Bring on 2020!

This is my final post of 2019 so I would first of all like to thank everyone who has visited my blog over the last year. Whilst I'm not an "influencer", maybe if I start vlogging every aspect of my daily life, I know that I've helped a number of people out there, and that makes this whole thing so worthwhile!

Below are some of the areas that I'm looking forward to seeing improved, or areas that I'm looking to explore myself. This isn't an exhaustive list, as that would take me until next year to finish writing.

Microsoft Teams

I have always had a love for Microsoft Teams, but there are a number of key things that are either confirmed as coming, or I really hope are coming in 2020. The first is the ability for Teams to be able to isolate the voice of the person speaking during a meeting so that all background noise is removed. If we combine this with the image blur, this is increasing the privacy of calls to an excellent level.

Following on from this, I'm also looking forward to the ability for Teams to put a custom background behind me. My Death Start hangar picture has been waiting since this was first announced!

What I really really want though, is for the full SharePoint experience to be implemented in Teams. I've seen it demonstrated a number of times from various people, and really want it to be rolled out! This will be a huge good news story if this comes sooner in 2020 rather than later.

Power Automate

Power Automate is going from strength to strength at the moment, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how this continues to evolve over the coming year. At the end of this year we were given UI Flows, introducing elements of Robotic Process Automation so that even old Win32 forms can still be included in our automations. Whilst I've not done much with this yet, I anticipate a lot of good things in this area.

I also believe that there will be much more leveraged with the AI Builder as at the moment we are really only scratching the surface of the AI services available within Azure.

Power Apps

The main thing I can shout about here, is Components! Come on Microsoft, make them GA! But on a side note, I'm looking forward to seeing the relationship between PowerApps and SharePoint becoming even stronger. What I really want to see rolled out is the ability to create a PowerApps form to modify the metadata for documents in a library.

SharePoint

The biggest area of interest for me in the coming year will be the search customisations available within SharePoint Online. In classic SharePoint we could place search web parts into our pages to augment the out-of-the-box, and the community have asked for this time and again. Luckily the PnP Team have answered our prayers so we can start to implement this functionality, and this will be a good solution until Microsoft fully include these web parts as part of their standard offering.

2019 has been a good year for Microsoft, and I think 2020 is going to be even better!

Merry Christmas everyone, and have a great New Year!!