The Future of SharePoint – Search and Discovery

Today, at the Future of SharePoint event in San Francisco, Microsoft unveils the new cloud-first, mobile-first vision and roadmap for SharePoint, along with new innovations that empower people and organizations to intelligently discover, share and collaborate.

Unfortunately, I cannot attend the event in person, but I’m sharing my thoughts in this post.

The vision for unified access and intelligent discovery are very exciting . On modern intranets, “findability” takes place of “search“, “discovery” becomes more and more valued in the age of information overload.

The modern intranet is the nerve center of many organizations. The new SharePoint home page, rolling out this month provides unified access to all of your sites (online and on-premises) and lets you navigate seamlessly through your intranet.

Did you know?

More than 200,000 organizations use SharePoint today, and a community of more than 50,000 partners and 1 million developers make up a $10 billion solutions ecosystem around SharePoint.

And there are so much more! Everything is about the enhanced productivity, collaboration and intelligence. Of course, the better collaboration and content creation & discovery can be, the better content we have. And the better content we have, the better findability can become, too.

With the new hybrid model, searching across your online and on-premises sites also can be as seamless as never before. Moreover, Office Graph can be extended with on-premises content as well, to enrich the overall experience in Office Delve and many more.

Some more of my personal favorites in SharePoint 2016:

• Modern document libraries: I really love this experience. Clean, modern and VERY productive. The new “Pin to top” increases visibility and findability of important documents at the top of the document library for all users.
  The new real-time full text search results appear directly in the document library experience.
  Learn more about the new document libraries HERE.
• Planner: Planner is a brand new tool to organize teamwork. It makes it easy to create plans, organize and assign tasks, get updates on progress, etc.
  Learn more about Microsoft Planner HERE.
• Microsoft Flow: When I saw Microsoft Flow first, my impression was that this is “IFTTT in Office 365“.  It helps to automate your team’s processes, without the need of complex development. You can connect your favorite services (Office 365, Twitter, Dropbox, Slack, Mailchimp and many more) and put them to work in your flow.
  Learn more about Microsoft Flow HERE.
• Insights: Site activities and insights provides some simple analytics about the usage of your sites, like top-viewed content, site map, etc.
  Delve also provides insights and analytics on the user’s level, which can be used as a personal dashboard.
  Learn more HERE.
• Intelligent discovery: A new “Discover” view is available in the OneDrive app and browser experience (as of today on Android, later this year on iOS and Windows Phone). This view is very similar to Delve, and provides suggested and relevant documents from Office 365, based on the user’s latest activities and relationships.
  Learn more HERE.

I am VERY excited to see these features coming to SharePoint, online and on-premises. I am confident the best is yet to come, so stay tuned! SharePoint is alive, more than ever.

As Satya Nadella says:

We are continuing to advance SharePoint, OneDrive, and the entire Office 365 service in ways that make productivity even more collaborative, intelligent, mobile, and trustworthy. 

The future is here!

 

Want to learn more? Click HERE to pre-order Agnes Molnar’s new e-book: SharePoint 2016 Search Explained: SharePoint 2016 and Office 365 Search On-Premises, Cloud and Hybrid for Search Managers and Decision Makers

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