Archive: 2020 Release Notes

Archive: 2020 Release Notes

Change the text appearing in FAQ header

Change the text appearing in FAQ header. You can now repurpose the FAQ app to have a list of resources with their own topic. You can also have several FAQ’s on the same site connected to their own respective lists.
More details: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) App
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Resize the SharePoint logo

Resize the SharePoint logo to the desired height by overriding the default size set by SharePoint. by using the [OverrideLogoHeight] parameter in the Config list on the hub site.
More details: Hiding and Updating SharePoint site header

Embed custom script

Embed custom script into the [Head] and [Body] of your SharePoint pages.
This will allow you to integrate with 3rd party apps, analytics, and performance tracking software.
More details: Embed custom script in to your SharePoint pages

Info Directory results can now be sorted alphabetically

Info Directory results can now be sorted alphabetically by the title of the item. This option can be enabled from the Info Directory web part property:
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When the setting is OFF, the results will be sorted by relevance.
More details: Info Directory app (Templates & Samples / Policies & Procedures)

Idea Directory improvements

Idea Directory will now have a property toggle to switch On/Off the [New]/[Top]/[Latest] buttons.
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When set to is OFF, the control buttons will not be displayed.
This will make the app better suited for right-hand sidebar:


More details: Idea Directory, Crowdsourcing/ Staff bulletin board in SharePoint

Refine Info Directory tags

You can now limit which tags will show for users to refine on. This allows you to quickly remove obsolete forms and items. This will also allow you to split items into sub-categories.
More: Info Directory app (Templates & Samples / Policies & Procedures)
Details in section: Limiting which tags show for users to refine on

Multiple Info Directory apps

You can now have more than one Info Directory app on the page connected to its own directory list
More: Info Directory app (Templates & Samples / Policies & Procedures)
Details in section: Advanced: Two (or more) separate directories on one page

Info Directory item limit

Limit who can access which item in the directory one-by-one or in bulk.
More: Info Directory app (Templates & Samples / Policies & Procedures)
Details in section: Advanced: Limiting permissions on items in the directory

News targeting

You can now choose to target your news carousel items on the home page to user properties available in the user profile service.
More: Featured News & Events (legacy)
Details in section: Advanced: Initial setup of targeting of news items based on the specific user profile property

Idea directory social stats display

Hide or show social stats (Likes and Comments) in Idea Directory posts by using the [Disable Social Stats] option. Here is an example with social stats OFF and ON.
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Shout outs UI improvements

Stack shout outs horizontally (which you can now) and vertically (which is available with this release)

Clickable banners

Banners are now clickable if you need them to be, just specify the URL in the banner app properties:
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Optional Featured News

Featured news description is now optional. Before this update, if the news didn’t have a description and were set as [Featured] news - the new carousel app would not display them.

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Wildcard search in Info Directory

Forms and Info directory will now search for partial matches and wildcard keyword matches. Before this update, full words were matched.

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People Directory custom refiners

People Directory will now let you refine users with custom properties. Before this update, you could only refine users by hardcoded Department or Location property.

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With this update, you can choose any user profile properties available in your User Profile Service Application in SharePoint or Office 365 and associate these properties to existing RefinableString (managed search property).

You can set these refinable properties in the People Directory like this:
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Check out more details on how to set this up: People Directory
Scroll to this section: Advanced: Adding custom refiners to group users by

News Carousel news management

News Carousel (aka the News Header web part) will now recognize if you have permissions to Add/Edit pages on the site. If you do, the [View All News] button will be replaced with [Manage All News] for only those users with the Add/Edit permissions.

From here you will be redirected to News Publication Dashboard where you can:

  • See all posts, where they show, scheduled date, and who are they targeted to
  • Create a new post
  • Publish, Archive, and Delete any post
  • Set posts as Featured or Carousel

SharePoint News Dashboard

Check out more details on how this works here: Featured News & Events (legacy)

Custom quick links for News Carousel

For better accessibility, the News Carousel and Quick Links web parts now have a new property called [Quick Link Text Size]
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This property allows you to set the font size of the text in Quick Link. Here are the examples:

People Directory enhancements

People Directory is now a bit more intuitive with these few enhancements:

  • Staff names are now being sorted by First Name (instead of the Last Name)
  • The contents of refiners are sorted in alphabetical order.
Info Directory improvements to metadata management

Info Directory will now display items that have metadata missing. This applies to customers who bulk imported the Info Directory content and were not seeing results with missing metadata.