At this month’s Future of SharePoint event, Jeff Teper announced several exciting changes to the SharePoint roadmap. This is all welcome news for a platform whose public momentum has slowed in recent years.

End-User Announcements

First and foremost, SharePoint will soon have a first-class app on iOS, Android, and Windows phone devices. Mobile SharePoint has usually been a frustrating experience due to unfriendly default interfaces, poorly-designed customizations, and frustrating authentication. Microsoft is eliminating many of those barriers by making lists, libraries, users, search, and Delve features available from a single-click on any device. I’m looking forward to testing it in the next month.

SharePoint is also getting a new homepage in Office 365. The new look closely aligns with Delve, showing your most frequently-accessed team sites in a clean tile-based interface. This might not be a welcome change for highly-branded intranets, but it will be an intuitive default for new users.

There are also new templates for team sites and document libraries, which have been controversial. Overall, the new team site design looks modern, flexible, and responsive for mobile devices. This was one of many templates sorely in need of a refresh, so it’s nice to see Microsoft revisiting user experience around the core SharePoint building blocks.

While each of those updates is great news for end-users, developers will be most excited about the new development model named “SharePoint Framework”.

Allcloud is proud that we were selected for the very first “wave” of the HoloLens developer program.

For the past month, we’ve been testing, developing for, and playing with the HoloLens Development Edition. Augmented Reality is amazing and we’re excited about the possibilities for both consumers and businesses.

Allcloud is hard at work on our first HoloLens app, which will streamline home and facilities maintenance. We’re also prototyping an immersive augmented reality app to teach music.

Microsoft continues to evolve its Office 365 platform with remarkable speed and transparency. One of my favorite aspects of the platform is that they listen to customer feedback and provide an honest look of what’s changed, what’s planned, and what’s cancelled.

Check out the Microsoft Office 365 Roadmap.

They divide updates into categories of “Launched”, “Rolling Out” (to early release members), “In Development”, “Cancelled” and “Previously Released”. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights in May 2016.