Our Favorite Releases From 2020
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Hub Site Improvements
In 2020, Hub Sites gained the ability to sync permissions to the associated sites. The first step is to enable syncing permissions on the hub-site (located in Site Permissions under a Hub tab) which will add the Hub Site Site Visitors group to all associated sites. Next, in the associated site, under Site Permissions toggle Sync hub permissions to “On.”
As far as “hub of hubs” or “associated hubs,” this has not shipped yet and the date keeps moving but it is on the roadmap for this quarter.
SharePoint News & Communications
There were a lot of improvements to SharePoint News this year starting with the option to add stock images provided by Microsoft. This reduces the trouble of finding licensed images, images of the right size, etc. It is a huge benefit for site owners and smaller organizations without a corporate communications team developing imagery for the intranet.
Page scheduling was released this year providing more freedom and flexibility to different site owners. No need to set that alarm to remember to publish a page anymore! Site Owners can set pages to be published at certain dates and times. This setting does have to be enabled in the Site Pages library first before using.
Audience targeting allows us to target content to only present what is relevant to our colleagues, making content more personal. This is available in site navigation, document libraries, on pages, and in the Highlighted Content and News web parts. Coming in 2021, it will also be available in the Quick Links and Events web parts.
Microsoft Lists
Microsoft lists are now both a separate thing and still SharePoint lists. There are more improved List Templates to help get us started, as well as better experiences on non-desktop devices like mobile phones.
Task Management
Task Management is finally starting to be unified across solutions in Microsoft 365. Microsoft Teams now rolls up action items assigned to you from To Do and so everything can be viewed in one place. There still is no roll up across Planner plans for a project management view across projects. Coming in 2021, @mentions in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint will have the ability to be added as a task in To Do.