SharePoint

My favorite updates from SharePoint Conference 2018 Keynote

Beau CameronLeave a comment

It’s finally here! SharePoint Conference 2018 kicked off today with a load of new features that we all should be excited to hear about! In this post we’ll do a quick run down from the  Keynote at the SharePoint Conference.

This isn’t a complete list of updates, frankly there are too many! However, here is a list of my favorites so far.

OneDrive

Mobile Devices
  • The ability to scan in documents, receipts from your mobile device and immediately upload the document to OneDrive.
  • Back up your camera roll from your mobile device directly to your personal OneDrive and your business OneDrive!

Search

As previously shown at Ignite 2017, new search features are powered by AI and Machine Learning. What this means is that SharePoint, Office 365 and Microsoft 365 will now provide a personalized search based on commonly visited content, content relevant to you and more.

SharePoint Team Sites

Document Libraries
  • Real time changes to libraries and lists! When colleagues change data in the lists, it will instantly change for you without refreshing the page!
Document Library Web Parts
  • Web Parts will now support Drag & Drop, Filtering, Sorting and grouping functionality.
  • Column Formatting JSON
    • Users can now bring in rich KPIs they built on a document library and use those features in a page through the document library web part.

SharePoint Lists

SharePoint lists are getting revamped in an effort to make lists easier for your users. This includes a modern UI for building lists based on existing lists in your site.

  • Provide the ability to create a list  and automatically bring over Flows and PowerApps into your new list based on the previous list.
    • Lists
  • Real time updates
    • You will be able to see updates immediately as other team members are updating and modifying the list.
    • You will not need to use refresh to see the latest list updates
  • Paste from Excel
    • You will be able to take an excel table and paste it into a SharePoint list.
    • Lists will create columns for you if they are missing from the SharePoint list.
  • PowerBI
    • PowerBI will be able to be integrated with your SharePoint lists using machine learning and AI to built real time analysis of the data in your lists!

SharePoint Communication Sites

SharePoint Pages
  • Tag pages with metadata
    • Ability to tag pages with metadata such as Region, Role, Activity. These values are just columns on the SharePoint library which allow you to create web parts to filter pages within your organization.
  • Page Approval workflow
    • A new page approval workflow is powered by Microsoft Flow
    • Can be customized to meet your approval needs!
    • Can be approved via from the approval panel in SharePoint or from within an actionable email.
Microsoft Stream
  • Microsoft stream now transcribes the video for easier searchability of your videos.
SharePoint News
  • Publish news from SharePoint to Microsoft Teams, to the SharePoint mobile app or directly to email!
  • News Scheduling & publishing
    • The ability to not only publish News via a scheduled date
New Web Parts
  • Weather Web Part (giggle)
  • Microsoft Training Services
    • Delivers content directly to your intranet. Content is delivered from Azure and provides all the training users may be interested in to be showed on your SharePoint Pages.
  • Hinted at more…

Hub Sites

Site Scripts
  • The ability to run site scripts when adding new sites to a hub. This will allow you to run custom logic such as creating new lists or even managing permissions immediately as a site joins a hub site.

SharePoint Development

SharePoint Development using SharePoint Framework will now be cross platform. That is, web parts you built in SharePoint using the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) will now be able to be used in Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams

  • New Tab Features
    • Will support the new document library web part as well. So when users are inside Microsoft teams, they can now drag and drop, filter and use column formatting directly within Microsoft Teams.
    • Will also support SharePoint pages within your Microsoft Teams tabs. This will make it much easier for users to stay organized and focus on work, without ever having to leave Microsoft Teams.
    • Will support SPFx web parts as new tabs.

Microsoft Flow

  • SharePoint Integration for managing Business Critical Data
    • When adding content & images to a SharePoint library, Microsoft flow can be used to run Text Analysis to figure out important metadata and information that is relevant to the document. This information could be location a photo was taken, common words found in the document or library and automatically tag your content!

