It’s official – summer is here (in the Northern Hemisphere), happy Wintering Southern Hemi. No matter the latitude or the attitude, the altitude of tech delivery continued with verve and zest.

June 2024 brought some great new offerings: Viva Amplify supports SharePoint audience targeting, SharePoint Premium: Autofill columns, SharePoint: Apply shapes to images, updated CLI for Microsoft 365 v7.10, Teams: File previews in messages, SharePoint: Text web part updates, OneDrive: Shortened URLs, Microsoft Designer updates + new icon, planner.cloud.microsoft, and more. Details and screenshots below, including our audible companion: The Intrazone Roadmap Pitstop: June 2024 podcast episode – all to help answer, “What’s rolling out now for SharePoint and related technologies into Microsoft 365?”

In the podcast episode, we also hear from Dave Cohen (Principal GPM at Microsoft) about how the SharePoint team plans, designs, and delivers ongoing value to your intranet of today and tomorrow. He provides a lot of great insights about how sites, pages, web parts, and more will evolve – applicable to some of the updates from this month – and certainly in the coming months.

All features listed below began rolling out to Targeted Release customers in Microsoft 365 as of June 2024 (possibly early July 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 Viva Amplify supports SharePoint audience targeting.

When publishing to one or more SharePoint sites from within Viva Amplify, you can now promote the news post to specific audiences by indicating security groups, Microsoft 365 groups, or Entra ID (previously Azure Active Directory) dynamic groups. 

Use audience targeting in the publishing pane within Amplify.

This new default feature will allow more targeted communications as desired by the authors and publishers, which equals more engagement with your Viva Amplify publications. When creating your Amplify campaigns, you’re able to use audience targeting in the publishing pane within Amplify. 

Scope your reach for the greatest impact. 

Learn more.

Roadmap ID 398975

SharePoint Premium: New autofill columns

Autofill columns allow an AI prompt to be set on a document library column that processes the file’s contents and saves the response to the associated column. The prompt can be configured to extract information from the file or to generate a response based on the analysis of its contents. That’s both existing, specific metadata, or generated metadata based on your specific criteria – which in the end, all make content mean more and your content become more discoverable, easier to enhance business processes, and takes the manual processing and automates it.

Example: Create a prompt to pull in and autofill column data per row item.

This is one of those when you see it in action, you first drop jaw, wonder how, and then quickly move into a simple gratitude statement: “thanks AI” and get on to other higher priority tasks.

Learn more.
Roadmap ID 389375.

SharePoint: Apply shapes to images.

Our eyes and brain love variance – especially when we can enhance the story of a communication, visually. To help bring more interest to a page, you can now apply a shape over an Image web part or inline image in a Text web part. The shapes include square, circle, triangle, hexagon, pebble, and teardrop.

Selecting the desired shape for your photo in SharePoint while editing your page.

Roadmap ID 395210.

CLI (command-line interface tool) for Microsoft 365 v7.10

This update brings new management capabilities for a variety of apps and services. Here, we’ll focus on the SharePoint’y IT updates. In full, the CLI for Microsoft 365 is a cross-platform command-line tool that allows you to manage your Microsoft 365 tenant and SharePoint Framework projects.

First, a primer on Microsoft 365 Archive; this is cost-effective storage for inactive SharePoint sites. Many organizations want to retain inactive data but may also wrestle with rising storage costs. Microsoft 365 Archive allows you to retain this inactive data by moving it into cold storage within SharePoint.

CLI for Microsoft 365 is a cross-platform command-line tool that allows you to manage your Microsoft 365 tenant and SharePoint Framework projects.

The CLI for Microsoft 365 now has new commands to archive and unarchive sites.

To archive a SharePoint site, run: m365 spo tenant site archive –url “https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/Marketing“
To unarchive a SharePoint site, run: m365 spo tenant site unarchive –url “https://contoso.sharepoint.com/sites/Marketing“

In this release we’re also adding the ability to list site administrators. To list all admins of a SharePoint site, run: m365 spo site admin list –siteUrl https://contoso.sharepoint.com

Read the full v7.10 article on the Microsoft 365 and Power Platform Community Blog.

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.

Microsoft Teams: New file image previews in messages

The Teams team is working on a series of features to help you to identify, consume, and act on content such as files, lists, and SharePoint pages/posts. In this first release, they bring file image previews to chats and channels, to help us better identify a file in the conversation stream.

When a file — such as a JPG or PNG image file, a PowerPoint file, or a PDF — is attached to a message in chat or a channel, you’ll see a small image of the file without opening the file.

An image stored in OneDrive or SharePoint when linked to a Teams chat now shows an auto-generated preview image.

The benefits are being able to:

Quickly scan for and find the file you need.
To preview part of the file content before opening it.
Save time and bandwidth by avoiding unnecessary file downloads and file opens.

This builds off the years of work to generate and provide file previews in OneDrive and SharePoint, and now – like much innovation – brings it directly into where you’re working with others – for your collective.

Message ID: MC790792

SharePoint: Enhancements to Text web part (Part 1)

The Text web part is one of the most used web parts in all of SharePoint – both in default templates and from organic use. Need to add text to a SharePoint page? That’s the main role of the Text web part. And we’re working to make it better, to give you more options to make the text on your pages appear how you prefer them to.

Two recent Text web part updates: Bulleted list style (left) and more lists level styles (right).

In this update, you’ll find:

Expanded support for font sizes 8-250 with the capability to manually enter custom value.
More bullet list styles – like Disc, Circle, and Square
More numbered list styles – Using numbers, the alphabet, and Roman numerals.
And the ability to start new lists and set custom numbered lists.

These small improvements bring a lot of choice to your text blocks. Alongside this and improved image support, you have great control to type out and visualize better for your viewers’ reception.

