Hello, welcome to Collaboration Coach.
My name's Matt
and this is the Roadmap Radar for October 2021.
In this show I look at the Microsoft 365 roadmap for the coming month
and I pick out the things that I think you'll be interested in.
We've got updates and new features for Teams, SharePoint and Forms this month
but first let's take a look at the public preview of Viva Connections.
So, we covered Viva Connections a while ago but new features are now in public preview
so I thought I'd cover them to give you the heads up on what's coming.
There are new dashboards and feeds for home pages that will make our intranets more useful and engaging,
and we'll get to that,
but first, if you remember, initially Viva Connections allowed us to set a home page in SharePoint
and configure it with a fancy new navigation
and we could add that site to Teams as an app
so it gave us the option to have our intranets running from inside of Teams.
Now that all had to be done with Powershell script initially, but now that's changing.
So a home site can be added with the UI in the SharePoint admin centre
and there will be a Viva Connections app that can be customised and added to Teams
so it shows up for everyone on the left hand rail.
Now the dashboards.
On the home site there will be an option to create a Viva Connections dashboard.
Dashboards are a nice set of tiles that can be added to your home page
to make them more useful.
You can build a dashboard with relatively no code
and they are edited like you would a SharePoint page.
You just drag and drop tiles onto the dashboard and configure them,
then add the dashboard as a web part to your home page so it can be placed anywhere you like.
'Feed' is another web part that you can add to your home page
and it's just a simple list of news and video posts.
The feed can't be configured at the moment
so everything you see in it is picked by SharePoint because it's relevant to you personally,
based on the sites that you follow,
so theoretically everyone's feed should be slightly different.
The feed is a carousel that you can move through
and every item has a view count, and you can feed back by adding a thumb
and you can share it on email, Yammer or just get a link.
Video newslinks are just like news posts but for video.
When they're published they show up in the Viva Connections news feed.
You create a video link from the 'new' button on the home page
and you can add the address to the video and customise how it will look.
When it's published it will appear in the Viva Connections feed where it has been added.
So that's a short roundup of all the new Viva Connection features coming your way.
They're in Public Preview so everyone should be able to test them out today.
Now we can reply to specific messages in chats.
We'll see a reply button when we choose the ellipsis on any chat.
We can then reply to that chat specifically and the original message is embedded in the reply
and this should make conversations much easier to follow.
The 'reply to chat' feature is already available on ios and Android
and it's rolling out now to desktop versions of Teams and should complete in October.
Two new updates for breakout rooms are rolling out to the desktop version of Teams.
First we'll be able to create the breakout rooms before the meeting starts now.
So once the meeting is scheduled there'll be a breakout rooms tab in the meeting
that we can use to set up the session.
We'll be able to create rooms, rename them and assign participants to them.
Once we're in the meeting we can then control who can manage the rooms.
Until now, only organisers of the meetings can manage rooms
but now the organiser can assign other presenters to do that instead.
Room Managers will see the breakout room icon in the meeting toolbar
and they'll be able to press it and take control of managing the rooms.
They'll be able to configure the breakout sessions,
they can add and remove people from the rooms
and do all the things an organiser can do.
These features have been delayed a little
but should be available to everyone by the end of October.
This new feature for SharePoint is controversial.
Years ago, SharePoint used to be able to connect files in the browser with Windows File Explorer.
There was a button that said 'open in explorer' in every document library ribbon
and it connected File Explorer so you could manage the files there.
People loved this and some were very upset when Microsoft removed it.
Now it's back
and when it's set up we'll see a 'View in File Explorer' option in the view menu
in every document library.
That will connect File Explorer to the library.
However, Microsoft is recommending that you don't use it.
The OneDrive sync client is the modern way to manage your microsoft 365 files...
...in Windows File Explorer or Mac Finder,
so I assume for that reason this is deliberately hard to set up
and only admins can do it and these are the requirements:
It only works in Microsoft's Edge browser.
Edge must be at version 93 and above.
You must apply a policy change to Edge to allow it
and you must make a script change to your SharePoint tenant,
and the computer has to be domain-joined.
I'll leave an article on how it's done in the description
and this update is rolling out now and should be complete by the end of November.
This new feature is for SharePoint administrators and intranet owners.
SharePoint will soon be able to associate hubs with other hubs.
This will make search results available to anyone who searches a site associated with one of those hubs.
Hubs are a way of linking SharePoint sites together.
When a site is linked to our hub it can share navigation and search results.
Before now, hubs could not be associated with other hubs
and this new feature is going to allow that.
It will support three levels of association.
A parent hub can have child hubs
and they can also have child hubs, making three levels.
Each of those hubs can have many associated sites
so admins can now create more complex hub-to-hub configurations.
To normal users of SharePoint - they'll get the benefit of better search results from all the hubs involved,
but apart from that, they won't notice any difference.
This feature is rolling out now and should be complete by the end of October.
This feature for SharePoint is going to allow us to switch the site navigation.
Currently, team sites run their navigation down the left hand side.
This navigation switcher feature is going to allow us to change that.
We'll be able to switch between vertical and horizontal in team sites.
This new navigation switching feature for SharePoint is rolling out now
and should be complete by the end of November.
For SharePoint page editors, Microsoft are adding a feature that will allow us to paste images inside of text
so the text will wrap around it.
We'll be able to align it left, right and centre.
At the same time, there'll be some updates to reduce the line spacing between headings lines and bullets
to give pages a more compact look.
These text web part improvements are rolling out now and should be complete in October.
A new polling option is coming to Microsoft Forms.
We'll be able to create word cloud polls.
This feature will be available in Teams meetings too.
When the presenter shares a word cloud poll,
attendees can type their answer into the poll
and then the answers are displayed in a cloud.
Attendees can also give someone else's answer a thumbs up.
The cloud is displayed in the meeting window for all to see.
The more attendees react to an answer, the larger it gets in the cloud.
Word cloud polls are rolling out now
and should be complete by the end of October.
This new feature for Microsoft Forms will let us manage our forms and quizzes as collections.
We can create collections from the My Forms page
and then we can add all the forms and quizzes we like to them.
And we can rename and copy the collections too.
This will allow us to organise, categorise and archive our forms and quizzes.
The form collections feature is rolling out now to the browser and mobile
and should be complete by the end of November.
So that's my pick of the new features and updates coming your way this month.
Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.