New Microsoft SharePoint mobile, OneDrive Universal Windows Platform apps to start rolling out in May
Microsoft is planning on releasing new SharePoint mobile apps for iOS, Android and Windows starting this quarter, as well as a new OneDrive Universal Windows Platform application for Windows 10.
Company officials will release more details about Microsoft's SharePoint future roadmap during a May 4 "Future of SharePoint" virtual event.
SharePoint provides content management and collaboration capabilities. It's one of Microsoft's multi-billion-dollar businesses in its own right, and currently has more than 190 million users in 200,000-plus companies, Microsoft officials say.
As officials have made clear previously. those using SharePoint Online, rather than SharePoint on-premises, will get all new features first. Some of the features on this list won't ever make it into SharePoint on-premises, as some of those are cloud-dependent (for example, anything dependent on Office 365 Groups or the Office Graph).
Microsoft officials recently disclosed when sharing details about its OneDrive cloud-storage roadmap that the company didn't plan to deliver synchronization of SharePoint Online document libraries with the OneDrive sync client until toward the end of calendar 2016. But the comapny does plan to provide some other SharePoint-OneDrive synchronization in the interim period.
Microsoft also plans to deliver a OneDrive Universal Windows Platform application for Windows 10 this quarter (most likely later in May), officials said.
Here's what's on Microsoft's SharePoint roadmap for this calendar quarter:
- Access to SharePoint Online document libraries from the OneDrive mobile app
- Intelligent discovery in OneDrive of documents from both OneDrive and SharePoint
- Copy from OneDrive to SharePoint
- OneDrive Universal Windows Platform (UWP) application
- Modern document library experience (currently rolling out to First Release tenants)
- SharePoint mobile app for iOS
- New SharePoint home page in Office 365
- Modern lists experience
- Site activity and insights on the Site Contents page
Here's what's coming before the end of calendar 2016:
- Document analytics surfaced in OneDrive to provide insight into document usage, reach, and impact
- Synchronization of SharePoint Online document libraries with the new OneDrive sync client
- Synchronization of shared folders with the new OneDrive sync client
- Mobile access to SharePoint document libraries in on-premises farms• SharePoint mobile app for Windows and Android
- Integration of SharePoint sites and Office 365 Groups
- Simple, fast site creation
- Modern pages experience
- Team and organizational news and announcements
- PowerApps and Microsoft Flow integration with SharePoint
The SharePoint mobile app -- which Microsoft is billing as providing users with the "your Intranet in your pocket" -- will allow users to access SharePoint content, sites, portals and people on their mobile phones.
While Microsoft's main focus with SharePoint is on cloud and mobile, the company also is planning to continue to roll out more SharePoint Server on-premises releases, as well as feature packs for SharePoint Server 2016 users, starting in calendar 2017.
For those wondering when and whether Microsoft might say more about what's coming on the placeholder-replacement front for OneDrive, there's no new news this week. Microsoft officials still are declining to say when and how the company will make this capability available to OneDrive users, even though Microsoft cloud-storage rival DropBox just announced its own plans for a placeholder-type solution.