| Timeline |
Release |
Feature |
Notes by author / ClearPeople |
Soon
(expected before 31 Dec 2019) |
n/a |
Microsoft Search: Public previews of search connectors |
The search connectors will be a fundamental part of the process of gathering knowledge from external data silos, such as a CRM system a specialised people database, a CV database or a legacy document management system. |
Soon
(expected before 31 Dec 2019) |
n/a |
Microsoft Search: Search extensibility with custom search results page, query alterations |
Allowing customers and suppliers to create bespoke search results pages relevant to the organisation. For ClearPeople this of course includes the ability to update Atlas search results features in line with the Project Cortex and Search roadmap. |
Soon
(expected before 31 Dec 2019) |
n/a |
MMS/Taxonomy: Modern Managed Metadata number of Terms boundary increased to 1 million |
This is an important increase for org taking taxonomy seriously. Current service boundary limits are 200,000 terms across the Term Store (1,000 global term sets and 1,000 groups)
|
| Early 2020 (expected 19 May) |
v1 |
MMS/Taxonomy: Modern MMS admin UX |
This is a very welcome item on the roadmap as the current MMS Admin UX has not had any updates since its introduction with SharePoint 2010. |
| Early 2020 (expected 19 May) |
v1 |
MMS/Taxonomy: Microsoft 365 suite wide experiences for taxonomy management, improved end user controls, term store usage analytics. |
For any organisations that take tagging (and taxonomy) seriously, this will be a very welcome new feature (and has been a major omission). It will be interesting to follow this roadmap item to understand exactly what is within scope. For example, we would like to see the ability to tag a Team or a Channel against a term in the MMS term store. |
| Early 2020 (expected 19 May) |
v1 |
MMS/Taxonomy: Improved enterprise content type creation & management |
From an IA (Information Architecture) this one has big implications. Again, like with MMS, Content Type management for enterprise scenarios has been a neglected feature ever since the Content Type Hub was introduced. For our Atlas users, it may (hopefully) mean we can incorporate more use of centrally controlled content types. Imagine a Content Type called "Standard Agreement" from which other Agreement content types inherit. We are hoping that Microsoft are maturing the ability to centrally add, update, remove columns and settings, which in this example would mean that if you add a new column (e.g. Agreement Date), it gets pushed out to all libraries using a content type inheriting from Standard Agreements. Effectively this has been possibly for years - but relying on a very temperamental Content Type syndication service. |
| Early 2020 (expected 19 May) |
v1 |
Topic cards & pages: Mining of knowledge, topic card in search, feedback of knowledge system, knowledge focused web parts, compliance with info barriers |
Until I know more, I am thinking of the Topic Cards and Topic Pages, as the "visible end result" of the mining process. Manual curation may improve the content/accuracy, but in effect the Topic Cards are intended to appear when hovering over a highlighted topic, and clicking through takes you to the full topic page. |
| Early 2020 (expected 19 May) |
v1 |
Content understanding: Content center, including forms processing with AI Builder + custom PowerAutomate template, Machine Teaching, smart ingestion of PDFs and better OCR |
The Content Center appears to be like the "catch all" area for a range of the Project Cortex features for the "power user". This is the default go-to location for creating the AI models with the new AI Builder (e.g. to create the intelligent rules for forms processing) and Power Automate. Machine Teaching is really one of the new key capabilities that should get far more headlines. It changes the game when it comes to building models - as you can work off a far smaller set of data, and therefore making it much more relevant for the Knowledge Manager role. Machine Learning on the other had is incredibly powerful, but only when you have far larger data volumes and the capabilities to build data models and training data sets, which in turn requires data scientists and domain experts. |
| Early 2020 (expected 19 May) |
v1 |
Microsoft Search: Classic Sites get Microsoft Search |
For us, and for many organisations that have been using Office 365 for a while, this is a welcome piece of news.The reason is that a lot of work, effort and investment has been put into "classic" SharePoint sites with a lot of valuable content and features residing there. Our digital workspace solution, Atlas, straddles both the modern and the classic experience, to allow organisations to leverage these investments for the foreseeable future. With this announcement from Microsoft it will give some comfort that the modern Microsoft search experience can be extended across the SharePoint Online experience whether in Classic or Modern mode. |
| Early 2020 (expected 19 May) |
v1 |
Microsoft Search: Scoping controls in search box |
|
| Early 2020 (expected 19 May) |
v1 |
Microsoft Search: Custom query suggestions |
|
| Early 2020 (expected 19 May) |
v1 |
Microsoft Search: Video vertical (Stream +ODSP) |
All I can say here is... "thank you, it's about time". Streams is an incredibly powerful (but underused) Office 365 feature. Part of the reason for it being underused has been the inability to surface the content in Streams up into search results (and search based web parts). The amazing thing here is that Streams already transcribes the audio - meaning you are able to search withing the spoken content of a video. |
| Early 2020 (expected 19 May) |
v1 |
Microsoft Search:
Conversations vertical |
|
| Early 2020 (expected 19 May) |
v1 |
Microsoft Search: Video & audio transcription including within Microsoft Word |
|
| TBD |
v2 |
Topic cards & pages:
Further Microsoft 365 integration, more topic types, mapping across metadata types, increase scope of sources including taxonomy and machine teaching |
|
| TBD |
v2 |
Enhanced business process automation in content center |
|
| TBD |
v2 |
File viewers and annotation, deeper integration with information protection e.g. Auto-classification use of retention label |
|
| TBD |
v2 |
3rd Party Extensibility and APIs |
This is really an exciting development that has been going on for a little while and which Microsoft has finally revealed more officially. At Ignite 2019 it was really good to see Yusuf Mehdi promote more than 100 3rd parties were announced for search extensions and APIs. |
| TBD |
v2 |
Smart document creation & generation |
|
| TBD |
v2 |
Microsoft Search:
Advanced search & extensibility, including Azure Search integration, better use of metadata and attaching workflow to metadata
|
|
