Developers and users of Microsoft’s SharePoint web-based collaboration and document management platform can now choose from a wide range of additional new and updated SharePoint web parts that can be used to communicate information within businesses and to customers and partners.
The latest web parts were announced in a Dec. 18 post by Mark Kashman, a senior product manager for the SharePoint team, on the SharePoint Blog.
“SharePoint web parts in Office 365 are the building blocks of your pages and sites—as you create, broadcast and engage others with content and information throughout your modern, intelligent intranet,” wrote Kashman. “Today, we mark the roll out of several new and updated SharePoint web parts—with significant updates from Yammer Conversations, personalized web parts, and YouTube embed.”
In Yammer Conversations, a new Yammer conversations web part provides a fully interactive Yammer experience directly in SharePoint, wrote Kashman. Users can now integrate conversations from any Yammer group, topic, user or home feed into any SharePoint page, news article or site with the latest web part.
Another new web part is the My Recent Documents tool, which has been the most often requested of the new personalized web parts, according to Kashman. “It enables you to add a personalized experience to your site for your page visitors—so they see the content that is theirs and meant for them to experience. When using personalized web parts, people will see their recent sites, their recent documents and news tailored for them” through personalized pages or news articles. “When you add this personalized web part to the page, it is aware of who is signed in and gives them a unique, relevant experience to the content and information you are promoting to them.”
Also new is the My Frequent Sites web part, which allows users to show a relevant list of frequent sites to the current user—showing them their frequently accessed SharePoint sites. “This is the same list as one would see on the SharePoint home in Office 365 and can be added to any home page, subpage or news article,” wrote Kashman.
Other SharePoint web parts updates include:
- Microsoft Stream now allows sorting choices for videos such as publish date, views and likes, while new mobile embedded playback capabilities are now available within the Android and iOS apps.
- YouTube videos can now be embedded right into the SharePoint content by pasting the share link provided by YouTube. A YouTube icon has been added to make this more apparent in the page authoring toolbox, wrote Kashman.
- A new countdown timer now allows site owners and members to communicate and show important launch dates, key meetings, campaign milestones and other information on site home pages, within subpages and/or within a news article on team and other sites.
- The quick chart component has been updated to allow users to select a list on a current site to be used as the data source instead of manually entering the data in the web part edit pane.
- The code snippet web part allows developers to properly share code snippets—with correct syntax—for many common development languages. Users can also switch between Light theme and Dark theme using the tool.
- The markdown web part is a plain text formatting syntax for authors that allows users to add markdown text into SharePoint and have it converted into clean, structured HTML.
More details on using web parts can be found on the SharePoint Online pages.