First Look: SharePoint 2016 Mobile App and More

Microsoft's much anticipated new SharePoint mobile app will be in the Apple store this month. Get a first look at the app, the new SharePoint Home and team sites.

Chris McNulty, Senior Product Manager, SharePoint & OneDrive, shared details on the new app as well as the related product roadmaps with more than 200 SharePoint users at SharePoint Saturday Silicon Valley 2016 on the Microsoft campus.

The roadmaps reflect Microsoft's thinking about the modern workplace, and how it plans to transform the discovery, sharing and collaboration on content from anywhere and on any device. Deep Office integration is central to that vision.

During Q2 MS will make mobile access available to SharePoint Online, intelligent discovery, copy to SharePoint and Windows Universal App. Coming next are document analytics, sync SharePoint Online doc libraries, sync shared folders, and mobile access to SharePoint on-premises.

The mobile app was built for iOS first, then will be rolled out for Android devices, followed by the Microsoft phones.

McNulty said the SharePoint ecosystem today encompasses more than 200,000 million organizations, 190 million paid seats, 1 million developers, 50,000 + partners and $10 billion + solutions. Forty percent of all seats and 60% of new seats are SharePoint Online. Nine of the world's top intranets are built on SharePoint. 

"We want to make it better-easier, friendly, intuitive," McNulty said, adding that SHP will live  at the center of Office 365. 

The new SharePoint mobile app includes several features and functionality, including news and announcements, navigation and search sites and portals online and on-premises, discovery activities and people, actionable alerts and SharePoint home for the web.

The 2016 mobile and intelligent intranet roadmap includes Office 365 Groups integration; simple, fast site and page creation; team and organizational news and PowerApps and Microsoft Flow. The open and connected platform roadmap includes sites on Microsoft Graph, SharePoint Webhooks, and custom sites on SharePoint framework. The security, privacy and compliance roadmap includes new datacenters in Germany and Canada, bring your own encryption key, granular access policies, SharePoint site classification and Hybrid SharePoint insights (preview).

McNulty also identified several key future workplace trends that will drive collaboration product development: documents that decide who needs to review them, content that drives security, intelligence predicts and schedules needed meetings, signal graphing and artificial intelligence suggest the need for a document, real-time contextual graphically rich data about collaboration and consumption, and simple automated processes to improve stakeholdership and authoring.

The presentation also highlighted SharePoint Server 2016's cloud inspired infrastructure, more robust security and compliance and enhanced user experience and the announced the new SharePoint Server 2016 Feature Packs.

More than two dozen free workshops were held at SharePoint Saturday Silicon Valley, covering a wide range of topics from building a voice-controlled SharePoint add-in to creating fast apps using AngularJS and Delve Organizational Analytics. Download the speaker presentations here.

SPH Saturday events are held around the world every month. To find an event near you, visit the site.