SharePoint evaluated as a Leader in latest edition of The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Content Management

SharePoint evaluated as a Leader in latest edition of The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Content Management

As written on blogs.office.com
We are very pleased to see SharePoint evaluated as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Content Management—Business Content Services, Q2 2017. As Forrester noted:
Microsoft instigates content-in-the-cloud with a focus on SharePoint Online. Microsoft’s launch of SharePoint 2016 and ongoing investment into Office 365 and SharePoint Online has proved to be a significant catalyst in enterprises’ decisions to move their enterprise content to cloud services. Support for hybrid deployments continues to be an area of focus, supporting firms adopting cloud in a phased approach, or for specific use cases. Microsoft’s FastTrack migration program, as well as its partners, provides a range of options for customers that want to move documents out of their own in-house data centers or on-premises SharePoint sites. Microsoft has a clear cloud-first vision, and has invested in eliminating the scalability barriers that challenged older, on-premises SharePoint editions. Microsoft continues to work to improve one-stop governance tools, such as common eDiscovery and legal holds across the Office 365 stack. Collaboration, including analytics and social graphing is a major area of focus and investment.
These are interesting times for enterprise content management (ECM). Industry thought leaders have noted the shift from archives for decades-long content retention, to agile collaboration-centric cloud toolsets that also empower security and reuse.
Forrester has been tracking this shift from traditional ECM to what they call business content services. Business content services emphasizes content creation, policy and reuse—but remains distinct from transactional, high volume content services (like those that support credit card processing). Microsoft, through Office 365 and SharePoint Online, has also been at the forefront of the charge.

The Power of SharePoint

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The Power of SharePoint

By Michael Blythe as written on powerbi.microsoft.com
Do you have SharePoint Online and want to better automate and streamline your business processes? Have you heard of PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, or Power BI, but you’re not sure how to use them with SharePoint Online? You’ve come to the right place! We’ve written a paper that explores how to build out a basic project-management app based on SharePoint lists and three key technologies that integrate with SharePoint Online: PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, and Power BI. These three technologies are all part of the Microsoft business platform, which makes it easy to measure your business, act on the results, and automate your workflows.

Business scenario

In the paper, the company Contoso has a SharePoint Online site where they manage the lifecycle of projects, from request, to approval, to development, to final review. A project requestor, such as a department head, requests an IT project by adding an item to a SharePoint list. A project approver, such as an IT manager, reviews the project, and then approves it or rejects it. If approved, the project is assigned to a project manager, and additional detail is added to a second list through the same app. A business analyst reviews current and completed projects using a Power BI report embedded in SharePoint.  Microsoft Flow is used to send approval email and respond to Power BI alerts. When you’re done with the paper, you will have a cool scenario like the following:

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Downloading the paper

You can download the entire package, with the paper and the accompanying files, or you can download individual pieces. After you download, open spo-scenario.docx, and follow the paper. The paper describes the role of the other downloads. Before using the sample apps and report, create your own SharePoint lists and update connections in the samples. For more information, see the section "Task 1: Set up SharePoint lists" in the paper.
  1. Go to the download page, and click or tap Download.
  2. Select all the files, then click or tap Next.
  3. Click or tap Save or Save As for each file.

Getting started quickly

The scenario we present in the paper is simple compared to a full-blown project management and analysis app, but it still takes some time to complete all the tasks. If you just want a quick introduction to using PowerApps, Microsoft Flow, and Power BI with SharePoint, check out the following articles:
When you’re done, we hope you’ll be back to check out the full scenario. Even within the scenario, you can focus on the tasks that interest you, and complete the tasks as you have time.

Visio is coming to the web and iOS

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Visio is coming to the web and iOS

By VisioTeam as written on blogs.office.com.  
Visio has been a trusted tool in diagramming for more than a decade. And we know its visual communication in the form of diagrams will become more powerful when anyone in the company can consume—regardless of their location or device. So, today we’re excited to announce Visio Viewer for iPad and Visio Online Preview, enabling users to share or access diagrams from nearly anywhere, gain operational insights and explore real-world diagrams easily.

