Microsoft Ignite is here this week! More than 20,000 people are expected to gather in Atlanta, GA to hear Microsoft’s latest announcements about SharePoint, Office 365 and many more.
The main focus of the week is on People, Content and Process – now let’s see the keynote’s announcements from the perspective of search and findability.
Major announcements
The most important news and announcements can be found on Office Blogs:
- SharePoint innovations further advance intelligence and collaboration in Office 365
- Connect to expertise and content with new people experiences throughout Office 365 (People experiences and Delve)
- Enriching the mobile and intelligent intranet
- Enhanced conditional access controls, encryption controls and site classification in SharePoint and OneDrive
- OneDrive updates at Ignite 2016 include SharePoint Online sync preview
- Announcing Feature Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2016—cloud-born and future-proof
What about Search and Findability?
As you can see, there are no particular updates on Search.
But this doesn’t mean there are no updates and announcements that improves Findability. As I’ve defined it in my previous post:
“Findability means intentionally being able to find something. It’s the cabability of finding the proper document(s) or content piece(s) according to the context and the user’s current intent.
Findability includes Search and Discovery, but it is more than that. It also consists of navigation (how I can get to the content), information architecture (how the content is organized in the source system), user experience, accessibility as well as machine learning techniques.”
Let’s see the most important announcements which improve one or more Findability features (source: Microsoft Ignite keynote & Official Microsoft blog posts above):
- A significant update to the OneDrive browser experience, so that you can find, access, share and collaborate on all your files in Office 365. – Navigation and User Experience.
- OneDrive sync preview for SharePoint Online document libraries and folders shared with you. – Accessibility and User Interactions.
Updates to the Office 365 profile. – User Experience, User Profile & Persona. - People cards in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business that intelligently surface content and details from your colleagues’ profiles. – User Experience, User Profile & Persona.
- SharePoint mobile apps for Windows 10 Mobile and Android. – Accessibility.
- Enhancements for developers including new sites and lists APIs in Microsoft Graph. – Machine Learning, and potentially User Experience and User Interactions.
- New security controls including site classification and conditional access based on location and device. – Accessibility, Information Architecture.
- A new Delve app for Windows 10 desktop and mobile. – Navigation, User Experience, User interactions.
Apparently, the engineering teams have been working hard to build exceptional new experiences on the powerful capabilities and simple, intuitive experiences that comprise SharePoint today.
Although it’s obvious that the primary goal of these updates were not to improve the Search and Findability scenarios. I am looking forward to seeing in the future months when and what Search features get improved. It’s worth to keep an eye on the Roadmap.
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