Microsoft Ignite is Microsoft’s annual conference for developers and IT professionals. This year, Ignite is being held in Orlando, Florida (November 4-8, 2019), and there have been several announcements related to Microsoft Teams and SharePoint that we are compelled to share.
Microsoft Teams Announcements
Microsoft Teams has been a hugely successful addition to the Office 365 suite. According to Microsoft, the application is growing at a phenomenal pace and already has 13 million daily users.
A major announcement at Ignite was related to Private Channels. Private Channels are now available in Microsoft Teams. Users have been requesting this feature be added to Teams and Microsoft has responded with the immediate release of the feature. Private channels offer users the ability to collaborate privately with a subset of the team. Microsoft has published detailed information on the capabilities and management of the Private Channels here.
A separate SharePoint site is used store documents with the subset of users in the Private Channel. According to Microsoft, this was the only way to limit access to the private documents.
At Kiefer, we use Microsoft Planner inside of Microsoft Teams to manage tasks. In early 2020, Microsoft will introduce a new tasks app that will combine data from Outlook, To Do, and Teams in a single consistent experience.
SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business Announcements
Microsoft announced that SharePoint Online now has over 100 million active active users. That is a lot of customers that are using SharePoint as the preferred way to share, collaborate, and secure their content!
At Ignite, Microsoft made an announcement that the maximum number of SharePoint sites in a tenant is increasing from 500,000 to 2 million. This is good news for Office 365 users that are using both Teams and SharePoint.
If your organization is using Microsoft Teams, you may not realize that every time you create a “Team”, you are creating a SharePoint site. And now, with the introduction of Private Channels, Teams will create another SharePoint site for sharing documents within the subset of users. This will have a significant impact on the number of sites that are being created in your Office 365 tenant.
Kiefer has been working with clients to help them in addressing the challenges with governance in Office 365. We are providing guidance on how to best manage the sudden increase in the number of SharePoint sites in their Office 365 tenant.
With the announcement that Microsoft was increasing the number of SharePoint sites in the tenant, Microsoft also shared that SharePoint and OneDrive for Business would support the upload of 100GB files. In addition, SharePoint and OneDrive will use a differential sync option that allows users to only sync the changes of the file. Sync times will be faster and consume less bandwidth.
What Else Can We Expect?
With 2 more days to go, there will certainly be more announcements. We will share more in future blogs. If your organization is looking to do more with Microsoft Teams, SharePoint Online or Office 365, talk to the experts at Kiefer Consulting. We are eager to help!