SPCNA 2018 - The Next Great Migration - Classic to Modern
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As organizations have moved to Office 365, many - especially "legacy" SharePoint shops - have resisted the move to the "modern" UIs as much as possible. This is true for both end users and developers. We tend to stick with what we know, and historically the "modern" UIs may not have seemed compelling enough to make the switch. What this means is there is an impending "migration" on the horizon for many organizations which they may not realize is coming. While "classic" doesn't have a known retirement date, Microsoft's investments are in the "modern" UIs. As developers, what can we do to help facilitate organizational preparedness for this migration? This session will cover what it means to embrace the "modern" UIs and what you can do now to prepare. We'll cover such topics as: - What still doesn't exist in "modern" and might keep you in "classic" for the time being (a moving target!) - How to rethink your existing client-side solutions to be prepared for the SharePoint Framework (SPFx) - How to add functionality into list views using column formatting - Moving from "classic" team sites to "modern" team sites and what that means from a navigational and functional perspective
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SPCNA 2018 - The Next Great Migration - Classic to Modern
- 3. Marc D Anderson President, Sympraxis Consulting Co-Founder and President of Sympraxis Consulting LLC, located in the Boston suburb of Newton, MA, USA. Sympraxis focuses on enabling collaboration throughout the enterprise using the SharePoint application platform. Over 30 years of experience in technology professional services and software development. Over a wide-ranging career in consulting as well as line manager positions, Marc has proven himself as a problem solver and leader who can solve difficult technology problems for organizations across a wide variety of industries and organization sizes. Author of SPServices Awarded Microsoft MVP for SharePoint Server 2011-2018
- 7. Projects Project A Project B Project C Intranet Home Departments Offices
- 8. Projects Project A Project B Project C Intranet Home Departments Offices
- 9. Projects Project A Project B … Project M Intranet Home Departments Offices
- 10. Projects Project C Project D … Intranet Home Departments Offices
- 11. Projects Project C Project D … Project Z Intranet Home Departments Offices
- 12. Projects Project C Project D … Project Z Intranet Home Departments Offices
- 13. Projects Project C Project D … Project Z Intranet Home Departments Offices
- 14. Adapted from What is Modern SharePoint and Why Should I care? by Bob German
- 16. What's missing from "modern" SharePoint that's keeping you from moving from "classic"? Showstoppers or just old habits? https://twitter.com/sympmarc/status/996820552533803008 https://www.facebook.com/marc.d.anderson/posts/10211379026648280
- 17. What's missing from "modern" SharePoint that's keeping you from moving from "classic"? Showstoppers or just old habits? https://twitter.com/sympmarc/status/996820552533803008 https://www.facebook.com/marc.d.anderson/posts/10211379026648280 https://www.wordclouds.com/
- 35. What is Modern SharePoint and Why Should I care? Is It Time to Give Up SharePoint Classic Sites? Modernizing Your Approach to Site Architecture in SharePoint and Office 365 5 Simple Steps to Maximize SharePoint Usability – “Modernify” Your Classic SharePoint Sites
Editor's Notes
- Right now you may have some folks interested in "modern" capabilities, but not yet ready to do much
- Once people decide they want to move, though --- watch out!
