Microsoft announced several updates for SharePoint, OneDrive and Office.com at the SharePoint Conference North America today, including a new mixed reality experience for SharePoint. The collaborative platform for Office 365 recently crossed a new milestone with over 400,000 customer organizations, with Microsoft adding that it’s now the #2 used capability in Office 365 after email.
According to Redmond, SharePoint is now the most popular content collaboration platform in the industry, and the time has come to push it to the next level with the help of Mixed Reality. SharePoint Spaces will allow SharePoint users to create their own mixed reality environment and fill it with documents, charts, 360° videos, 3D maps, as you can see in the video below:
The immersive mixed reality experiences will be accessible with a Windows Mixed Reality headset, HoloLens or a web browser. “SharePoint mainstreams mixed reality, empowering everyone to create visually compelling spaces that are available to anyone, on any device,” said Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President for OneDrive, SharePoint, and Office. After Microsoft first pushed entertainment and gaming scenarios for Windows Mixed Reality last year, it will be interesting to see if the company continues to shift its focus on enterprise use cases over the coming months.
In addition to this new mixed reality experience, SharePoint is also getting new AI capabilities such as the new Find tab in the SharePoint Mobile app, which brings intelligent search on the go. The Sharepoint document library experience is also coming to Microsoft Teams, allowing users to create custom views, pin documents and more on any Files tab in a Teams channel.
The last important SharePoint news from today’s SharePoint Virtual Summit is related to SharePoint Server 2019, which will be available in public preview in June. This next on-premises version of SharePoint will introduce user experience improvements, native support for hybrid scenarios as well as improved support for business process with PowerApps and Flow. You can learn more details about this new version on this blog post.
Microsoft also highlighted today some updates to Office.com, which can now show you a list of recommended files powered by AI and help you search for specific images such as receipts. The OneDrive app has received new capabilities including a new Scan feature as well as an option for uploading photos to OneDrive for Business. You can learn more about these latest additions on this separate blog post.
