A few weeks ago and before a much-needed vacation, I attended the SharePoint Conference North America. Before I head to Microsoft Inspire, let me update you on what I've learned about SharePoint 2019.

SharePoint 2019

SharePoint on-premise is not dead yet and to prove it Microsoft announced the release date and the features that will be included. Expect it to align closer to the SharePoint Online available today with these features:

• Modern Team Sites
• Modern Community Sites
• Modern Lists and Libraries
• SPFx Web Parts
• SPFx Extensions
• One Drive Sync Client
• Improved Hybrid Support
• Improved support for PowerApps and Flow

You can read even more details about SharePoint 2019, here.

SharePoint Spaces

SharePoint Spaces was the announcement no one was expecting, and it brings SharePoint 2019 to the mixed reality. SharePoint Spaces will allow non-developer users to easily build mixed reality spaces that interact with SharePoint data. SharePoint Spaces will work from the computer browser directly or with the use of VR headsets. In the SPNA keynote demo, we saw the display of a product line stored on SharePoint using a SharePoint Space.

If you want to be one of the first to get your hands on Microsoft SharePoint Spaces apply here.

Enhanced Modern Lists

Lists are one of the main functionalities used in SharePoint and Microsoft is adding AI to SharePoint 2019 to improve the user’s productivity. Announced during the conference and available later this year, enhanced Modern Lists feature:

• Creation Lists based on Excel templates
• Real Time List Updates – no need to refresh the browser to see data updates
• Row Formatting – An update to the column formatting introduced last year

More information about the new features included in Modern Lists is available here.

New Functionalities for Modern Pages

Modern pages continue to evolve and during this year we will see some useful new features, namely:

• Page Tagging - Through the use of metadata, it will be possible to target pages to different audiences based on the language, location and more
• App Pages - Finally the full-width page will be released and developers will have access to the entire page to develop web parts and extensions
• New areas for Application Customizer extensions
• Option to remove the vertical navigation on Team Sites

New Web Parts

The default gallery of web parts continues to grow and a few more were announced during the SharePoint Conference:

• Weather web part – Configurable to show weather information
• Image web part: text on image – Enhance your images with hyperlinks and allow authors to overlay text on images.
• Document library and lists web part updates – It’s even easier to engage with documents and lists on a modern page with tile view and drag-and-drop upload. You can also customize column and row formatting.
• Stream updates – No matter where you view a news article or page, you can expect that videos playing from Stream will look and playback beautifully – even when you are viewing them within the SharePoint mobile app. There, too, are channel improvements to help view and playback a complete set of videos in the context of your site or news article.

PnP Starter Kit

The PnP starter kit was developed to showcase the potential of modern sites and it includes a few web parts and extensions that take advantage of everything that was released so far for Modern SharePoint. It also makes use of the PnP Provisioning engine to deploy the solution to SharePoint.

This is a good starting point for developers to learn everything related to the modern SharePoint and PnP.

To use the solution, follow this link.

SharePoint Hit Refresh

During the last months and following in the footsteps Satya Nadella outlined in his book Hit Refresh, Jeff Teper published the fourth and last article about Hitting Refresh on SharePoint.

The four articles provide a unique perspective of the SharePoint evolution over the years, if you haven’t read them yet, I leave you with the links to the four articles below.

• Hitting Refresh on SharePoint and More, Part 1
• Hitting Refresh on SharePoint and More, Part 2
• Hitting Refresh on SharePoint and More, Part 3
• Hitting Refresh on SharePoint and More, Part 4

Conclusion

SharePoint doesn’t stop, and its growth is incredible with more and more features being released. The SharePoint North America Conference 2018 was the landmark for the arrival of AI to SharePoint 2019. You can find more detailed information about new features and insights below:

• What's new for your intranet in Office 365
  by Mark Kashman
• SharePoint innovations transform content collaboration with mixed reality and AI
  by Jeff Teper
• SharePoint Virtual Summit 2018 - SPC 2018