Microsoft Ignite 2022 took place last week and once again Microsoft delivered on all fronts when it comes to vision and excellence for businesses and users like you and I to improve how we work and adapt to the new world of hybrid workplaces by expanding their offering on the digital workplace.

My focus for this post is employee collaboration, so I will highlight a few things that caught my eye on with this lens, however, there were many other important announcements on other areas around Azure, Windows and others.

SharePoint goodness!

First off, the new set of features that improve on daily work on SharePoint and Teams continue to bring refinements to an already quite mature platform. For example, Ignite brought light to further enhancements to Microsoft Lists, providing deeper support to the lookup column type, packaging rules into both out of the box and custom list templates and Approvals integration. In addition, Lists are also supported in Android tablet devices and a new feature to create a list from CSV is also included.

On the video from, further refinements to match up with their previous offering were announced as well as the ability to present videos inline in the SharePoint Highlighted content web part on various layouts.

For Admins, one big highlight on the SharePoint side is the ability to control whether users can create sites in the org, an importan feature to improve your governance posture. In early 2023, SharePoint administrators will be able to create more than one home site (up to 10) which should enable larger organizations to provide tailored experiences for different business lines or subsidiaries.

To the Cloud!

For those still on premises, the SharePoint migration tool (SPMT) will support migrations from 2019 to SharePoint in Microsoft 365, coming in preview soon, and will be fully launched around mid 2023. A migration assessment tool will also provide insights to content and blockers when migrating from 2010, 2013, 2016 and 2019.

Also on the migration front, a new tool to migrate SharePoint 2010 and 2013 workflows to Power Automate will be integrated into SPMT.

Devs rejoice! Later this year, the new SharePoint Pages Graph API will allow you to manage and create news posts and SharePoint pages.

Soon in Teams

On the Microsoft Teams side, a new channel experience is in the works, frankly a welcome one as it brings the most recent conversations to the top, as well as the rich text editor, relieving users from constantly scrolling down. Yay!

On other fronts, the meeting experience will also be refined, specially for Teams on the web and will include improved pre-join, dynamic views and the updated control bar.

For template generation, sensitivity labels will be supported, improving the discovery of sensitive information in the organization.

A new Excel live feature allows meeting attendees to collaborate on an Excel worksheet live during the meeting, a welcome addition for collaboration!

Viva for Sales teams

On the Viva front, a new app for Sales teams, Microsoft Viva sales is released and will bring the CRM experience to teams with a more intelligent, AI based experience. I’ll have more on Viva and Syntex in future posts.

Closing Thoughts

As I was creating this post, I couldn’t help but think about the spot Microsoft is in as a leader in the market for employee collaboration. Frankly, no other platform comes close in terms of completeness of vision and execution. That said, Microsoft faces the challenge of continuing to find opportunities to bring value and balance it out with higher or premium SKUs. That said, I expect clients will need to be informed about the productivity and insights gained from implementing the newer and AI infused features around Viva and Purview.

One thing is certain, I’m excited and looking forward to helping clients implement these new and existing features!