SharePoint / Office 365 innovations

Sharepoint hosted by Microsoft Office 365 continues to get more features with a few indicating changes coming to broader Office products.

Changed Opening Pane

The Office.com pane is changing with a ‘Recommended’ section that lists items that Microsoft’s Artificial Intelligence thinks you should see.  Discover shows documents other staff are working on, including new documents you might not be aware of.

Source: Microsoft

Better Image capabilities

Microsoft has been developing image ‘intelligence’ for some time.  At first it was OCR, reading text in images which has been in OneNote for many years.  These days it’s all cloud based and includes identifying content in images.  Office 2016 for Windows/Office 365 can insert alternate text for images based on a cloud analysis, with very mixed success.

Despite problems with the image service, its being pushed into a wider range of Microsoft offerings.  The text recognition can be very useful.  SharePoint is getting the ability to search images for text (which OneNote has done for years).

Source: Microsoft

See Microsoft’s blog post for their SharePoint Virtual Conference.