Microsoft’s annual gathering of tech leaders and practitioners was delivered as a digital event last week. There was a lot of news - so much that it was compiled in a digital Book of News. In this post, I focus on a few of my favorite announcements for communicators and intranet managers.

Global navigation has long been tops on my wish list for modern SharePoint intranets. My favorite announcement at Ignite 2020 involved the new SharePoint app bar (aka, global navigation). The SharePoint app bar is configured in the Home site. It allows you to take the navigation on your home site and bring it to a narrow left rail that persists everywhere in SharePoint.

The app bar includes a link back to your Home site, a link that shows your list of recent and frequent sites, and a link to news from sites you follow and sites recommended for you. This is like what you get on the SharePoint start page – but instead of another destination, it follows you around and can pop out whenever you need it – exactly what we want for global navigation. You will need a Home site to take advantage of the SharePoint app bar.

To learn more and see how it can be configured, check out this Ignite video: Architecting your intelligent intranet with SharePoint global navigation, hubs, and site designs. The SharePoint app bar should be available by the end of 2020 – along with the long awaited feature announced at Ignite 2019, associated hubs.

The SharePoint app bar brings your Home site navigation to all SharePoint sites.

Intranets can only engage and delight if they are used. Bringing them to where people are working ensures that this will happen. We’ve already got a great mobile experience for SharePoint, but I’ve really wanted to bring the intranet into Teams – especially once the Communities app for Yammer in Teams became available. If you want to bring a SharePoint page into Teams today, you can, but if you bring in your intranet home page, you lose the navigation experience – which makes the current integration great for pages, not great for sites.

This is why I am so excited about the home site app for Teams. This app brings your home site and the best of your intranet to Teams! Sites built on modern SharePoint will render inside Teams itself. And the app makes it easy to share and discuss content from intranet sites in Teams channels and chat.

The home site app isn’t an intranet built in Teams – it’s an intranet built in SharePoint and delivered in Teams. You still need good governance, content management, and information architecture – but now the intranet doesn’t have to only be a destination, it can come to you where you are. The idea is to create integrated experiences – at the right time, in the right app, on the right device.

The home site app for Teams brings your intranet to Teams.

Communications professionals got a lot of love at Ignite 2020. The page scheduling feature is rolling out now, which allows you to schedule when a page or news article will go live. But other great news features are on the way soon!

The auto-news digest sends a personalized digest to everyone in the organization – only showing news they haven’t read.

This year, there were some very exciting announcements about new web parts for SharePoint pages. Be sure to take a look at this video: How to Author Dynamic Intranet Pages and News: Tips and Tricks from the Product Team to see how they work in action. These are all targeted for October/November 2020.

You may have noticed that the sites in the screenshots above look like they have images in the header area. They do – and we’re all going to be able to apply new layouts for the header area of SharePoint sites. The new extended header allows you to add a background image to header areas and move the logo to different places in the header. And, if you don’t want a long header on your site, you can apply the minimal header to bring the visual focus more on the content area of the pages in your site. There are some great tips about planning your site header in this video: Build a beautifully designed intranet: tips and tricks.

The extended and minimal header updates are expected to be launched by the end of 2020.

A great way to see examples of the “art of the possible” with modern SharePoint is to explore the amazing collection in the SharePoint lookbook. Another great announcement at Ignite was that you will soon be able to instantly apply a selection of lookbook-inspired design templates on any site – providing the ability to give a new or existing site a makeover. Site templates are also scheduled to be available by the end of 2020.

This post could easily be a lot longer if I added all the other announcements that have me really excited about what’s to come for intranets and modern SharePoint. There are major announcements for search (check out the 24-page blog post about Microsoft Search updates!), Yammer, and Microsoft Stream that will all come together to help organizations create and update their intranets to improve value and engagement. To help understand the timing of all of the various announcements, I’ve done my best to collect all the roadmap slides from Ignite 2020 and put them on one handy slide deck.

I know  Microsoft is working on a better summary; when that arrives, I’ll update my collection – so keep the link handy! To learn more about what was announced, check out this list of key Ignite 2020 intranet sessions available on demand: