Welcome to SharePoint Server 2019, a modern platform for choice and flexibility

“Without continual growth and progress, such words as improvement, achievement, and success have no meaning.”

• Benjamin Franklin

This morning at SharePoint Conference North America we broadly announced our vision, strategy, timeline, and investment areas for SharePoint Server 2019.

Welcome to SharePoint Server 2019. Reimagined to focus on you, SharePoint Server 2019 has a new, modern design that works perfectly across screens—whether you’re working with tablets and phones, laptops, or desktops – it’s beautiful and fast, familiar, and yet intuitive. SharePoint Server 2019 gives you instant access to the people, content, and apps you work with the most. You’ll spend less time searching for information and more time working with it.

SharePoint Server 2019 helps ensure that you have access to the information they need, regardless of the screen you choose to access it on.

User experience improvements

SharePoint Server 2019 delivers innovations in user experience from SharePoint Online, with improvements to document libraries and navigation constructs that are consistent with Office 365.

These updates have proven successful in driving adoption in Office 365, and will now benefit SharePoint Server.   Using the cloud as a baseline, we’re bringing the most compelling communications and collaborative experiences to customers of SharePoint 2019.  These investments include the introduction of Communications Sites, Team News, and modern Team Sites to include Lists and Libraries and in support of broader data mobility the Next Generation Sync Client (NGSC) support for reliable access to your documents – anywhere, anytime.

Caption: Screenshot of a SharePoint Server 2019 Team Site on a PC and mobile device side-by-side.

Platform enhancements

As with SharePoint Server 2016, for SharePoint Server 2019 we continue to derive our on-premises server from our platform investments in SharePoint Online with new native support for hybrid scenarios that can be configured during your deployment.

Business process improvements

We know that customers worldwide use SharePoint to support collaboration, search, business process automation, and custom business applications; and we know that many customers rely on SharePoint Server for mission-critical workloads. We know it’s not always easy to move your business, your workloads, to the cloud so we’re investing in supporting the use of process automation and forms technologies such as Microsoft PowerApps and Flow to connect with your on-premises data with 2019.

Key Features

• Modern Sites, Pages, Lists, and Libraries
• Team News
• SharePoint Home
• Communication Sites
• OneDrive Sync Client
• Improved hybrid support and scenarios
• New developer options
• Improved support for the business process with PowerApps and Flow

SharePoint Server 2019 has been optimized for the way you work, with a familiar, consistent view of information, collaboration, and process. At the same time, IT will benefit from a comprehensive, easily managed and integrated platform that meets the needs of the business today and tomorrow.

Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.

– Bill Gates

SharePoint Server 2019 has been developed applying these principles – listening to our customers’ feedback and understanding their needs…  Later this Summer we’ll invite you to experience SharePoint Server 2019 as part of our Preview release – look for details soon!

Timeline

SharePoint Server 2019 will be generally available to customers in H2 CY18.  SharePoint Server 2019 Preview will be available to customers in Summer 2018.

Customize a SharePoint List Form with a Web Part

Customize a list form by adding a web part

The forms are contained in web part pages, and you cannot customize the existing web parts at all. What you can do is add another web part, and Peter recommends the Content Editor web part. You can embed code and add tables, links, pictures, videos or another web part to the Content Editor web part. 

• Click on the button Form Web Parts under the LIST tab in the ribbon.

• Select one of the options, depending on which form you wish to customize.

• Click on Add a Web Part.

• Add the Content Editor web part in the Media & Content category.

• Click on "Click here to add content" and add the content you wish to add from the options under the ribbon tabs.

• Edit the web part and set the Chrome Type to None to avoid having the Content Editor caption on the web part.

• Click on the Stop Editing button.
• 

Modern SharePoint Web Parts – Part 1

Microsoft released the “Modern” page experience for team sites in SharePoint Online in the Fall of 2016. This included the ability to add web parts directly within the page user interface, but there weren’t very many Modern Web Parts available at that point. 