Back to the basics—ubiquitous sharing and access with Visio Online and iPad app

As one of the most widely adopted process mapping tools, Visio helps thousands of organizations blueprint the business processes that drive their desired transformation. Using Visio Online Preview and Visio Viewer for iPad, you can securely store your diagrams in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online and easily share them with anyone as a link—allowing your colleagues to view and interact with diagrams effortlessly across devices.
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Visio Online Preview—gain operational insights from anywhere

The Visio desktop has always been a powerful tool for creating network maps, organizational charts, business processes and more. Visio Online Preview amplifies the power of visual communication by helping teams glean real-time information from diagrams with just a browser—turning your data-linked diagrams into an operational dashboard that more employees can access.
Picture a network map that the IT department uses to manage the company’s global datacenters. As a static diagram, the map is perfect for understanding how different servers interact and show the location of those servers. Now, pairing that map with real-time data, IT admins can see things like server outages as they happen. You can use hyperlinks to bring in additional documentation, such as policy guidance created in Word. Or, moving from the network dashboard to the rack dashboard for a specific server performance, IT admins are able to drill down to the root cause of the outages and take the appropriate actions to keep the business up and running.
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See the Visio Online Public Preview FAQs to learn how to access the preview.

 

Visio Viewer for iPad—explore real-world diagrams in high-fidelity on the go

Visio diagrams often comprise details that customers could miss on smaller screens. Built for iPad Retina display, Visio Viewer for iPad brings high-fidelity viewing of real-world processes and plans on the go. With the new exploration experience, plant managers can zoom in to production line issues from remote facilities, financial advisors can examine detailed workflows of a loan approval process while visiting clients around the world, retail district managers can conduct store management trainings with associates using detailed CAD-based store layouts and much more.
Using the Find pane, you can pinpoint all occurrences of a shape name, text or data—eliminating the need to sift through countless shapes. After you locate the shape with your desired metadata, smoothly navigate through your diagrams and zoom in and out with intuitive Pan and Zoom features. You can even reveal different visualizations of the same diagram by adjusting the visibility of certain layers. For example, an architect can share the same building layout with Facilities and HR, who can then visualize the respective layers which contain only the electrical map or personnel location for their own functional need. Operations managers can add an inventory visualization layer on top of a production line with throughput information to understand the root cause of a station breakdown.
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You can download Visio Viewer for iPad today. We’ll bring Visio to the iPhone in the coming months.

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Your intranet in your pocket—the SharePoint mobile app for iOS is now available

Your intranet in your pocket—the SharePoint mobile app for iOS is now available

Last month, we unveiled a new vision for the future of SharePoint, and today we’re pleased to release the new SharePoint mobile app for iOS. Install it now and take your intranet with you—your intranet in your pocket. Stay connected to important content, sites, portals and people from across your intranet while on the go. The SharePoint mobile journey starts now. This is a first step, and we are excited to continue to build on what we’ve started. Let’s dive in to the details.
Watch this episode of Microsoft Mechanics with Andy Haon, principal group program manager on the SharePoint engineering team, for an in-depth look at the SharePoint mobile app:

The SharePoint mobile app
The new SharePoint mobile app helps you keep your work moving forward by providing quick access to your team sites, organization portals and resources, and even a view into what the people you work with are working on. And this new app is infused with the intelligence of the Microsoft Graph, which applies machine learning to activity in Office 365 to connect you to the relevant documents and people around you. The SharePoint mobile app works with SharePoint Online in Office 365, SharePoint Server (2013 and 2016) on-premises and your hybrid environment. Once you launch the app on your iPhone, you’ll be prompted to sign in with your SharePoint credentials. The SharePoint mobile app lets you easily switch between accounts.

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The Sites tab takes you to a list of the sites you visit frequently and sites you’re following. Click on a site to see recent activity, recent files and the site’s assets (documents, lists, subsites, pages and more). You can also share the site. When you click to a team site, you immediately see how the SharePoint mobile app natively renders the site elements quickly and beautifully.
The SharePoint mobile app also links to other Office apps. For example, when you click an Office document in the Recent files pivot, it will take you directly into the corresponding Office mobile app. Similarly, when you access a SharePoint document library within a team site, you will be taken into the OneDrive mobile app for iOS to view, share, discover and manage files stored across Office 365. Learn more how the two apps work together.

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The Links tab takes you to sites and portals programmed for everyone in your company to see. These are curated by your SharePoint admin(s) from the SharePoint home in Office 365. And if you have invested in responsive, mobile-designed portals, they will shine through in the app. Microsoft, too, is investing in responsive design as a top priority to ensure all new experiences (like the SharePoint home in Office 365, Microsoft Delve and Office 365 Video) are mobile and responsive by default.

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The People tab gives you visibility into what the people you work with are working on. Find and browse colleagues in your network. Tap on an individual to see their contact card and discover what they are working on and who they are working with based on intelligence powered by Office 365.

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Search—The SharePoint mobile app provides search throughout with clean results—filtered by sites, files and people. When you perform a search in the SharePoint mobile app, you are connecting through full enterprise search, so you can find content and people from across your intranet, SharePoint team sites, company portals and the OneDrive for Business folders you have access to, including content recommendations powered by the Microsoft Graph.

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What’s next
The SharePoint mobile app for iOS is just a first step on the SharePoint mobile journey, and we are excited to continue to build on what we’ve started. We’ll continue delivering enhancements to the app, such as support of cross-company news and announcements, coming later this year. We are also working on Android and Windows Universal versions, which we expect to release before the end of this year.

Office Online—chat with your co-editors in real-time

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Office Online—chat with your co-editors in real-time

We recently announced the ability for co-editors to chat with one another directly within a OneDrive document when working in Office Online. Today, we’re pleased to extend this capability to our Office 365 Business and Education customers for documents stored in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint Online. Built on the same technology as Skype for Business, the new chat feature is available in all the Office Online applications—Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote.
How to initiate a chat
When you share a document from OneDrive or SharePoint Online with your co-workers or classmates, they can view, make edits and even co-author with you in real-time. When multiple people are in the document at the same time, their names appear in the list of co-editors at the top right of the browser window. Next to the list of co-editors, you’ll see a blue Chat button (shown below).

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Chat in real-time while working with others in Office Online.

 

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Real-time chat is integrated with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote Online.

 

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Use emoticons to liven up your conversations.

 

When to chat and when to add document comments
Use Chat when you want to communicate with others immediately, for example, to ask a quick question or divide sections among the co-editors. Chat history is not saved when you close the document but can be copied and pasted if desired. Use Comments (on the Review tab on the ribbon) when you want to attach a comment to a specific selection within the document, such as when you need to ask if a word or phrase should be changed. Comments are saved with the document and can be replied to, marked as done or deleted.
That’s all for now. We’re constantly working to improve Office Online and add new features. Leave a comment below or add new feature suggestions to our UserVoice sites for Word, Excel, PowerPoint or OneNote.

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Modern document libraries in SharePoint

Modern document libraries in SharePoint

Last month, we unveiled our broad vision for the Future of SharePoint, and today we’re delighted to announce the that modern document libraries are now rolling out to all Office 365 commercial customers worldwide. You can learn more about how to use modern libraries in this article, “What is a document library?”

What’s new
Helping people share files and collaborate on content has always been central to our mission. That’s why we’re creating a better experience for document libraries that’s faster, more intuitive and responsive.
Here’s a look at what’s new:

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The new, modern document library experience, showing two documents and a link pinned to the top.

 

User interface
Modern document libraries combine the power of SharePoint with OneDrive usability—Modern document libraries have an updated user interface that offers an experience similar to OneDrive, so it’s more intuitive to create a new folder and upload files in the browser. The ribbon has been replaced with a trim command bar, which provides intelligent commands relevant to the tasks at hand. If your organization has customized the ribbon with buttons that map to critical business functionality in your enterprise, those buttons will appear in the command bar as well. With this update, each new Office 365 group now gets a full modern document library, replacing the former “Files” page.
Important documents easily highlighted—Click Pin to top to add documents “above the fold” in any onscreen view.
Copy and move files from the command bar—Copying isn’t new, but the copy and move gestures are intelligent about displaying your information architecture and letting you create new folders on the fly.
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Copy files from SharePoint command bar.
Import files from other libraries—You may not have to make as many copies any more. Document libraries are also intelligent about remembering other files you’ve been using in SharePoint. That’s why you can import other files from other libraries as links, without having to duplicate files between multiple sites. You still see thumbnails and metadata for native files. And SharePoint shows your list of most recent documents, so you don’t have to cut and paste a link.

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Create a link in modern document libraries.
Personalization
Personalized views simplified—The new document libraries let you group files directly in the main page without clicking to a separate admin screen. You can also click and drag to change the size of your columns, as well as sort, filter and group from any column header. To make the view available to everybody else in the library, just click Save View.
Responsive and accessible design—Mobile browsers have the same features as the desktop, making SharePoint productive for every user—whether they interact via mouse, keyboard, touch or screen reader.
Metadata
Document metadata now available inline—You can now edit metadata directly from the main view in the information panel. No more clicking into multiple screens to apply an update! If you’re in a view that groups files by metadata, you can drag and drop files between groups to update the metadata. And if you miss something required, the document is no longer hidden behind enforced checkout—you just receive a reminder to enter the data when you can.
One-stop shopping for everything about your documents—Thanks to Office Online integration, you can navigate a complete document preview at the top of the information panel. The panel offers metadata, including the history of recent activity, updates to the file and who received a share to the file. You can also add more users or immediately stop all sharing. Finally, all other file properties are displayed, in case there’s anything else not already covered.

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The document information panel.
Keeping it authentically SharePoint—While we enhanced the document libraries to make them as intuitive and productive as possible, we know that the power of SharePoint has always been in your ability to customize document libraries to work for your team. At the same time, there’s a rich tradition of using content types, check-in/check-out, versioning, records management and workflows in SharePoint. Modern document libraries inherit all of these.
Navigation
Modern libraries come to Office 365 Groups—To bring enhanced content management to group files, libraries belonging to an Office 365 group have a new header control at the top of the page. Unlike the old control, which included links to the group’s conversation, calendar and member management, the new control has a single link to the group’s conversation, from which users can navigate to calendar and member management.
Getting started with modern document libraries
As we roll out modern libraries into production, we know it’s important to focus on several key aspects of managing the overall user experience.
Since usability requires manageability, we keep IT in control of the experience. You may be ready to adopt this across the board or you might want to stay in classic mode until you can prepare your users. We give you full control of using classic or modern looks at the tenant, site collection and library level.
When we bring modern document libraries into production later in June, it will become the new default for all libraries in most cases. However, we will add the tenant and administrative controls in advance of the actual library rollout, so if you choose to opt out, you can do so before users start seeing the new experience. We also included customization detection, so if we see certain features and customizations that don’t work in the modern experience, we automatically drop back to classic mode.
And we’ll keep classic mode running well into 2017 while users and developers adapt and adopt the new capabilities. See the support.office.com article “What is a document library?” for more details.
There’s more to come
First Release customers have been actively using many of these features since April and their feedback has guided our improvements announced today. You can join that conversation on the Office 365 Network on Yammer and weigh in on the improvements that will be part of our general release. For more context on the future of team sites beyond the new, modern document library experience, read “SharePoint—the mobile and intelligent intranet.”
We heard your feedback on extensibility and customization in particular, and we’ll have more to share in a future update. We plan to add support for customizing the page using modern techniques. Until then, customized library pages should stay in classic mode.
In the meantime, learn more about using and supporting libraries in “What is a document library?,” try out the new document libraries in SharePoint Online and give us feedback directly inside the modern document library experience with the Feedback button.
Thanks for using SharePoint.

New to Office 365 in May—updates to Skype for Business, Outlook, SharePoint and more

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New to Office 365 in May—updates to Skype for Business, Outlook, SharePoint and more

By Kirk Koenigsbauer as written on blogs.office.com

This month, our updates to Office 365 include real-time chat integration into Office 365 web experiences, as well as new capabilities in Outlook and Visio. We also cover key announcements for SharePoint and OneDrive for Business made earlier this month.
Real-time chat in Office 365 web experiences for commercial customers
Last month, we announced deeper integration of Skype for Business into Word and PowerPoint for Windows desktop. Now for commercial customers we’re integrating real-time chat into Office Online—the web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. Simply click the blue Chat button to start a conversation with everyone editing in the browser at the same time, for any document stored in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.

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We’re also rolling out Skype for Business chat within Outlook on the web. Click the Skype icon in the top navigation bar to access contacts, search your organization and start a chat alongside your Outlook mail and calendar experience. You can also begin conversations by clicking the IM button in a person’s contact card.

 

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Outlook updates across platforms
We have a number of updates coming this month to Outlook, helping you stay on top of what matters and get stuff done on all your devices—even your wearables!

 

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SharePoint and OneDrive for Business enhancements for Office 365
Earlier this month, we unveiled our new cloud-first, mobile-first vision and roadmap for SharePoint. We’ve already started rolling out some of those improvements to help empower people, teams and organizations to intelligently discover, share and collaborate on content from anywhere and on any device.
It’s simpler and more powerful to share files and collaborate from any device. Now you can use OneDrive for iPhone and iPad to seamlessly share, edit and take offline any files stored in SharePoint document libraries, Office 365 groups and OneDrive for Business. On the web, you can copy files from OneDrive for Business to a SharePoint team site or Office 365 group. The new Discover view in both the web and OneDrive for Android helps files find you, minimizing search time with recommendations powered by the Office Graph. We’ll expand these capabilities to more platforms later this year.

 

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We’re also updating SharePoint to make your intranet more mobile, intelligent and personalized. The new SharePoint mobile app will provide full-fidelity, on-the-go access to your company content, sites and apps—available on iOS by the end of June and on Android and Windows later this year. In Office 365 on the web, we’ve renamed Sites to SharePoint and we now provide a modern, new SharePoint home page with access to team sites, search and views into activity across your teams and organization. SharePoint document libraries and lists (coming soon) have a simple and familiar new look based on OneDrive, while still offering intuitive access to the rich content management and customizability of SharePoint. Soon we’ll integrate PowerApps and Microsoft Flow directly into SharePoint. Stay tuned for more!

 

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AutoCAD 2013/2010 file support in Visio Pro for Office 365
Over 12 million people use Visio to visually communicate complex information, document business processes and more. Now Visio Pro for Office 365 customers can insert and open the latest AutoCAD 2013 and 2010 file formats. Architects, engineers, operations teams and others can collaborate more effectively on AutoCAD design documents in Visio with capabilities such as co-authoring, commenting and annotation. You can even add data on top of your layout and design to provide operational insights. For example, import an AutoCAD diagram of a building and add people and facilities to the floor plan to more easily track resources or simply highlight key architectural information to share with others. Sign up for a free webcast on July 12 to learn more about using Visio to collaborate on AutoCAD files.

 

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Learn more about what’s new for Office 365 subscribers this month at: Office 2016 | Office for Mac | Office Mobile for Windows | Office for iPhone and iPad | Office on Android. If you’re an Office 365 Home or Personal customer, be sure to sign up for Office Insider to be the first to use the latest and greatest in Office productivity. Commercial customers on both Current Channel and Deferred Channel can also get early access to a fully supported build through First Release. Thanks for your continued feedback and support!

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Sharepoint is going mobile this year with a new app

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Sharepoint is going mobile this year with a new app

By Blair Hanley Frank as written on cio.com
SharePoint is going mobile in a big way. Microsoft announced a new app for its content management and collaboration platform on Tuesday, which will give workers a way to access content from their smartphones and tablets on the go.
The app, called SharePoint Mobile, will be coming to iOS by the end of June, and is one of dozens of new features for the platform that Microsoft announced alongside the general availability of SharePoint Server 2016.
Other capabilities include redesigned team sites that make it easier to see relevant files that people are working on and a hybrid search functionality that works across cloud and on-premises versions of SharePoint.
After 15 years on the market, SharePoint is still going strong. The enterprise content management and collaboration platform software is getting a number of updates over the coming year, to benefit the more than 200,000 companies, 50,000 partners and one million developers working with it today.
The SharePoint Mobile app is aimed at helping people get quick access to four types of information from SharePoint: news from across the company, the sites that people use the most, quick links to important pages and a list of their coworkers. It will work both with SharePoint Online and some on-premises versions of SharePoint Server.
Using information from the machine learning-powered Microsoft Graph, the mobile app will be able to pick out who people work with the most and what SharePoint sites they use most frequently, and make those more readily available than less-used information. That same capability will also power functionality inside the app that shows users files relevant to them.
Microsoft said Android and Windows versions of the SharePoint Mobile app will be coming later this year.

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OneDrive is also getting some updates enhanced by machine learning. This quarter, OneDrive mobile app users will be able to access their SharePoint Online document libraries, and get suggestions of useful documents shared with them both through OneDrive and SharePoint.
Those document suggestions are similar to what Microsoft has been doing with its Delve product, which also uses the Microsoft Graph to show users what other people in their organization are working on.

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SharePoint's Web incarnation is also getting several major updates including a redesigned sites layout and a new Home page that gives users an at-a-glance look at the team sites they're a part of along with quick updates from those sites.
Companies that are concerned about securing their internal file sharing will also get access to new tools that both help them manage how their employees share data and provide more robust security capabilities that lock down SharePoint in its entirety.
This quarter, Microsoft will release dynamic conditional access policies that let administrators define levels of access based on a person's identity, what app or device they're using and their network location. That means an administrator could prevent users from accessing high-security files stored in SharePoint from a mobile device that the company doesn't control.
Later this year, customers will be able bring their own encryption keys to lock down data stored in SharePoint.
Finally, SharePoint developers will get a new set of tools to help them build on top of the service. This summer, Microsoft is going to release a new SharePoint Framework that lets developers use modern JavaScript and Web tempting frameworks across SharePoint in the cloud and on premises.
Anything that developers build with the Framework will by default integrate with SharePoint Mobile so that users can get access to it on the go. That only scratches the surface of the developer announcements, which also include new APIs and support for Webhooks.
That's only a small segment of what Microsoft has in store for the collaboration platform. There are plenty of more updates in the pipeline for 2016, including integration between Office 365 Groups and SharePoint sites and connections between SharePoint and Microsoft's new PowerApps and Flow citizen development tools.

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