- Production apps written in .net Robust Search Functionality Search extensibility has been the biggest headache for clients, but even that hasn’t made us suggest using classic on a project today. Of course document sets. "Full canvas apps" there in SPFx yet? It's not what it is missing, but is it bringing any benefit for casual user to even justify scratching the surface to find the show stoppers. Mostly resistance to change. if it isn’t broken do not try to fix it mentality. Also a its not ready yet and you cannot make the modern site customised to look like the existing sites. To me resistance is futile, deal with it now before there is a mad scramble to get off them. As for features I don’t think there is much, but certain branding features without going to SPFX coding like headers and footers, background image and font changes .need to be in the site designs / GUI Two more if I may add, Calendar view (overlays calendars) and Promoted links (it is modern but useless without a modern webpart) because of the ability to security trim the items / tiles Page layout templates for modern pages. Subsites?! I don't like search giving all suggestions in a library and then the "give more"-option only gives results from current view. How about publishing features? Search just isn’t there yet! Audience targeting in general will be nice, for web parts and hub site navigation. Publishing - fixed layouts / version control / check-in and checkout / metadata / Search aggregation controls / image renditions (with my *own* choice of crops and specific width and height!) Also, can't wait for custom metadata on modern site pages - I know it's on the way and will be so helpful! Disable comments on site pages at the site level. I'd also like to see links that are added to a document library work correctly when clicked from inside a document library web part on a modern page. Right now, it tries to download the link if you click it which is... bizarre... I haven't seen an equivalent for classic Blog site. This means: Posts + comments as a list (metadata, views, categories, possibility of alerts,..). Perhaps you could give your opinion on this issue? Actually - the question is a bit the wrong way around. What does "Modern" get me? It is half baked, you still have to switch to classic to get to the list and site settings Search Search search search Customer obsession with standardized page templates and content categorizing for faceted search (that nobody uses). This is despite the fact that the content authoring experience in classic is absolutely dire compared to modern. Feature parity & working. Multi select column as a drop down: once an item is selected it's impossible to unselect. Many app uninstall / remove / upgrade only work in classic. Feel free to quote me on that too... frankly, it's incredible to me that the only noticeable improvement we've seen to modern in the last 2 yrs was a control to switch between modern & classic... and that feature was announced with much fanfare! If that doesn't speak volumes about the problem, nothing else does. The whole "keep your hands on the keyboard" is broken. I did a video of how horrible the UI is with refreshes and lost focus. If you have MMS it is even worse. Yesterday I tried to "Group By" and the groups were totally wrong. (I haven't reported that yet because I cannot share a screen shot of the data. I need to repro it with fake data.) I can't imagine that it is accessible for the blind. "Column default value settings" does not work in modern. Have to switch to classic when uploading documents to the folders otherwise it doesn't set the values. I have 2 clients that have been getting errors when uploading files via the Modern view lately. The errors were not helpful at all in troubleshooting and I had to switch them back to the Classic view, just so they could upload files. Y'all have support tickets open for these issues, right? Oh and I've seen issues with thumbnails of images not showing up in modern views either especially with publishing image fields. I know I have encountered more issues too just not remembering what else they were and have gotten in the habit of switching back to classic when something isn't working in modern. Wait, I thought you just meant the Page creation experience, not just the back end (list view) stuff. Modern Pages >>>>>> Classic Publishing Infra. List-Driven web parts. All content is in the page. The missing link for the JSlink functionality. Search is a big one The missing JSLink is one that bugs me. My clients loved JSLink because it was easy for them to pick up and manage but are now frustrated that they have to migrate from JSLink to SharePoint Framework Extensions. column formatters in json? easier in a way than jslink imo Another is that so much requires a developer to still do. The provisioning story, templating, global header and footer Modern experience right now is not that bad actually we just build web part page like in SharePoint 2003 but other than that. It is fantastic right now. A proper search web part is the biggest loss in modern - but I finally started working on that. So I’ll say I’m rather fond of modern, it works pretty well.. but I would like to see proper markup with html5 tags for sections, h1 etc. That’s just being ignorant