Monthly SharePoint News Digest - May 2024

4 min read

New month, new features for the Microsoft 365 Collaboration Tools 🚀

🗓️ Events around Microsoft 365

💡 Trick & Tips

Use Site Columns rather than list or library columns.
There are different functional and technical reasons to prefer to create Site Columns.
First of all, because you can reuse it more easily - no need to create a new column, just add it to the list/library, then, you can organize the site column by content types.
Technically, a site column is composed of an Internal name and a Display Name. The display name can be changed but the internal name, once created, you can't (except programmatically).
Choose to use the Pascal Case or underscores for the internal name (no special chars, spaces, accents, etc.).

Example: myAwesomeSiteColumn.

Finally, if you use the same site columns' internal name with different kinds of types (string, number, bool, yes/no), you have some risk of breaking the search and have some tricky behaviors. Site columns can avoid this.

📰 News

SharePoint

Brand Center (preview)

Finally accessible in my environment, I can finally try this famous feature that allows you to add a brand to apply it to my SharePoint site.
I created this blog to set it up and create your package.
But basically, this feature is not so revolutionary. You can upload custom fonts and create a package that will be used in the different areas of a SharePoint site.
It's important to note that this preview version answers clients' needs which consist of adding additional fonts to be more compliant with their corporation or to let more capabilities and extending the imagination to create awesome branding integration.
We need to wait a couple of times before seeing additional features as demonstrated by Microsoft.

Bookings

New Home page

More modern, fluid, and beautiful, the Microsoft Bookings home page gets a new look 😍

Nothing else 😊 I didn't detect any new major feature linked to this new look yet.

Stream

Trim your videos

No need to use a video editor to be able to trim your Stream videos anymore. You can still use Clichamp for more capabilities, but just to trim your videos, you just need to click on the scissors from Stream and

Select the Start and End range

Select From and To range to cut a middle part of the video

The interesting point is the cut part is "just hidden" but is still possible to download the full video.

In the meantime, I just noticed that a Home icon is now available in the command bar.

Microsoft Forms

Pre-filled fields

One of the most expected features with Microsoft Forms is to be able to pre-filled some fields.

In fact, it works great. You can generate a link to access your forms with pre-filled fields but this information is static. In other words, you can't generate a dynamic URL with some parameters (for example) to pre-filled fields based on another data source (ex: use Power Automate to generate a Forms URL based on a SharePoint list)

SharePoint

Stream Web Part support Playlist

With the latest version of Stream, the "Classic" Stream Web Part for SharePoint has been made deprecated and removed to make way for the new Stream Web Part.
This new Web Part allowed to display of a videos folder, videos on the site, or a single video. To be able to display a Playlist, it was necessary to use the List Web Part that allows to display of a SharePoint list view.
Old story 😄 now, use the Stream Web Part, select Playlist, and choose the playlist that you want to use, then configure the next options related to the playlist such as: