To date, SharePoint has helped countless teams and organizations as the best document management system. In addition to being a document and file management tool in organizations, SharePoint is also an excellent collaboration tool outside of the professional setting with SharePoint development. Microsoft has continued to improve the tool and provide updates and new features with each new release. In this article, let’s see what are the new SharePoint updates of December 2020.
Dynamic Site Templates
SharePoint offers a set of dynamic templates ready for everyone to use. There are many templates for organizations, communities, and schools to help users create more intuitive and modern sites.
The image below is an example of a communication template for sites. This site is great for team communication and engagement where you can customize the theme and logo. You can also use various web parts in this template, including Yammer discussions and conversations.
Next, we have a sample landing page for educational institutions. The strengths of these new models for schools are:
The school home page which can be the main and central page.
The Staff Home Page , a portal for staff members to collaborate on documents and links
The class home page which is the template for class resources, handouts, and updates.
These new templates can help create an amazing collaboration, communication, and engagement site that can also be integrated with a class team in Microsoft Teams for Education . Take a look :
More customizations for your brand
Your site design can now be more personalized than ever. You can reinforce your organization’s logo and choose the background color that matches it. Then you can also customize the hub logo for your navigation tabs. Finally, the site logo can be enhanced to add more customizations to your brand.
The tip for this logo definition is to use different logos, fonts, and themes to differentiate each section. Below is an example of a logo display and navigation section.
Microsoft Search
While the classic search experience is great, there’s a new modern search experience called “Microsoft Search” that provides better results. The latest update included a host of new benefits such as improved search functionality in SharePoint, a more powerful search bar, and more personal results that are now easier to explore and navigate.
In order to save users from struggling to find a file or document across the whole site, Microsoft Graph is used to give you more dynamic results based on your query. Results may vary for each user, even when typing the same word, because only items they have access to will be displayed.
Based on the sample query above, Microsoft Search provides more dynamic results based on the first word you type, and results update as you type additional words. Also, if the first results are not enough, you can click on the last link and you will get other results related to the word(s) you typed in the search bar. This is what you see below:
These new updates to SharePoint give users a more personal and refreshing experience and will help many organizations, schools and individuals bring their brand and site design up to modern standards.