and lazy. Plus we can use one site collection for page layout (Meta Data on Page not actual layouts) I will say there are some features in modern list views that I do love such as the ability to hide/show columns without having to go to the view settings page. I hate teaching SharePoint Online end user classes now because the differences between classic and modern is very challenging for my students. Hence why I decided I just want to teach Power BI and PowerApps/Flow from now on But I do want the "Site Settings" menu back in the Site Actions menu. That one annoys me! - some form of page layout/template - metadata editing in page edit mode That's for intranet/publishing-type scenarios. For team sites, modern generally works great and the main thing that can be painful is: - lack of a timeline web part (like the old one that displays project tasks in a timeline format - popular for lightweight project management/reporting) more power for the Highlighted Content web part is needed too. Like the ability to fully specify the search query. Sure, you can write your own if you have SPFx skills. But you shouldn't need to for that.. Regarding modern vs classic sites: Many of my customers are using classic sites as their main site collection and then only using modern sites for large scale document management. The cons in modern sites outweigh the pros. Don't forget about a modern responsive behavior because right now most web part relies heavily on JavaScript resize functions, not media queries. Those are pretty slow. - Proper responsive component handling - proper image resize (no idea who built this but there are things missing and bugfix request is already issued) - App first not browser first approach - Heavy Page load The fact that “modern” SharePoint currently only exists in certain places We are locked into this uber critical barf inducing customisation we thought was a good idea back in the “classic” days. The partner that sold us it is long since out of business and we have no idea what it does, how it does it or why we ever asked for it We really, really like having core functionality hidden from users under three layers of “...”. We have found that preventing users from doing advanced things like opening and sharing documents significantly reduces IT support and training overhead We only just got done deploying SharePoint and training all our users where everything is and about all the quirks and best practices. Last week we had to recover a whole folder of important documents deleted by mistake. We can’t now just go through all that again and tell our users the previous training is now null and void. Plus we are using ECS to view excel workbooks in the browser We have no budget We are pissed at Microsoft and SharePoint. Three years ago we were told this was the greatest thing since sliced bread, now were being told we are old and need to modernise. We don’t like be treated like shit, so we are digging our heels in. A bad part of modern UI is that "Check In" is buried under 3 layers of "..." like Spence said. Standard doc management functionality hidden away! Overall page performance is terrible as soon as you have practical levels of content and or shared data. All the postbacks and lazyloading is not conducive to doc man scenarios. Far too much lag. Lack of rest APIs for core shared service scenarios. Utterly retarded “preview” views fall apart in a heap with large amounts of content. Poor use of screen real estate. No clear indication vendor is aware of just how much customers use metadata. Completely unfathomable site settings hierarchy Teams, groups, yammer, OneDrive, SharePoint, modern. HELP! We don’t think of it as a migration. We believe in not fixing what isn’t broken. We also believe in not spending money just because there is something new and shiny. We’ll continue to use classic where it meets our needs. For new developments we will assess modern and use it where it makes sense to do so If it’s so modern why do I need to hire a developer to do the things I want to like implementing simple workflows or custom views? We don’t yet really fully understand or embrace the evergreen SaaS / customisation hybrid. We were told SaaS was all about the 80/20 rule, now we are being told it’s also a development platform. Frankly we are a bit confused. At the same time we are worried that as things keep changing and improving, we are at risk of things breaking. We understand that Microsoft can afford to carry that risk, but we as a customer of SaaS cannot. We’ve heard rumours of incomplete APIs and performance issues with shared data. We aren’t that confident of our citizen developer capability. In short we are nervous. We love what we see with modern sites, but at the same time are afraid to jump in without a safety net. We have accessibility and multi lingual requirements that are not met, keyboard control, screen readers, right to left languages. Context controls are particularly challenging and usually require suboptimal workarounds Had a customer ask me to switch a whole tenant to classic because in a document library the Name column isn't expanded by default so you need to resize the column to read the full file name. I showed them that if you resize it the new width persists for the given user. They wanted