Collaboration

So, what’s new with Office 365 collaboration? Lots!

I’ve picked the top 5 new features that I think will be useful to organisation using the Office 365 collaboration workloads, and I’ve put some roadmap slides at the end of this blog to show just how how much work Microsoft is putting into developing Office 365.

1. No code conditional formatting in SharePoint Lists

SharePoint lists are a great place to store structured data. There are many ways to sort and filter data then present it on SharePoint pages and Teams tabs, but having the ability to format cells and rows based on their values really makes data stand out.

The ability to apply conditional formatting to lists have been available for a while but requires an understanding of JSON formatting. The image below shows some of the code required to apply formatting to a column:

Rolling out now is the ability to apply conditional formatting from the interface (just like in Excel), as illustrated below:

This will help people who don’t have a deep SharePoint and JSON knowledge to adopt SharePoint lists as a replacement to Excel spreadsheets, and then use the view, sorting and filtering tools to display content in useful ways on SharePoint pages, and soon, Teams channel tabs.

2. Full SharePoint list and library experience in Teams

Lists and libraries in SharePoint Online are being constantly improved and shortly their full functionality will be available in Team channel tabs. This is great news as it will allow people to do more of their work within the Teams app and not have to switch between Teams and SharePoint. The full fidelity views will allows people to sync content using the OneDrive Sync client, use list views , pin documents to the top of the page and all the other great things you can do in a SharePoint list.

3. Teams Multi-window

Have you ever been in a meeting or chat and needed to get some information from a tab in a Teams channel or contribute to another chat? Well soon you’ll be able to split chats into separate windows to manage them separately.

4. @mention emails for Office 365 apps

This one sounds like it’s going to be very useful. Currently, when reviewing a Word, Excel or PowerPoint document you can leave comments for the author to action. The author then needs to be alerted that comments have been left and they can then go and edit the document.

@mentions allow reviewers to tag someone in the comment, which then e-mails them to let them know a comment has been tagged for their input and allows them to go straight to the comment or reply to in within the email.

5. Request Files

The Request files feature, coming soon to OneDrive for Business will allow people to set up a folder that internal and external people can upload files to without having to sign in.

People with the file request link can only upload files to the location, they are not able to see files in the folder.

Roadmaps

The following slides are taken from session presentations delivered at Microsoft Ignite The Tour in London.