Monthly SharePoint News Digest - June 2024

Laurent Sittler

5 min read

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

🗓️ Events around Microsoft 365

https://www.communitydays.org/event/2024-06-14/m365-community-days-mtl-2024

💡 Trick & Tips

Folders vs metadata to manage your content?

Folders are a good solution to manage your content moreover if you are mainly working with OneDrive Sync (SharePoint library or OneDrive). It is simple to organize your content. The cons of organizing your content with folders are:

Duplicated content: a file can be duplicated between two or more folders. It becomes complicated to manage versions, merge information
Deep structure: if you have a deep structure of folders, managing content can be complex and you can lose access to the content because the path to access file exceed the limits
Difficult to retrieve documents: without additional information, SharePoint and Microsoft Search are based on a Full-Text search. The search can parse the content of the documents and based on your search keywords, return the documents/results that contain these keywords

Metadata are a "modern" and advanced solution to manage your content. Metadata are currently supported only via the Web UI of SharePoint or in the case of office documents (ex: Word), from the properties of the files. It is possible to assign unique or multi-value fields. In other words, it is possible to categorize one document in different categories (ex: "User File Type" column with values "Candidates, Résumé") compared to the folders that you have to choose or duplicate the file in both of the folders. It is possible to create views with filters or groups to display your files. You can use metadata in the search and use them as refiners. Finally, following your licenses (ex: E5), you can assign sensitivity & retention labels. The cons of organizing your content with metadata are:

Not easy to use for not advanced users or users that do not already have the habit of using metadata
You cannot manage security/access through metadata
Cannot be used from Windows Explorer when you sync a SharePoint library with your OneDrive for desktop
Can be used in an immoderate way when there are too many or mandatory fields

What about taking the pros of both of them and using them at the same time? 🚀

📰 News

SharePoint

Section Content Vertical Alignment

Basically, the content put in a section is positioned at the top. Now, you can choose to position the content at the top, middle, or bottom of the section.
In other words, no need to add the Spacer Web Part anymore to align the content to the middle of your section in 2 or 3 columns 😉

OneDrive

Open OneDrive from Outlook

That can be tricky to explain this... From Outlook Web, users can now open directly their OneDrive while remaining in Outlook 🙃

That can be useful to avoid opening more tabs in the browser.

Stream

Additional Analytics KPI

Because you can now add Callout and Forms in your Stream videos, getting some information about their interactivity seems logical.

A new tab is available from the Analytics area "Interactivity analytics" on which you can find this information:

Unique video viewers: Total number of people who have watched the video since it was published.
Viewed interactivity: Percentage of unique video viewers who viewed at least one interactivity in the video but did not necessarily interact with it.
Engaged with interactivity: percentage of unique video viewers who interacted with at least one interactivity in the video.
Avg interactions per viewer: Average number of interactions per viewer engaged with interactivity.
Avg attention time: Average time spent engaging with interactivity within the video.

SharePoint

New Text Web Part features

Microsoft added some new amazing enhancements to maybe one of the most used Web Parts: Text 🚀

There are so many enhancements that I have to create a video for this, but a quick overview of these new features:

You can bypass the limitations of the text size by typing manually the size of the text
New bullet list style options
New numbered list style options (this one is maybe the most impressive improvement that needs a video to check all of them 😊)

SharePoint

Video Page Templates

As announced by Microsoft, new page templates are available. These page Templates allow you to highlight your video content. Four templates are available

Starter: blank page with Stream Web Part
Training, recap & message: header image and title, video, quick links, text, people and image Web Parts

As with any page template, it allows to afford to win some time for the final users to create the page. But if you are using your templates, these ones do not bring added value.

Stream

New interactivity features

In fact, no big changes, only UI changes to facilitate the life of users:

Color picker for the callout
Pick URL to existing files - when you click on "Add", the URL of the file is posted in the callout

SharePoint

Crop to Shape your Images

Maybe one of my favorite features for this month 🤩

I love creating pages and arranging the content to provide the best visual effect possible. The images have a real effect on the final users:

Include beautiful pictures to bring a better experience
Include useful pictures that can be practical because users memorize visuals
In the context of the content and in accordance with the organization's image

So many good reasons to prefer using SharePoint pages rather than documents to sharing, or explaining something.

Preparing images was quite complex because if you wanted to resize, crop, change the form, or arrange in any way your pictures, you had to do it from software and upload the picture into SharePoint. Microsoft brought about major change several months ago with the "advanced image editor" and now by adding the capability to crop pictures with useful shapes: