Flexdesk: Smarter date handling for bookings

Flexdesk now keeps you on the date you were working with. Previously, confirming a booking would reset the view back to today's date; the reservation date is now preserved.

New feature: Search beyond your own tenant

Available if your tenant is in Preview.

Content Search can now retrieve content from a second Microsoft 365 tenant. Useful after a merger, or in a group structure where several entities keep separate tenants while sharing a single intranet: your employees run one search, and results come back from both environments.

Settings

A Tenant selection section appears at the top of the Content Search edit panel, in the Content tab:

Selecting an external tenant also switches term labels to that tenant's localization, so refiners and metadata read correctly against the remote source.

Permissions

No additional consent is needed on the Powell Intranet application. The SharePoint resource this relies on is already part of the permission set you approved when the platform was set up.

Access still follows the rules of the tenant you are querying. Reaching into another tenant does not bypass its permissions: your users must hold access rights in that environment for its content to come back — typically as guest users invited into the target tenant, with permissions on the sites concerned. Results are trimmed per user, exactly as they are in your own tenant: someone with no rights on a target site gets nothing back from it.

Plan the guest access and the site permissions in the target tenant before rolling the webpart out. Without them the webpart returns nothing, which reads as a broken search when it is only applying the target tenant's own rules.

New feature: Microsoft Graph as a search source

Available if your tenant is in Preview.

Beyond SharePoint search, Content Search can now query Microsoft Graph, including external items — content indexed into Microsoft 365 from third-party systems through Graph connectors (ticketing tool, HR system, document repository). A single webpart can surface results from outside SharePoint.

The companion Refinement Panel follows automatically: filters align on the Graph source with no extra configuration.

Settings

A Graph settings section appears in the Content Search edit panel, in the Content tab:

Two points worth knowing before you configure a webpart:

• Graph search overrides the tenant selection — see the note above: the two evolutions are not cumulative for now.
• Existing webparts are unaffected. Graph search is off unless you turn it on, and webparts configured before this release keep querying SharePoint search.

Permissions

Searching external items requires two extra permissions. ExternalItem.Read.All and ExternalConnection.Read.All are not part of the permission set granted when the Powell Intranet application was first approved: they are requested only if and when you use this capability.

Selecting External Item surfaces a Grant admin consent for tenant button, which opens the Microsoft consent screen for the Powell Intranet application in your own tenant. A tenant administrator must complete it — the request fails for anyone else.

Once granted, these permissions stay on the Powell Intranet application for your whole tenant, and the button no longer appears.

If the content sources list is empty after consent, the permissions are fine — it means no Graph connector is publishing content into your tenant yet. Connectors are set up in the Microsoft 365 admin center, outside Powell. Until at least one is publishing, there is nothing for an external item search to return.

Newsletter: Editable title & description for articles & documents

In the settings of the article or document itself, you can now edit the title and description shown in its preview within the newsletter, without changing the original document. This makes it easier to adapt the content to the context of the newsletter.

Newsletter: New settings to show or hide author and date

Newsletter's Articles and Documents component now lets you manage whether the author and date are displayed, via new selectors in the settings panel. In a newsletter template, this is set as a global default, which can still be overridden for each individual article or document if needed. In a regular newsletter, there is no global toggle: the setting is configured individually, article or document by article or document.

( In preview ) Launcher - Page Builder

We're excited to finally introduce Launcher, the AI-powered feature that turns a natural-language prompt into a ready-to-preview SharePoint page. 

Launcher will for now be in Boost package, but this situation may evolve quickly. Launcher can be activated from Powell Manager > Tenant settings > Global settings > Powell Admins > Products.

Describe what you want to create, and Launcher generates a complete draft: structured sections, written copy, and relevant images, all built entirely from existing Powell components, so what you see in the preview is a real, interactive page rather than a static mockup.

This release introduces Launcher for page creation. 
Site creation is coming in a future release and will extend the same experience to full SharePoint sites, including a brief-based template matching flow.

How it works

Launcher is reached from the Contribution and opens into a conversation: each draft is tied to one ongoing exchange, which can be picked up again at any time.

Once a draft is generated, it can be refined:

• By hand: adding, replacing, or reordering components, editing content inline, or switching templates.
• Through further prompts: asking Launcher to swap a section or adjust the tone, with each requested change applied to the preview and explained.

Draft history & preview

Every state of a draft is saved, so changes can be reviewed or reverted from the draft's history before anything is published. Launcher's editor also lets you preview an individual section as it would render at a different breakpoint (for example, seeing how an element looks on mobile while still working in the desktop view), without resizing your browser window.

Publishing

Once you're satisfied, publishing deploys the page directly to SharePoint in a single step.

Dedicated documentation is coming soon.
 

Advanced Analytics: New engagement metrics in the header

For Advanced Analytics customers, we're extending the feature with new metrics.

Active Views and Active Users are designed to give Internal Communications and HR teams a clearer, more actionable understanding of what is capturing employee attention right now. With Sentiment, it's time to transform your intranet from a top-down notice board into a nuanced, two-way communication channel.

Impact

For employees:

• The 3 metrics will be available within the intranet, through the header, on all pages.
• Active Views and Active Users are included in the header with a period of 30 days.

Sentiment is available at the bottom right of the page.

For Advanced Analytics Dashboard viewers:

• View, in the tab content, is replaced by Active Views and Active Users.
• Like is replaced by Sentiment.

Deployment

Can be enabled in advanced analytics settings :

What's next

• Exclude specific roles from metrics (for example, don't track contributors' actions in Active Views and Active Users).
• New out-of-the-box reports for Exec Summary, Portal Administrators, Contributors...
• Understand the reach of a piece of content. 

Note : Need to sync powell lists 

Dedicated documentation is coming soon.

📱 Mobile Application 📱

(In Premium + Preview) Global Visual Rework

The Powell Mobile App is rolling out a new design across its native components

Alongside this, several improvements have been made to the mobile experience on both iOS and Android:

• Enhanced Search Engine: the search bar has been optimized for both News and Powell Buddy queries, for smoother navigation.
• Flexible Social Interactions: administrators can now hide likes and comments in an item's detailed view.
• Display Corrections: image rendering issues have been fixed, and the Powell Buddy icon now displays correctly in light mode.

Customers using a packaged (premium) app will need to repackage their app to receive this update.

(In Premium + Preview) Native Components : News, Events, Orgchart, Flexdesk, Buddy ...

This release introduces a new generation of native components, each dedicated to a specific use case: News, Events, Orgchart, Flexdesk, and more, with a UX designed specifically for use within the mobile application.



 

• App-dedicated UX: these components don't reuse the design or navigation logic of the desktop intranet; each screen is built from the ground up for mobile.
   
• Opening to Frontline: several of these components are accessible to deskless profiles who don't hold an intranet license, making them the only option available to Frontline employees.
   
• Social engagement, now live on News and Events: users can like and comment on content directly within the app

This generation of native components covers both licensed employees looking for a dedicated mobile UX, and Frontline profiles without an intranet license.