Learn more.
Roadmap ID 394278

OneDrive: Shortened URLs in OneDrive web

This makes it easier to navigate to and around OneDrive. When you visit OneDrive on the web, you will see that the previous, longer URL had the format “tenant-my.sharepoint.com/personal/alias/_layouts/15/onedrive.aspx?view=1”. The new, shortened URL will have the format “tenant-my.sharepoint.com.”

We will also replace the name of the pivot in the URL when the user browses to a different part of OneDrive, e.g., “tenant-my.sharepoint.com/my” for My Files or “tenant-my.sharepoint.com/favorites” to go to your favorites view. 

Note: If you book marked or linked to the previous URL, the service will be redirected to the new URL. All sharing links, bookmarks, and custom redirectors; like typing tenant.onedrive.com – the shortest of all OneDrive URLs – still takes you to OneDrive for the Web. Browsing content within another user’s OneDrive will also continue to work and will display the old URL format. There will be no changes to SharePoint Web URLs.

Message ID: MC796476

Related technology

Microsoft Designer gets a refresh + a new icon

First, you’ll notice the new Designer icon within the Microsoft 365 app launcher if you’re signed in with your Microsoft account ID. It’s simple and clean.

The new, official Microsoft Designer icon.

Beyond the updated logo, some of the fun , new features…

Aspect ratios: Designer now supports landscape and portrait images, along with square.
The app also brings Greeting Cards, a new tool in Designer that helps you create highly personalized greeting cards for any occasion.
Transform your photos effortlessly with the new Restyle Image feature. This allows you to turn your photos into stunning, stylized images with just a few clicks. (check it out)

Using the Microsoft Designer ‘Restyle image’ feature – showing the original photo and three style examples as they were generated in my testing.

Learn more about Microsoft Designer at: https://designer.microsoft.com/, plus a recent video: “Using Microsoft Designer “Restyle Image” Tool” from community member, Rob Quickenden.

The new Planner transitions to the cloud.microsoft domain

Initially, the cloud.microsoft domain, provisioned in early 2023, provides a unified, trusted, and dedicated DNS domain space to host Microsoft’s first-party authenticated SaaS products and experiences.

And now, welcome Microsoft Planner to the cloud.microsoft domain: that’s https://planner.cloud.microsoft. Type it into a browser and taken straight to the new Planner – with trust and dedication.

We know this quells IT Pro heartache, and we appreciate the feedback about what we can do to make rolling out and adopting tech and tech services more known and trusted.

Public | Upcoming Microsoft 365 Champions call.

The upcoming July 2024 has as its primary topic the SharePoint Web UI Kit – used to design engaging sites and pages in Figma. The call is on July 24th, 2024. To join the call, head over to https://aka.ms/M365Champions and register to join for free. The webinar is presented twice on the same day: At 9am and 6pm PT for coverage across time zones.

This month, the guest speakers are Nicole Woon and Farhan Mian from the SharePoint team – both working on the Web UI Kit. While building a page in SharePoint is easy, the team wants to provide the ability to explore different design options for your site without the limitation of admin privileges and tenant restrictions, and without exposing organization data. ​

Microsoft 365 Champions program and calls: https://aka.ms/M365Champions.

And you can find the SharePoint Web UI Kit within the Figma community: https://aka.ms/SPWebUIKit ​

Learn more about the Microsoft 365 Champions program.

We will be retiring the SharePoint News connector from Microsoft Teams starting July 22, 2024, and ending August 31, 2024. To continue receiving SharePoint team site news notifications in Teams, we recommend using these alternatives, where development investments continue:

Viva Connections News notifications
Viva Amplify
Or Workflow in Teams

After the connectors are retired, users will not receive new post notifications. While no admin action is required to implement the retirement, we recommend that you guide people through the process of determining if they have configured the SharePoint News connector using the detailed, step-by-step guide. 

Learn more.
Plus, a new blog from Rob Nunez: “SharePoint news connector retirement“

Microsoft Stream: now consumes Less storage consumed for Stream videos in the Microsoft 365 Suite

Video files tend to be very large and consume lots of space against your OneDrive and SharePoint storage quotas. Currently, when you make metadata changes such as title, description, transcripts, chapters, interactivity, thumbnails, media settings, etc. to files in Microsoft Stream, each of those changes causes new versions to be created. Not ideal. Each of these versions counts the full file size towards consumed storage quota. Thus, for large video and audio files, these versions cause your storage consumption to quickly increase. Again, it was not ideal.

To evolve the service, we are changing how Stream handles versioning. Any changes made to the metadata of files from Stream will stop making versions, thus preventing storage from increasing as rapidly as it has in the past.

The following actions will no longer create a version in the file’s version history:

Editing title or description from within Stream.
Adding or editing chapters, transcripts, captions, or interactivity – like a survey.
Adding audio tracks.

For more information, visit Versioning in Stream within Microsoft Support.

Roadmap ID 395380

July 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: Rewrite SharePoint pages with Copilot in SharePoint Text web part v1 [Roadmap ID: 124840] 
Teaser #2: Collaborate on SharePoint Pages and News with coauthoring [Roadmap ID: 124853]

… shhh, tell everyone.

BONUS | “The intranet of tomorrow: beautiful, flexible, and AI ready”

Helpful, ongoing change management resources

Community News Desk | Get up to date on community news and events.
Microsoft 365 apps and services in-depth, on-demand product learning series
“Stay on top of Office 365 changes“
“Message center in Office 365“

Install the Office 365 admin app; view Message Center posts and stay current with push notifications.

Microsoft 365 public roadmap + pre-filtered URL for SharePoint, OneDrive, Yammer 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 – June 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 – June 2024 graphic showing some of the highlighted release features.

​Microsoft Tech Community – Latest Blogs –Read More