The SharePoint Conference has kicked off in Vegas, here’s the highlights from the keynote.

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SharePoint is going nowhere! Yay!

The father of SharePoint himself – Jeff Tepper. Did you know it’s been 20 years since he built the first SharePoint server under a desk in Microsoft? Now there are 54 data centres, 28 regions and 180 000 servers hosting it! WOW! Glad to know I backed the right horse on this one. Microsoft are investing in SharePoint for the long-term. Nice. Jeff also mentioned that the need for the SharePoint community to translate technology to business is greater than ever before. We agree. (Jeff even gave us some book love recently).

It’s also the 10th anniversary of Women in SharePoint. Nice one Cathy!

In tech updates, you can now view proper metadata straight from Teams.

And use the “files that need attention” view to find missing metadata.

You can also now get a fullscreen view of lists in Teams – oh pleeeeeaaase can we have that directly in SharePoint too, pretty please.

And very cool instant formatting of imported spreadsheets!

Glad to see some focus on governance, you know how I’m always harping on about that. You can set tenant-wide settings on how long external users can access the links sent to them.

All the features from the classic SharePoint Admin centre are now available in modern, so you don’t have to switch between them anymore.

And in BIG news! We can finally change site URL names! Yay!!! And not only that, you can change the URL and site name at the same time, or not. AND more importantly, all links to the original name will be automatically rerouted to the new link, no matter where they are. Awesome!

There is a new site template called a SharePoint Home Site. It will allow us to make striking intranet home pages that are mobile friendly and super smart.

We can also now add a link to the suite bar to the main organisational site, which will be accessible from anywhere in Office365.

Stream videos will let us embed polls, forms, quizzes and surveys directly into the videos, cool!

Search is getting a big overhaul. We’ve never had a search result fail us, so don’t know how it can get any better, but better it will be – and search multiple platforms.

Search also gets its own admin centre where you can add bookmarks and things, nice. Time to get those important docs at the top of the search results.

There’s also still a big focus on AI, machine learning and teaching. … Still can’t help thinking about The Terminator every time this comes up. 😀

Microsoft have created a zooty SharePoint engagement video they feel replaces the SharePoint Lookbook. I think the Lookbook is far more valuable, but the video is kinda cool, link is below the image.

And finally, I was really pleased to hear Jeff say that it’s really important that we don’t forget the aspect of change management and adoption and invest in these things. We could not agree more.

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If you’re in Vegas at the conference, have a ball.