There are 22 web parts available to add to a modern SharePoint page. You can see an overview of the Modern Web Parts on this Microsoft page, which includes links for further information on each web part.

Bing Maps Web Part

The Bing Maps Web Part allows you to display a map of any address or point of interest you enter. By default when it’s added to a page, it displays the “road” view of your current location, but then you can type in the location you wish the map to display to users, and you can switch to Aerial (satellite) view or Streetside view (which is not available for all locations).

Embed Web Part

When you select the Embed Web Part, the editing panel immediately appears, allowing you to paste a website address or embed code. For example, you could embed a YouTube video on your page, allowing users to play the video directly from there. Note that this is different from the Link Web Part, which will only display a preview of a video and require the user to actually follow the link to play it.

File Viewer Web Part

This is the new version of what had been called the Document Web Part. According to announcements at Ignite, this web part will allow previews of 270 types of files, so it’s no longer just for documents. However, as of this writing (just after Ignite), while the web part’s name has been changed, it currently still only displays an Office document (i.e. Word, Excel, PowerPoint).

Hero Web Part

This web part was added with the rollout of Communication sites in the summer of 2017. It’s a visually attractive web part which allows you to add visual links to pages, images, or documents in various layouts. Microsoft has quite a detailed page about this web part, as it’s a big part of a Communication site.

After adding a link by clicking Select Link in one of the Hero content areas, an image from the link will be displayed automatically; for example, this might be an image from a document you’ve linked to. When you hover over the tile or layer, you’ll now see a small edit icon in the lower right, which you can use to edit the link text, the image, and some other options – the sections are described below. In the lower left is a Move icon, to move the tiles/layers around within the Hero Web Part.

Image Web Part

This web part allows you to choose an image from recently uploaded images or from the current SharePoint site, from a link to OneDrive or another SharePoint site, or to upload an image from your computer.

Image Gallery Web Part

This web part gives you a way to display a collection of images rather than a single image. You can add a title for the collection at the top of the web part. Editing the web part allows you to select the layout (Tiles or Carousel), and if you’re using the Tiles layout you can also select the aspect ratio (1:1 square – the default, 16:9 wide, or 4:3 standard).

To add images, you can either browse to select them from SharePoint or from your computer as you can with other web parts, or you can drag images directly onto the web part while the page is in Edit mode. After an image is uploaded, click the Edit icon to edit its properties: Title, Caption, and Alternative Text. The Title and Caption will be visible to the user when they view the full-size image by clicking on it from the Tiles layout, and the Title (only) will appear below the image when you use the Carousel layout. You can rearrange the images by dragging them within the web part when you’re in the Tiles layout.

Link Web Part

This web part allows you to enter a single link to a URL, and displays a preview of the page, video, or image. You can choose to remove the display of either the URL or the preview by clicking the x next to it. There are no options available via the Edit icon.

Office 365 Video Web Part

Here, you can select one video to display from your O365 Video portal. Note, however, that Office 365 Video is being replaced by Microsoft Stream, which has its own Modern web part

[described in the Dynamic Web Parts section of this article], so I won’t go into detail on the O365 

Video Web Part.

In Part 2 of this article, we’ll explore Modern Web Parts which display varying content, depending 

upon the criteria set in the web part.

SharePoint mobile app—your intranet in your pocket

The intranet is the nerve center of many organizations. It provides content-centric collaborative spaces that give teams the resources they need to work together. It lets users consume and contribute news and information within their teams and across the organization. It manages knowledge and connects users to content through navigation and search. It hosts applications that support and automate business processes.

SharePoint is now making your intranet more accessible on the go, more intelligent, and more personalized, based on your activities across sites, the people you work with, the content you work on and the business processes you drive.

We’re thrilled to announce the SharePoint mobile app, designed for Windows, iOS and Android, to put your intranet in your pocket, with full-fidelity access to company news and announcements, people, sites, content and apps—no matter where you are. And the app will incorporate your on-premises SharePoint sites, as well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.