This month is a bit lite on the news. Why? Because everyone is out on summer vacation I assume. Lots of social media chatter but really it was either repost of old news or things we had previously discussed going live. Makes sense. They can’t drill us with amazing features every day. So some keys things I enjoyed are covered like OneDrive group policies and then at the end, I give you some straight up unfounded ideas of where I think we are headed.

SharePoint Hub Limit raised to 2000

Not an issue I thought I would ever run into but it is solved either way. You can now create up to 2,000 SharePoint Online Hub Sites. Wow! I thought the increase to 100 was a bunch, clearly, I was wrong. Either way, this feature is live so hopefully it helped you.

Tune SharePoint Online Page Performance

This wasn’t an announcement exactly, more of a reminder. As we continue to get more SharePoint Online content and features it is really easy to build pages that are slow. So keep this page from the document bookmarked, Tune SharePoint Online performance. It has core concepts like don’t display giant image files on the page to nerdy stuff like object cache and how to do some diagnostic work.

Site usage getting updated

Looks like some improvements to SharePoint Site Usage are starting to roll out. Site Visits and Unique Visitors will be improved along with a new “Popular Platforms” report will be made available. Letting you see if your users are always at their desk when they go to your site or if they are on the go. Helpful for context as you design and think about the experience. Remember we need to keep getting better at user experience.

The Shift

Jeff Teper, the father of SharePoint, sat down with Brad and Mary Jo to talk about SharePoint, artificial intelligence, millennials, and more. A fun little video if you want to hear straight from the horse’s mouth where he thinks we are headed. And since he is in charge probably a good chance we get there. Sorry, I couldn’t get an edited version of the video without Brad.

Configure OneDrive Client to automatically sync SharePoint libraries with Group Policy

Wow, that is a long title. The name they use is Auto Mount Team Sites, more long words, but the feature is cool. As part of your rollout of the OneDrive client, you can set group policies to define document libraries to auto-sync. One less thing to train users on so a big win. Check out more details here.

Where do we go from here

Microsoft didn’t give me enough to report on so now you get my two cents on what I see next. They have only their selves to blame. So what do I think we will see as this year continues?

• I think we will see more automation and intelligence in the platform. There is a clear push to bring in more of the awesomeness that is Azure to enhance the platform which will lead to more fun for us.
• I think we will see more Teams focus. For a long time, it has been a SharePoint first model, the tides have changed, and I think they will continue to change where Teams is first and SharePoint plays a supporting role.
• I hope we see a purging of the product catalog. Office 365 has so many tools and features that I get lost. I hope this year we see the beginning of a consolidation of tools that do similar things. How many forms products can we have?
• I think search will become even more awesome. And that says a lot because I already think search is the most awesome feature in SharePoint.
• I think the line of what is SharePoint and OneDrive will continue to be really blurry. OneDrive Business and OneDrive Personal are still confusing concepts.

That is what I think. What do you think? Where are we headed?