Microsoft has been busy with announcements at Ignite, and another set of news comes from the SharePoint team. The company has shared some of the upcoming features for the service, starting with SharePoint home sites which is now beginning to roll out worldwide.
Microsoft is also adding more branding capabilities, starting with the ability for companies to add custom branding to the SharePoint mobile apps, with options to add a logo image, choose app theme colors, and more. There are also new branding capabilities for both website footers and headers, including a new Shy Header option that makes it possible to hide the header on the website. Microsoft is also bringing the Fluent Design System to SharePoint websites, and transitioning the default color from blue to teal.
The SharePoint look book has received an update, too, with more samples of what SharePoint websites can look like, and making it easier to add a design you like to your own tenant if you"re an admin. You can find the new look book here.
SharePoint is also getting a few improvements for hubs. Hub permissions allow businesses to manage access to associated sites; hub analytics provides insights into how the hub is being used; associated hubs allow search and discovery to be done across hubs, and audience targeting for hub navigation allows navigation items to be targeted at employees based on their job role, for example. This is also being made available outside of hubs.
Microsoft has made improvements to page, news, and web parts in order to reduce the need for custom code. These include image resizing, along with new stock images; a version history and page difference visualization, so it"s possible to see how pages have changed across versions; an updated Yammer conversations part with improved performance and the new design; and a My Feed web part that brings up relevant content for the user.
Another new feature is the ability to write posts and create pages in advance and schedule them to be posted at a specific time. Finally, SharePoint is adding multilingual capabilities so websites can be presented in different languages and allow users to view them in their preferred languages. This ties with the version history feature above to let translators know when changes have been made to the page and allow them to compare the differences between versions.
These features will be rolling out at different points in time in the coming months. To know more about when they"re available, you can check out the roadmap.