At the SharePoint Conference 2019 in Las Vegas, Jeff Teper (Corporate Vice President Office 365) presented several innovations around the SharePoint and Microsoft 365 platform. Among the expected new announcements were the SharePoint Home Sites and the cross-platform search function Microsoft Search.
The SharePoint Conference 2019 was generally dedicated to the changing world of work. According to Microsoft, desk workers now spend around 80% of their time working with others, in twice as many different teams as 10 years ago. Work continues to evolve: from working in cubicles to open co-working environments and from work environments where individual performance counts to rewarding team success. Meanwhile more than 500,000 customers worldwide use Microsoft 365 (incl. SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Yammer etc.) with approximately 180 million active users.
Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jeff Teper presented some innovations of Office 365 and the SharePoint platform in particular. Among the new features were the "SharePoint Home Sites", a special version of the already well-known "Communication Sites". In Home Sites, various information elements and sources can be personalized and combined and used via a Megamenu navigation and the also newly introduced "Microsoft" search function.
The above-mentioned "Microsoft Search" unifies the search experience across the various Microsoft platforms and also opens up new, AI-supported search options, such as text search in images or videos, or also in PDFs.
The new Microsoft SharePoint Home-Sites. CYCL supports the new features and goes one step further, for example in multi-language support, multi-hub concept, parameterization and governance.
Since its introduction, MatchPoint's Turn-Key Intranet for Office 365 has acted as a hub for working intelligently in our ever-changing digital world, building on Microsoft Office 365. MatchPoint Intranets help companies transform digitally and culturally by uniquely facilitating collaboration, making employees more productive, involving them in communications and engaging in dialogue. Microsoft provides the powerful platform, CYCL the solution with MatchPoint.
"The new SharePoint Home Sites are the best proof that we were right with our search-based aggregation intranet concept when we first launched it 6 years ago with MatchPoint Snow".
Patrick Püntener, CEO of CYCL, adds: "The intelligent intranet primarily connects people with information. Individual components, as presented last week by Microsoft at the SharePoint Conference, in honor, but for this to work really well, it needs a sophisticated interaction of different components, a coherent information architecture and consistent parameterization. This is reflected in our more than 10 years of experience and the more than 500 intranets that we have been able to implement for enterprise customers and SMEs to date".
It goes without saying that the CYCL products "MatchPoint Hub", "Condense", the new "MatchPoint Provisioning Service", the "MatchPoint Governance Service" and the "MatchPoint Context Service" announced for summer 2019 support the new SharePoint functions such as "Home Sites" and "Microsoft Search". Some of the highlights of this support at a glance:
The MatchPoint Search Experience is now based on Microsoft Search. This allows you to benefit from even better search results and possibilities thanks to AI support, e.g. image and video content can now also be searched. The new integration offers the familiar, intuitive user experience with different views for content, workspaces (including teams) and people, our popular filter panel and clear search results with preview and contact information (in the people search).
CYCL publishes regurarly Release-Notes of MatchPoint and Condense.
As always, when Microsoft announces major enhancements, there is a rumour that value-adding products will "no longer be needed". This may be the case for simple add-ons with narrow functionality. But with a turnkey solution like MatchPoint, actually the opposite is true: with each new SharePoint release, the functionality of MatchPoint has doubled. That makes sense, because every new basic function that Microsoft brings to the Office 365 platform can be transformed into a multitude of new solutions to better meet the ever-growing needs of users. Thus the Make (=Intranet with out-of-the-box functionality, that requires development by yourself) vs. Buy (=Turnkey Intranet, Intranet-in-a-box, already 90-100% finished) question arises. The advantages of a turnkey intranet are obvious:
