Quick Rant:
We’ve all heard the wonderful things about Office 365 and the frequent updates that should be pushed out to it. These updates will hit O365 and SharePoint Online first and eventually, if decided, will reach on-premises. These updates are supposed to occur more frequently, per SPC14, and I of course ask the silly question “How do we know what updates are being made?”.
This was answered with this link: http://community.office365.com/en-us/w/office_365_service_updates/974.aspx. However, this link hasn’t been updated since 2/13, and that wouldn’t be a problem if Microsoft hasn’t released more updates to SharePoint Online, but they have…
I found these, by accident, in my Office 365 tenant, by noticing a little notification icon in the blue bar at the top. Sorry, I don’t have a screen shot as it has been removed probably because I clicked on it. The Message Center in the Office 365 Admin appears to have this critical information about upcoming updates. As of now, I can’t find any other way to know about these updates. There is no feed to subscribe to, no email alerts, nothing. I submitted a ticket and their reply confirmed it.
One more thing, you can read up on the message center here: http://blogs.office.com/2014/04/01/managing-change-with-message-center/
As you can see, these two updates have been released but that wiki above hasn’t been updated. What’s up with that?
Now onto the updates:
Updates coming to user profiles in SharePoint Online starting April 1, 2014.
SharePoint Online user profiles are getting a new look. In the next few weeks, you’ll notice a new layout that makes it easier to find information and a new section called “Documents we have in common.” Documents we have in common is a list of documents users have shared with one another. When one user visits another’s profile page, the list of their shared documents will be prominently displayed.
This update will start rolling out April 1, 2014 UTC. It may take up to several weeks for it to be available to all customers.
I don’t see this in our tenant. Do you? This looks like a step closer to the new Office Graph! I wonder if they’ll roll out certain pieces slowly or the entire thing at once.
SharePoint Online is introducing a new command bar in Document Libraries starting April 9, 2014
We are introducing a new command bar to Document Libraries in SharePoint Online in order to give users simplified access to common commands. With this update, users will be able to quickly and easily launch frequently used tasks such as: new, upload, sync, edit, manage, and share.
This update will start rolling out on April 9, 2014 UTC. It may take up to several weeks for it to be available to all customers.
This update includes a link to Sync OneDrive for Business or SharePoint site libraries to your computer page, which includes a little screen shot of the new toolbar. This’ll be a nice update for SharePoint, as this has been a recurring ask from users.
Thankfully, now that I know about the latter update, I have some custom solutions for customers in which we have tweaked this bar, I can now plan accordingly. Whew.
I’m a little bitter about this and I hope Microsoft does something soon to remedy.
RSS - Posts