SharePoint On-premises

  • Modern UI will be coming to SharePoint 2019
    • SharePoint Home
    • Modern Team and Communication Sites
    • Modern Lists and Libraries
    • New Modern authoring canvas for SharePoint pages.

Looking for more updates on SharePoint 2019? Check out my good friend Nick Brattoli’s post on all the super awesome features coming to on-premises! https://collab365.community/sharepoint-2019-features-announced/

 

 

OCR Support in Office 365

Beau Cameron19 Comments

Last year at Ignite, Microsoft announced OCR capability using “computer vision technology” would be coming to Office 365! This stirred up a lot of excitement as this was a feature many people have been wanting for years! Microsoft posted an article at techcommunity about the new advancement in Intelligent Search using OCR which can be found here. Well I am happy to say it exists and it sure is awesome!

Supported Types

Per the techcommunity article above, the supported types are “bmp”, “png”, “jpeg”, “jpg”, “gif”, “tif”, “tiff”, “raw”, and also “arw”, “cr2”, “crw”, “erf”, “mef”, “mrw”, “nef”, “nrw”, “orf”, “pef”, “rw2”, “rw1”, “sr2”.

To test this capability, I have uploaded a mock up design for a Help Desk Add-In I have built for Office 365 into a Document library.

SupportTicket

The jpg looks like this

HelpDesk

You’ll notice inside the image there are 4 tickets have been mocked up with a bit of bacon ipsum. The ticket titles are “Trouble with SharePoint”, “Computer not Working”, “No Trouble Just Saying Hi” and “Trouble with SharePoint” again.  My plan to test out OCR is to search for the contents of that Title using SharePoint search!

Test: Search for Ticket values

My first test will be trying to find one of the tickets labeled “Trouble with SharePoint” and look at the results! Not only does it match with the values in the image, but it’s also picking up the other ticket values as well.

 

SearchResult

It should be no surprise that when I search for some of the description of the tickets, that they should return in search results as well. I’ve decided to search for the first sentence of the description in the mock up. Here is the result!

SearchResult2Does it work in Modern too?

In my previous examples I was using SharePoint Classic Search. If you were wondering if it works in Modern search as well, you bet!

modernsearchHow does it work?

My guess is that OCR in SharePoint is using Azure Media Services to convert text content in digital files into digital text. The reason for assuming this is because of the following naming convention used in SharePoint.

Whenever SharePoint finds text within your images, the values get stored on the item in a field called MediaServiceOCR. Take a look at the JSON response from querying for the list item.

MediaServiceOCR

I wasn’t able to find a default managed property for this field but that isn’t a huge problem because SharePoint automatically creates a crawled property called ows_MediaServiceOCR. Using this crawled property, I can create whatever managed property mappings that I want.

Crawled.png

 

Some Comments

OCR PDFs have native support in Office 365. However, scanned documents which are PDFs currently aren’t generating values in the MediaServiceOCR column. I’ve been testing this functionality with no success — yet.

I have noticed some inconsistencies with the OCR functionality. I have tested this on multiple libraries and I have noticed it hasn’t been creating the MediaServiceOCR values on some items (doesn’t exist). I’ll keep you posted when I find more information about this.

 

 

So your hub site settings aren’t showing up in Office 365?

Beau CameronLeave a comment

Hub sites have been released to Office 365 Targeted Release tenants. With all of the excitement, everyone has been jumping to powershell and adding hub sites to their tenancies!

Register-SPOHubSite https://mysite.sharepoint.com/sites/Hubsite

However, some have noticed that even though the powershell commands appear to be working, you may notice that your navigation is missing or the hub site settings are not appearing in the UI. The reason is simple, and thanks to @dmadelung for reminding me… you need to make sure that your release preferences in the Office 365 admin center are set to “Targeted release for everyone”.

ReleasePreference

If you’d like more tips and tricks on hub sites, head over to Marc Anderson’s post!

Thanks and happy hubbing!