to set that column display width explicitly for all users as they didn't want to train users to show everyone how to resize the Name column. They were from a business unit and requested IT Department switch back to classic. A battle ensued, IT department resisted, business unit won. They got the tenant entirely switched back to classic. Also it seems if you switch the tenant setting to classic individual users can't themselves switch to modern if they want modern. why should I need to do spfx development for thing like page headers and footers. Why can I not add a background or change the font yet? Too much white space. Space is important but sometimes you just want a little less between things. Column formatting as json... Some oob parts Don't work for guests. E.g. people and yammer parts. I disagree about the advanced pieces being more visible..user get confused by the array of options in the classic UI ribbon. Simple is very. Otherwise put in an advanced mode for those who need it. Getting odd inconsistent experiences between classic and modern. Page load speed. Why does a page load and then load the data behind it. Can that not be async. Why do I have to migrate data again to use with teams. Customer has architected site collections with multiple sub sites. Also they created customised lists as document libraries as part of provisioning back in 2p13 and if has all come across into SPO. So doc libs are all of type 80000 and not 101. Which means anything that uses a doc library app or teams, onedrive etc cannot find the content. Only solution migrate to new libraries That will be migration number 3 in 4 years. Get a lot of if it is not broke Don't try and fix it. And if you are going to do modern make sure the sites look and work 100% like the existing classic sites. Also make sure you can do custom jscript and css on the pages. Users already complain about the look and feel and how complicated existing sites are. Ability to just copy / move docs from outlook Grouped team sites why can we not reduce the permission levels. All locked to full control for owners and edit for members. Just like to tone that down a bit does not appear possible for entire site only other libraries etc disinherited permissions. Document Sets From a corporate intranet perspective - we can’t do the level of branding a customer wants. Sorry MS. Customers still want uniquely styled pages. From a collaboration perspective, love it (apart from all the issues already reported) From an ISV perspective - cross platform support. Our product supports 2013, 2016 (pre and post FP1). Publishing pages is the lowest common denominator and we ain’t building two separate products to do the same thing. For application we “have” used modern and SPFx and its works great, within its realms of limitations. STOP SPAWNING BROWSER TABS. with all the investments done in the past by Microsoft collaboration doesn’t uniquely is part of SharePoint anymore. What is left over is content aggregation, portals (team portals) and document storage which follows the same old collaboration of team sites paradigm. Communication site is different because it’s a team site that tries to be a publishing portal. Internal communicators love these sites as its dead easy for them to publish content and t does look great. But why would “Jack on the shop floor” go to a hub site or a communication site? He couldn’t care less about that content. He just wants to quickly get to a Hr site to raise a grievance or request holiday. Or quickly go to the IT site to report a broken phone or ask for a new laptop. The “communication” side of things is passive. That’s the stuff we expose them to while they are trying to achieve some task. If I could embed the components of a communication or hub site in their HR or IT Intranet department page, then we have a winner. Companies (and more importantly their users) still want a single place to go that lets them get to 80% of what they need to do. And that’s a completely different use case to collaboration. Delve does a great job here if surfacing my working content but not the policies, procedure and forms. Variations / multilanguage capabilities still missing ts interesting how many of the issues here are present both in classic and modern. this underlines the perhaps most important consideration. Modern is nice and all, but it's the underlying capability, not the skin which needs fixed most. it doesn't matter how many times Microsoft give (and heavily promote) a new skin, this will remain the case. Personally, I think SharePoint Online has really turned into a spaghetti junction of features and products. I like having multiple ways to accomplish a task, but there are TOO MANY ways to do things. It is confusing for end users and, frankly, confusing to me sometimes too. I had to tell customers to avoid OneDrive for years because of the major sync issues, but now it works so I'm trying to get customers to give it a try. Modern, Classic, Teams, Team Sites, OneDrive, Flow, PowerApps, etc...this is turning into the Android fragmentation issue. Microsoft needs to consolidate products and features. Did anyone already mention... web part connections? Of course, you can accomplish that same concept by building it as a PowerApps, so it's not as pressing anymore.
