SharePoint

Monthly SharePoint News Digest - May 2025

Laurent Sittler

5 min read

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

🗓️ Events around Microsoft 365

June 19th - Canadian Cloud Summit

💡 Trick & Tips

How are you managing wide access to some of your SharePoint sites and OneDrive?

Two words will illuminate your days: Dynamic groups 🚀🤯

Thanks to the dynamic groups, you can, if you want, reproduce the Token Everyone Except external users:

(user.userPrincipalName -contains "contoso.com")

Thanks to the dynamic groups, you can regroup people quickly, for example:

per department
per country
per domain name
per job title
company name
and so much more...

The last thing is, when you want to create a Viva Engage community or a Microsoft Teams team, behind the scenes, it is a Microsoft 365 group; this group can be "converted" to a dynamic group 💡.

📢 Announcements

Changes to the API access page in the SharePoint admin center
eSignature for SharePoint supports Word Documents
SharePoint Alerts Retirement
Whiteboard URL transitioned https://whiteboard.cloud.microsoft/

Favorite Feature of the Month

Multi-color SharePoint Theme

📰 News

SharePoint

SharePoint Start Page Experience

From the new navigation, select a Recently edited site. The main content is refreshed to be related to the selected site. You will be able to create page directly to the selected site.

Left navigation on the new SharePoint start page

On the start page, from the list of pages, you have a useful Shortcut action menu with the following options:

Open: lets users view the selected page in canvas mode.
Share: lets users create a link to share the page with collaborators.
Duplicate: quick copy of the selected page.
Manage access: manage users' access.
Delete: moves the selected page to the recycle bin of the site

SharePoint

Multi-color Theme

Enabled by default, this feature introduces multi-color themes that support multiple color combinations in a theme. The theme colors will also show up in section backgrounds, the rich text editor (text web part) 🚀

How can you handle colors on your page? Select your section, and you will see a new tab named Design 🤯

In my case, I used the Copilot logo colors.

SharePoint/OneDrive

Control Enable OCR

As an administrator, it is possible to enable OCR on OneDrive for specific users or all organization.
Thanks to this feature, all documents can be retrieved from the search.

[info] Important: OCR is a pay-as-you-go feature. Turning on the OCR feature will incur cost for the organization.

SharePoint/OneDrive

Remove EEEU Token

Are you using the Everyone Except External Users token to manage access for some SharePoint sites, libraries, etc?
Microsoft will prevent the usage of this token for the following artefacts:

SharePoint Root site
The default document library in OneDrive's

💡 Look at the Trick & Tips of this month for more details about best practices

SharePoint

New Public CDN

Currently, the SharePoint Online Content Delivery Network (CDN) URL is: publiccdn.sharepointonline.com.

Microsoft will change this URL for Azure Front Door (AFD): public-cdn.sharepointonline.com.

This change will take effect by the end of July 2025.

SharePoint

Additional Web Parts include Animation

New feature release at the same time as the Editorial Web Part, the animation feature.

This feature adds a depth effect when the page is loaded and the Web Part is visible. Currently, three Web Parts include this feature:

Editorial
Quick Links
People

SharePoint

Preview Mode

You are a seasoned editor, and you want ensure that your page content match with the screen sizes, and mobile.
It is really helpful to preview the content before publishing it and catch most of the display issues if they exist.