Enriching the mobile and intelligent intranet with team news, apps for Android and Windows and more

The intranet is the publishing center of all things happening throughout your company. It is where people keep up with news and discover what’s happening around them at work. It’s time, now, to further empower employees—more precisely, give them a way to broadcast their work.

Today at Ignite, we are pleased to announce the newest waves of innovations to your mobile and intelligent intranet, powered by SharePoint, including:

  • Team news for SharePoint Online modern team sites (announced today).
  • SharePoint mobile apps for Android and Windows 10 Mobile (in preview today).
  • News roll-up tab within the SharePoint mobile app for iOS (announced today).
  • Create a modern team site and an associated Office 365 group from the SharePoint home (announced today).
  • New people experiences within SharePoint Online team sites, document libraries and lists, and OneDrive for Business (rolling out now).

Below is a summary—along with links to additional resources—of these innovations.

Keep the team informed and up-to-date with team news

Team news is how you keep up with and broadcast key events and accomplishments with other members of the team and extended stakeholders. You can use team news for things like trip reports, best practices, project updates, highlights of new documents and content, welcoming a new team member, sharing team goals and celebrating milestones.

To add a news item, from within the News web part on the team site home page, click + Add to create a news article. Next, add content to the news post using the toolbox—a gallery of web parts—to add text, video, documents, quick links and more. When you’re finished, click Publish and the news article will be featured prominently on the team site home page within the News web part. And when you click See All, you’ll land on a dedicated News page that serves as the team’s news archive.

Below shows how a team site with all the news—front and center—is displayed in the SharePoint mobile app:

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Team news in the SharePoint app. News articles render beautifully in the SharePoint app.

Team news is a great way to broadcast of all the important content from your team. In the future, you will receive mobile and email notifications to help keep you up to date.

SharePoint mobile app previews come to Android and Windows 10 Mobile

In June 2016, we released the first version of the SharePoint mobile app for iOS—your intranet in your pocket. Today, we are filling more pockets by introducing the SharePoint mobile app for both Android and Windows 10 Mobile previews.

The SharePoint mobile app helps keep your work moving forward by providing quick access to your team sites, organizational portals and the people you work with throughout Office 365 by letting you search for content and people across your organization. We leverage the Microsoft Graph to power several of the in-app experiences, providing you relevant information to get to the content and people you work with most frequently.

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Android: Main Sites tab showing Frequent and Followed sites. Android: Team site showing site activity, files, lists and the full site navigation.
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Windows 10 Mobile: Main Sites tab showing Frequent and Followed sites. Windows 10 Mobile: team site showing site activity, files, lists and the full site navigation.

You can use the SharePoint mobile app to:

  • Navigate from Sites to team sites you follow or frequently visit.
  • Navigate from Links to important sites configured by your organization.
  • Catch up on what’s happened with the Activity view, which shows recent file activity in your team site.
  • Open your document libraries with the OneDrive app and then edit your files using Office mobile apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote.
  • Learn more about people you work with and discover what they are working on.
  • Perform an enterprise-wide search to find sites, files and people throughout your organization.
  • Android first: you’ll be able to launch a PowerApp from a team site directly in the SharePoint mobile app.

Learn more about SharePoint mobile app for Android and the SharePoint mobile app for Windows 10 Mobile.

Catch up with all your team’s news in the SharePoint app on iOS

If you use the SharePoint app on iOS, you get the first look at the mobile experience of team news. When you tap the News tab, you will see a list of aggregated news using the intelligence of the Microsoft Graph from the sites you work in, the sites you follow and the sites your colleagues work in. SharePoint mobile on iOS gives you one place to catch up on the news from across your intranet. That’s your news in your pocket!

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News on SharePoint mobile will come to other platforms as a future update.

Create a modern team site and an associated Office 365 group from the SharePoint home

We’re pleased to announce that soon you’ll be able to create a site and a group for your team—right from SharePoint home in Office 365. The Create site wizard will create an Office 365 group as well as a modern SharePoint team site. You will even be able add members and classify the site along the way. And if you’ve ever waited for a SharePoint site to be provisioned in the past, you’ll discover this process will create the site in mere seconds.

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Coming soon: Create a team site right from SharePoint home.

The result is the same as when you create an Office 365 group from Outlook: every group in Office 365 Groups gets the full power of a SharePoint Online team site.

Know who’s who, and who’s working on what, with new people cards

Teamwork is all about the people and what they’re working on. Now, when you see a person in a SharePoint team site, document library, list, or in OneDrive for Business, the value of discovering more about that person lies at your fingertips where you are already working.

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People cards appear in SharePoint document libraries when you hover over a person’s name.

When you hover over a person’s name or photo, you’ll now see a richer people card. Previously, the card contained basic contact information and one-click methods to connect with the person. Now, you instantly see who the person works for and what documents they recently worked on. Powered by the Microsoft Graph, these intelligent people cards provide a personalized and actionable experience as you work with your files across Office 365.

Read more about upcoming updates to people experiences throughout Office 365.

Stay tuned for more innovations

The innovations will keep coming. For example, with news, you’ll see enhancements to the news reading experience on both mobile and web, and you will be able to interact with news as well as sign up for notifications. We’ll expand on team news, using the Microsoft Graph to provide a stream of personalized news from across all your sites, complementing it with traditional corporate news articles. In future iterations, we envision corporate, divisional and influential blog posts to be surfaced along with a blend of top-down, curated content all powered by Microsoft Graph-driven relevance.

Here is a summary of what we’re doing to power your mobile, intelligent intranet:

Release date Feature
First Release in October 2016. Team news in SharePoint Online team sites.
In preview today. SharePoint mobile apps for Android and Windows 10 Mobile.
Update pushed to App Store in October 2016. News tab within SharePoint mobile app for iOS.
First Release in October 2016. Create site from SharePoint home integrated with Office 365 Groups.
Rolling out now. New people experiences in SharePoint Online document libraries and OneDrive for Business.

Good news is good news. We hope you like all the news we’re sharing today. We look forward to your feedback. Please share your thoughts in the SharePoint space of the Microsoft Technical Community and submit your ideas to the SharePoint UserVoice page—and we always have an eye on our tweets @SharePoint. Let us know.

—Mark Kashman, senior product manager for the SharePoint team

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