands on concrete example how to create common and useful queries, let’s see about that.

Let’s take a look at another really cool update, Button and Call to Action. It works much like the image web part you can put into a full-widh section in a page, you know the one that fits especially well on a home page / start page for the Intranet. I see this new web part something like a “mini hero banner”, typically something that my clients usually demand, especially editors and people that works with communication who want and need to work with form and design, they previously had too few opportunities in modern pages to create landing pages and few opportunities to link to other pages and resources in the Intranet.

 

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Read more about what is recently updated and what new features are available at at Microsofts Tech community.

In addition to the above mentioned, Microsoft has also launched and rolling out more interesting updates this month & this quarter for example:

  • updates for the weather web part
  • hero tiles layout for News
  • vertical columns for page layouts
  • Page edit (undo/redo)
  • Modern document sets
  • Sticky headers for large lists
  • Convert a communication site to become the root site

You get the point, all this is just awesome nice and useful features that will strengthen up the SharePoint brand, feels good in our SharePoint hearts! Not to mention all stuff that have been rolled out in June and July, a lot of updates.. I do really looking forward to show all this new goodies for my current customer, I know the will like it as they see that Microsoft is investing heavily in the product, and that SharePoint Online and Office 365 is simply getting better and better and not least that what is missing today that many demand is likely to be rolled out in the future.

Nut how should we be able to keep track of what is happening and try to predict what will happen in the future?

It goes fast so first of all, be sure to follow Office 365 Roadmap and the UserVoice, you’ll find the link to the roadmap here. Another good source is the UserVoice for SharePoint, you can also submit new ideas here, and Microsoft think this input from the users of SharePoint is much important so if you see something that’s missing, be sure to submit them here and to vote for other ideas that’s already existing. If you take a deeper look into UserVoice, you can also see what Microsoft thinks about in this very moment and what features they are working on right now and you can also provide information from your perspective that could be in help for the development of a new feature.

Well, this was just some thought from me on the fly, keep on going SharePoint Online!