The New DIP – The SharePoint Properties Panel Arrives in Word
I just got back from a great SPTechCon conference in North Bethesda, Maryland (aka “DC”) last night. It was the last SPTechCon under the BZ Media banner, as SPTechCon has been acquired by
That said, this post is about the new SharePoint Properties Panel that just started showing up in First Release this week. When I was talking to Lynn Parsons (@nnylsnosrap), who is the Operations Systems Manager, Information Technology at the World Wildlife Fund (a great organization!) at SPTechCon, she mentioned she had seen something odd when she was editing a document in Word. Someone else – whose name I didn’t get, unfortunately – had also mentioned some issues in Word. The three of us got together and realized that the SharePoint Properties Panel was indeed available (and solved the issues)!
The SharePoint Information Panel is the successor to the venerable DIP, which many people were disappointed to see disappear in Office 2016. In fact, it kept many organizations from upgrading to Office 2016 from 2013. Unfortunately, Microsoft seems to have a penchant to remove things with their successors not yet available. The SharePoint Properties Panel is currently only targeted at Word, but I would hope it creeps into the other important Office applications (Excel and PowerPoint, at the very least) as well.
Here’s a screenshot Lynn was nice enough to share with me which includes some real content:
Notice how well the managed metadata column works in the panel. It even does a good job with a multi-select lookup column (from my tenant):
After Ignite – where the SharePoint Properties Panel was announced – Chris McNulty (@cmcnulty2000) sketched out what was coming in his post Updating content management for the cloud on the Microsoft Tech Community. The release date in that post is currently [January 2018], but obviously some of us are already seeing it.
I’m on the Monthly Channel for Office updates (my version below), and my Office 365 tenant is set to First Release for Tenant. So you may need to perform some incantations to be able to view the SharePoint Properties Panel at the moment – assuming you have the appropriate permission levels.
If you think you ought to see the SharePoint Properties Panel, look for the button to pop it out under the View tab, at the far right.
What challenges are you hoping to solve with the SharePoint Properties Panel? Do you see it as just the “new DIP”, or do you expect more? As a HUGE fan of a reasonable amount of metadata, I’m very happy to see this capability arriving back in Word. Some people are saying that AI means that metadata is dead, but I strongly disagree with that idea. No one understands content better than the people who create it – not a machine, nor anyone else in the organization. Metadata from the source is the best way to make content useful. Period.
#longlivemetadata
Thanks for sharing this!
Did a little test and this is just what we need.
Your closing comment is almost perfect (besides the typo). I would add “No one understands content better than the people who create it at the time they are writing it…
A properties panel visible while authoring makes it natural to see content and properties inclusively.
@Jeff:
Argh! I hate my typos! Thanks for pointing it out – fixed.
M.
Throws an add in error when documents are opened from SharePoint 2013.. been troubleshooting this for over 2 weeks..
@Sri:
I don’t think Microsoft has promised anything for versions of SharePoint other than SharePoint Online.
M.
Agreed. But we have Office 2016 clients installed via O365 subscriptions and also SP2013. We are yet to migrate to SPO and each time a document is opened, the property pane shows up and throws an error which is frustrating the users. There seems to be no way of disabling this add-in.
@Marc
Do you know of any way we can disable this
@Sri:
Sorry, but I have no idea. I’d suggest a ticket with Microsoft.
M.
Hi, just letting you know that I placed a query on Microsoft Forum regarding this issue, https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/6aeec4be-2310-4859-85b8-ec55e16eb82f/word-sharepoint-properties-panel-issue-addin-error?forum=sharepointgeneral, and that Microsoft appears to be working on this issue still, although I have no idea if they intend to make this feature available for on-premise deployment.
We are working on trying to disable the error that users see when they open word documents, and I will post if we come up with a solution.
Also, Marc, I am the other person at sptechcon 2017 who had the same issue.
I love the SharePoint Properties Panel. One thing that seems very strange, when opening a document (using content types) from a SharePoint document library (using content types), it opens on the right side of the document. Yet when I open another document in a subsite, using the same content type, it opens the sharepoint panel in File, instead on the right side of the document. Any suggestions?
Any idea if they are going to make this work on premise?
@D:
I can’t profess to know the answer to that. However, all functionality these days starts in the cloud and then comes to on premises if it makes sense. This feels like something that does make sense. Maybe SharePoint 2019? Again, no definite knowledge here.
M.
I have built an adaptation of the properties panel to with SP2010. I have hit a big snag though that I realize is part of the Office365/SharePoint 2016-Online design. Opening a new document from a template in a library, or opening a new document for a content type in the New dropdown does not enable the Properties Panel. Using the button in the ribbon only switches to the backstage tab. It seems that the properties panel will only work with an existing document. Our use case for the “venerable DIP” is to use content controls for library columns in templates (.dotx) so the content can be entered in the DIP with the context of the document visible – this is particularly useful for authoring new documents from the template. Unfortunately the backstage properties view is a bad substitute for the DIP. The new properties panel is promising, but I’d like to figure out how to get it to appear with a new document.