- Search Document Sets Needing devs to do things that were previously available via settings Existing investments in classic tech Corresponding modern Web Parts missing Still need to switch back to classic to make some things work Production apps written in .net Robust Search Functionality Search extensibility has been the biggest headache for clients, but even that hasn’t made us suggest using classic on a project today. Of course document sets. "Full canvas apps" there in SPFx yet? It's not what it is missing, but is it bringing any benefit for casual user to even justify scratching the surface to find the show stoppers. Mostly resistance to change. if it isn’t broken do not try to fix it mentality. Also a its not ready yet and you cannot make the modern site customised to look like the existing sites. To me resistance is futile, deal with it now before there is a mad scramble to get off them. As for features I don’t think there is much, but certain branding features without going to SPFX coding like headers and footers, background image and font changes .need to be in the site designs / GUI Two more if I may add, Calendar view (overlays calendars) and Promoted links (it is modern but useless without a modern webpart) because of the ability to security trim the items / tiles Page layout templates for modern pages. Subsites?! I don't like search giving all suggestions in a library and then the "give more"-option only gives results from current view. How about publishing features? Search just isn’t there yet! Audience targeting in general will be nice, for web parts and hub site navigation. Publishing - fixed layouts / version control / check-in and checkout / metadata / Search aggregation controls / image renditions (with my *own* choice of crops and specific width and height!) Also, can't wait for custom metadata on modern site pages - I know it's on the way and will be so helpful! Disable comments on site pages at the site level. I'd also like to see links that are added to a document library work correctly when clicked from inside a document library web part on a modern page. Right now, it tries to download the link if you click it which is... bizarre... I haven't seen an equivalent for classic Blog site. This means: Posts + comments as a list (metadata, views, categories, possibility of alerts,..). Perhaps you could give your opinion on this issue? Actually - the question is a bit the wrong way around. What does "Modern" get me? It is half baked, you still have to switch to classic to get to the list and site settings Search Search search search Customer obsession with standardized page templates and content categorizing for faceted search (that nobody uses). This is despite the fact that the content authoring experience in classic is absolutely dire compared to modern. Feature parity & working. Multi select column as a drop down: once an item is selected it's impossible to unselect. Many app uninstall / remove / upgrade only work in classic. Feel free to quote me on that too... frankly, it's incredible to me that the only noticeable improvement we've seen to modern in the last 2 yrs was a control to switch between modern & classic... and that feature was announced with much fanfare! If that doesn't speak volumes about the problem, nothing else does. The whole "keep your hands on the keyboard" is broken. I did a video of how horrible the UI is with refreshes and lost focus. If you have MMS it is even worse. Yesterday I tried to "Group By" and the groups were totally wrong. (I haven't reported that yet because I cannot share a screen shot of the data. I need to repro it with fake data.) I can't imagine that it is accessible for the blind. "Column default value settings" does not work in modern. Have to switch to classic when uploading documents to the folders otherwise it doesn't set the values. I have 2 clients that have been getting errors when uploading files via the Modern view lately. The errors were not helpful at all in troubleshooting and I had to switch them back to the Classic view, just so they could upload files. Y'all have support tickets open for these issues, right? Oh and I've seen issues with thumbnails of images not showing up in modern views either especially with publishing image fields. I know I have encountered more issues too just not remembering what else they were and have gotten in the habit of switching back to classic when something isn't working in modern. Wait, I thought you just meant the Page creation experience, not just the back end (list view) stuff. Modern Pages >>>>>> Classic Publishing Infra. List-Driven web parts. All content is in the page. The missing link for the JSlink functionality. Search is a big one The missing JSLink is one that bugs me. My clients loved JSLink because it was easy for them to pick up and manage but are now frustrated that they have to migrate from JSLink to SharePoint Framework Extensions. column formatters in json? easier in a way than jslink imo Another is that so much requires a developer to still do. The provisioning story, templating, global header and footer Modern experience right now is not that bad actually we just build web part page like in SharePoint 2003 but other than that. It is fantastic right now. A proper search web part is the biggest loss in modern - but I finally started working on that. So I’ll say