I'm sure many of you have listened to the Intrazone's December 2018 Roadmap Pitstop podcast by now and if you haven't I highly recommend doing so, it does a great job talking about what's to SharePoint online in the coming months. But I wanted to take some time to talk about the one thing that I am most excited about in early 2019 - Page Designs.
For those that don't know Page Designs are basically Page Layouts or a Page Template for the Modern UI, you can set a standard look and feel for all of the content on a page including webparts and placeholder content. More information here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?featureid=33136&rtc=1
So why am I excited about this? News and articles. From what I've seen at our clients news is one of the biggest reasons they do not want to move to the Modern UI since there is currently not a way to standardized the look and feel of a page. Yes Modern allows you to easily create and publish news, but if you have multiple people creating news with varying levels of O365 know-how, you can have some articles that are a single block of text while others include webparts that pull in related content, have images placed throughout the page, include a stream video, or a form for some feedback.
So while these customizations are great at facilitating user engagement with news, and having just a body of text does get the point across, it goes against the typical client request to have a standardized page with an image, the body text, and then maybe using search pull in recent news articles and/or related news articles onto the page causing them to choose the Classic UI over Modern.
With Page Designs now all of this is possible and you still allow for the latter option of a user getting creative with their news in those one off instances. By creating that standardized look and feel to a page you can bring unity to your intranet and create the best user experience for the end users and content creators. I feel like this will allow us to clear a major roadblock we see and hear and get more people utilizing the Modern UI.
For those that don't know Page Designs are basically Page Layouts or a Page Template for the Modern UI, you can set a standard look and feel for all of the content on a page including webparts and placeholder content. More information here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?featureid=33136&rtc=1
So why am I excited about this? News and articles. From what I've seen at our clients news is one of the biggest reasons they do not want to move to the Modern UI since there is currently not a way to standardized the look and feel of a page. Yes Modern allows you to easily create and publish news, but if you have multiple people creating news with varying levels of O365 know-how, you can have some articles that are a single block of text while others include webparts that pull in related content, have images placed throughout the page, include a stream video, or a form for some feedback.
So while these customizations are great at facilitating user engagement with news, and having just a body of text does get the point across, it goes against the typical client request to have a standardized page with an image, the body text, and then maybe using search pull in recent news articles and/or related news articles onto the page causing them to choose the Classic UI over Modern.
With Page Designs now all of this is possible and you still allow for the latter option of a user getting creative with their news in those one off instances. By creating that standardized look and feel to a page you can bring unity to your intranet and create the best user experience for the end users and content creators. I feel like this will allow us to clear a major roadblock we see and hear and get more people utilizing the Modern UI.
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