Soon Microsoft will roll out new features for OneDrive and SharePoint. These new features will help with the cloud migration of on-premises SharePoint. Microsoft announced the updates at their annual Ignite Conference.
New to Microsoft SharePoint
Included in the helpful migration tools for SharePoint Online are:
- Increased upload size to 100 GB
- Customized business footers for privacy notices
- Business branding of SharePoint mobile apps
- Customized SharePoint home site searching
According to Gartner senior research director, Larry Cannell, the goal of these updates is to encourage more on-premises SharePoint customers to begin using SharePoint Online. Cannell further stated that this update is ushering in “the future of Office”. Moreover, in order to stay abreast of any future improvements to SharePoint, you’ll likely need to be using the Online version.
Microsoft bought Mover.io in October 2019. This acquisition will make it easier for OneDrive migrations for those who are currently using Box, Dropbox or Google Drive for their cloud storage solutions. For Office 365 users, Mover.io capabilities are free. Microsoft will also release its own migration tools for on-premises SharePoint users to help them migrate to SharePoint Online and OneDrive easier, according to Yammer, SharePoint, OneDrive and Stream director, Dan Holme.
Additionally, Microsoft has also released other new features for SharePoint Online (that were previously exclusive for SharePoint classic) to help users. These include:
- Access to royalty-free stock pictures
- Multilingual capabilities
- Hovercards capable of showing all of the comments on a document in one place for OneDrive
- Mega-menu navigation that employees using SharePoint home sites can personalize
- The ability to see what has changed on SharePoint home sites
Microsoft’s push for users to migrate to the cloud is due to their ability to not only provide more safety features, but they can also offer their customers more usable features.
Project Cortex
SharePoint Online and OneDrive updates weren’t the only news from Microsoft at Ignite. They also released information about Project Cortex. Project Cortex will use AI capabilities to automatically create enterprise knowledge bases for business use. According to Microsoft, this will be possible without any manual input.
To achieve this, Project Cortex will utilize mining to discern a business’ document patterns. The knowledge base will come from this already available information. The AI has the power to browse user’s documents (including OneDrive, Outlook, SharePoint, Stream, Team and Yammer files), identify the desired topics and create a wiki-type page that the users will then have the power to approve, edit or reject before the tool makes the page live. Administrators will also have similar controls.
While Project Cortex isn’t available yet, a preview will likely be available before the beginning of 2020 and it is slated for a full release during the first half of 2020. Pricing has yet to be released.