Updates on SharePoint & M365, July 2023

It’s July, and even though it’s a traditional Finnish summer vacation month (yes, many of us have paid holiday for 4 weeks), SharePoint doesn’t sleep and, apparently, nor do I 😉

So many new, long-awaited features are popping up, so I couldn’t resist to write a post about them. Also, this is the perfect opportunity for the first blog post on my new website 🤩

Here we go, keep on to your summer hats!

The new Stream web part

Organisations amidst Stream migration are probably happy to hear that the new Stream web part has finally arrived, or at least it’s rolling out as we speak.

In the new Stream web part, you can display single or multiple videos directly inline on the SharePoint page, with all the usual Stream video options, like changing the speed of the video and skipping to a certain chapter.

☝🏼Why is it useful? You have multiple ways of displaying videos on your SharePoint page, choose the ones that suit your needs best. (I wrote a blog post about it earlier, in Finnish: Klassinen Stream poistuu – miten näytät videoita intranetissä nyt ja jatkossa? (meltlake.com))

Please also notice that Microsoft will retire the Stream (Classic) webpart on August 15, 2023, and it will no longer be available for use after this date.

(Still using classic Stream and haven’t planned your migration? You will seriously need some help. Get in touch with me, sooner the better.)

Playlist view in the List web part

You have been able to create playlists with the SharePoint/Microsoft Lists for a while now, and finally, the Playlist view is also available in the List web part 👏🏼

☝🏼Why is it useful? You can display your carefully curated playlist directly next to the related text content or instructions on your SharePoint page.

Twitter web part

Unfortunately, not only good things are happening in the land of SharePoint. Last week, Twitter web part in SharePoint stopped working in multiple tenants, probably due to the earlier changes in the Twitter API. Currently, there is no way to fix this, so my advice is just to forget (and remove) the Twitter feed in your SharePoint, at least for now 🤷🏼‍♀️ You can follow up on this site if there will be changes or fixes on the issue.

Support for multiple Viva Connections home sites

Here’s a feature that multiple large organisations have been waiting for. It comes with a but, though: to be able to have multiple (max. 10) Viva Connections apps in Teams, you need to have Microsoft Viva Suite licenses. That’s the deal.

The good news is that you’ll get a ton of other features with the Viva Suite licenses. Don’t know what they are? You can start with https://viva.microsoft.com, and basically almost everything you’ll see is included. I might also write my next blog post about it 😉

Anyway, why would your organisation need multiple Viva Connections instances?

You have multiple organisations in one tenant and you’d like to give them personalised intranet experience in Teams
You have subsidiaries that need their own content
Not wanting employees to have to visit the experience of another subsidiary
International legal entities that need control over the content
Presenting international content in a different language that won't overlap with existing content (for example, separate experiences for English and Finnish content)
Content specific to frontline workers (for example, dashboard and resources with the frontline worker focus such as tasks, shifts, approvals, and top news).

The new feature is also that you can create Viva Connections experience without having SharePoint intranet attached to it. The user experience in Teams is gathering all the Vivas together + the Viva Connections Dashboard:

If you have created a SharePoint intranet and are using the Viva Connections to display it (and only it) in Teams, the user experience should be like this:

Although, recently my customers have been suffering from the so called forcing of the new Viva Connections home experience, even though the only thing they should be seeing is their intranet.

You can learn all about how the multiple Viva Connections can be registered in the Microsoft technical documentation.

Looking forward to the upcoming releases

I spotted this picture from the Microsoft documentation, and I paid attention to all the Viva icons nicely on the header area:

Viva Connections home experience with all the Viva apps

There we can see Viva Amplify and Viva Pulse, the two newcomers. Viva Pulse is already in public preview and the Viva Amplify got finally to the M365 roadmap just in the end of June. The current timeline for Viva Amplify if September 2023 and I’m pretty sure my customer contacts responsible for internal communications are going to love it!

With Amplify, you can create internal communications campaigns, author a publication once and then choose whether you want to send the communications through Teams, SharePoint or Outlook. It will automatically format your content for different destinations and you can choose to customize the content or layout. So, something like an internal newsletter application dedicated for M365 🥳

Both Viva Amplify and Viva Pulse are on my blog topics list, so please stay tuned 😊

Also, we will go through the rest of the new releases & happenings in M365 in our monthly Astetta edellä webinar in August 23rd. In case you’d like to participate, you are very welcome, but please note that this webinar is in Finnish 😉

Feed for Viva Connections gone mad

For the end, I wanted to add something fun. While writing this blog post, I run into a peculiar thingy in one of my demo environments. I though it was amusing, like a web part playing ping pong by itself, so I decided to record it. Here it is, enjoy:

That’s all for this time, I hope you’ve found this useful 😊