I’m rather fond of modern, it works pretty well.. but I would like to see proper markup with html5 tags for sections, h1 etc. That’s just being ignorant and lazy. Plus we can use one site collection for page layout (Meta Data on Page not actual layouts) I will say there are some features in modern list views that I do love such as the ability to hide/show columns without having to go to the view settings page. I hate teaching SharePoint Online end user classes now because the differences between classic and modern is very challenging for my students. Hence why I decided I just want to teach Power BI and PowerApps/Flow from now on But I do want the "Site Settings" menu back in the Site Actions menu. That one annoys me! - some form of page layout/template - metadata editing in page edit mode That's for intranet/publishing-type scenarios. For team sites, modern generally works great and the main thing that can be painful is: - lack of a timeline web part (like the old one that displays project tasks in a timeline format - popular for lightweight project management/reporting) more power for the Highlighted Content web part is needed too. Like the ability to fully specify the search query. Sure, you can write your own if you have SPFx skills. But you shouldn't need to for that.. Regarding modern vs classic sites: Many of my customers are using classic sites as their main site collection and then only using modern sites for large scale document management. The cons in modern sites outweigh the pros. Don't forget about a modern responsive behavior because right now most web part relies heavily on JavaScript resize functions, not media queries. Those are pretty slow. - Proper responsive component handling - proper image resize (no idea who built this but there are things missing and bugfix request is already issued) - App first not browser first approach - Heavy Page load The fact that “modern” SharePoint currently only exists in certain places We are locked into this uber critical barf inducing customisation we thought was a good idea back in the “classic” days. The partner that sold us it is long since out of business and we have no idea what it does, how it does it or why we ever asked for it We really, really like having core functionality hidden from users under three layers of “...”. We have found that preventing users from doing advanced things like opening and sharing documents significantly reduces IT support and training overhead We only just got done deploying SharePoint and training all our users where everything is and about all the quirks and best practices. Last week we had to recover a whole folder of important documents deleted by mistake. We can’t now just go through all that again and tell our users the previous training is now null and void. Plus we are using ECS to view excel workbooks in the browser We have no budget We are pissed at Microsoft and SharePoint. Three years ago we were told this was the greatest thing since sliced bread, now were being told we are old and need to modernise. We don’t like be treated like shit, so we are digging our heels in. A bad part of modern UI is that "Check In" is buried under 3 layers of "..." like Spence said. Standard doc management functionality hidden away! Overall page performance is terrible as soon as you have practical levels of content and or shared data. All the postbacks and lazyloading is not conducive to doc man scenarios. Far too much lag. Lack of rest APIs for core shared service scenarios. Utterly retarded “preview” views fall apart in a heap with large amounts of content. Poor use of screen real estate. No clear indication vendor is aware of just how much customers use metadata. Completely unfathomable site settings hierarchy Teams, groups, yammer, OneDrive, SharePoint, modern. HELP! We don’t think of it as a migration. We believe in not fixing what isn’t broken. We also believe in not spending money just because there is something new and shiny. We’ll continue to use classic where it meets our needs. For new developments we will assess modern and use it where it makes sense to do so If it’s so modern why do I need to hire a developer to do the things I want to like implementing simple workflows or custom views? We don’t yet really fully understand or embrace the evergreen SaaS / customisation hybrid. We were told SaaS was all about the 80/20 rule, now we are being told it’s also a development platform. Frankly we are a bit confused. At the same time we are worried that as things keep changing and improving, we are at risk of things breaking. We understand that Microsoft can afford to carry that risk, but we as a customer of SaaS cannot. We’ve heard rumours of incomplete APIs and performance issues with shared data. We aren’t that confident of our citizen developer capability. In short we are nervous. We love what we see with modern sites, but at the same time are afraid to jump in without a safety net. We have accessibility and multi lingual requirements that are not met, keyboard control, screen readers, right to left languages. Context controls are particularly challenging and usually require suboptimal workarounds Had a customer ask me to switch a whole tenant to classic because in a document library the Name column isn't expanded by default so you need to resize the column to read the full file name. I showed them that if you resize it the new width persists for the given user. They wanted to set that column display width explicitly for all users as they didn't want to train users to show everyone how to resize the Name column. They were from a business unit and requested IT Department switch back to classic. A battle ensued, IT department resisted, business unit won. They got the tenant entirely switched back to classic. Also it seems if you switch the tenant setting to classic individual users can't themselves switch to modern if they want modern. why should I need to do spfx development for thing like page headers and footers. Why can I not add a background or change the font yet? Too much white space. Space is important but sometimes you just want a little less between things. Column formatting as json... Some oob parts Don't work for guests. E.g. people and yammer parts. I disagree about the advanced pieces being more visible..user get confused by the array of options in the classic UI ribbon. Simple is very. Otherwise put in an advanced mode for those who need it. Getting odd inconsistent experiences between classic and modern. Page load speed. Why does a page load and then load the data behind it. Can that not be async. Why do I have to migrate data again to use with teams. Customer has architected site collections with multiple sub sites. Also they created customised lists as document libraries as part of provisioning back in 2p13 and if has all come across into SPO. So doc libs are all of type 80000 and not 101. Which means anything that uses a doc library app or teams, onedrive etc cannot find the content. Only solution migrate to new libraries That will be migration number 3 in 4 years. Get a lot of if it is not broke Don't try and fix it. And if you are going to do modern make sure the sites look and work 100% like the existing classic sites. Also make sure you can do custom jscript and css on the pages. Users already complain about the look and feel and how complicated existing sites are. Ability to just copy / move docs from outlook Grouped team sites why can we not reduce the permission levels. All locked to full control for owners and edit for members. Just like to tone that down a bit does not appear possible for entire site only other libraries etc disinherited permissions. Document Sets From a corporate intranet perspective - we can’t do the level of branding a customer wants. Sorry MS. Customers still want uniquely styled pages. From a collaboration perspective, love it (apart from all the issues already reported) From an ISV perspective - cross platform support. Our product supports 2013, 2016 (pre and post FP1). Publishing pages is the lowest common denominator and we ain’t building two separate products to do the same thing. For application we “have” used modern and SPFx and its works great, within its realms of limitations. STOP SPAWNING BROWSER TABS. with all the investments done in the past by Microsoft collaboration doesn’t uniquely is part of SharePoint anymore. What is left over is content aggregation, portals (team portals) and document storage which follows the same old collaboration of team sites paradigm. Communication site is different because it’s a team site that tries to be a publishing portal. Internal communicators love these sites as its dead easy for them to publish content and t does look great. But why would “Jack on the shop floor” go to a hub site or a communication site? He couldn’t care less about that content. He just wants to quickly get to a Hr site to raise a grievance or request holiday. Or quickly go to the IT site to report a broken phone or ask for a new laptop. The “communication” side of things is passive. That’s the stuff we expose them to while they are trying to achieve some task. If I could embed the components of a communication or hub site in their HR or IT Intranet department page, then we have a winner. Companies (and more importantly their users) still want a single place to go that lets them get to 80% of what they need to do. And that’s a completely different use case to collaboration. Delve does a great job here if surfacing my working content but not the policies, procedure and forms. Variations / multilanguage capabilities still missing ts interesting how many of the issues here are present both in classic and modern. this underlines the perhaps most important consideration. Modern is nice and all, but it's the underlying capability, not the skin which needs fixed most. it doesn't matter how many times Microsoft give (and heavily promote) a new skin, this will remain the case. Personally, I think SharePoint Online has really turned into a spaghetti junction of features and products. I like having multiple ways to accomplish a task, but there are TOO MANY ways to do things. It is confusing for end users and, frankly, confusing to me sometimes too. I had to tell customers to avoid OneDrive for years because of the major sync issues, but now it works so I'm trying to get customers to give it a try. Modern, Classic, Teams, Team Sites, OneDrive, Flow, PowerApps, etc...this is turning into the Android fragmentation issue. Microsoft needs to consolidate products and features. Did anyone already mention... web part connections? Of course, you can accomplish that same concept by building it as a PowerApps, so it's not as pressing anymore.