POWELL Intranet · RELEASE NOTES
Release Note 2026 - November 9.
Smarter. Faster. More connected.
Discover the latest updates and improvements designed to enhance content creation, search, analytics and the mobile experience across Powell Intranet.
⭐ AI & Content Creation
❤️ Content Builder & Page Builder: use page metadata
Content Builder now includes a metadata block that allows contributors to display and edit page properties directly within their content.
- Use SharePoint page metadata within Content Builder.
- Support fields containing multiple values, such as URLs and people.
- Bind block values only to metadata fields with a compatible type, ensuring accurate data mapping.
❤️ Content Builder & Page Builder : comments block
A new Comments block introduces a dedicated discussion area directly on a page, allowing users to exchange feedback in context.
- One comment block per page.
- The feature uses its own comment functionality and does not rely on Viva Engage.
🔎 Search
Powell Buddy: taxonomy suggestions ( Preview )
Powell Buddy can now leverage your tenant's taxonomy to provide more relevant search suggestions. This evolution introduces tenant-aware taxonomy indexing and a dedicated synchronization mechanism.How it works
- Taxonomy is read using the tenant certificate, without requiring a dedicated Entra application or client secret.
- For current-user tenants, an administrator's token is used when saving the configuration or triggering a manual synchronization.
- Each term set displays its term count, last synchronization date and indexing status: Indexed, Pending, Error or Too large.
- Only suggestions with a relevance score above 0.35 are returned, together with their label and taxonomy path.
Powell Buddy: taxonomy terms in the search box
Powell Buddy search box can now draw on your SharePoint Taxonomy tags to bring the most relevant content to the top.
How it works
Admins choose which SharePoint Taxonomy fields Powell Buddy can use.
As users type in the search box, matching tags are suggested automatically.
Why it matters
Users spend less time searching, and the content that matters most to your organization gets noticed.
✉️ Newsletter
❤️ Customizable article and document card layouts
Article cards in newsletters are no longer locked to a single layout.
Communication managers and contributors can now adapt each article to its content (a strong visual, a text-only announcement) and vary the rhythm of long newsletters.
What’s new
For each article added through the content selector, contributors can now set:
- Image position: right (default), left, top (full width) or none
- Image size: small, medium or large (for left and right positions)
- Background colour: chosen from the template’s style scheme, with text colour adjusted automatically for readability
- Description: show or hide
- “Read more” button: show or hide (label localized)
Template defaults
Template owners can define default article options to set the house style. Articles added from the template inherit these defaults, and contributors can still override them on any individual article.
Consistent rendering everywhere
Your choices render identically in the email (Outlook desktop and web, Gmail, iOS Mail) and in the Adaptive Card posted to Teams channels (desktop and mobile). On mobile email clients, the image always appears above the text for a clean stacked layout. When an article has no image, the text uses the full width.
No action required
Existing newsletters and templates are unchanged: their articles keep the current layout (image on the right, same sizes) until you decide to customize them.
📊 Advanced Analytics
❤️ Analytics (Preview): measure real engagement with active sessions
A session now counts as active when a user stays on a page for at least 10 seconds. Accidental or quick clicks no longer inflate your numbers.
What’s new
For admins: the Content tab shows the share of active sessions for each piece of content.
For users: active sessions appear in the header, next to Active views and Active contents.
Why it matters
You see how far your content really reaches, based on actual reading instead of clicks.
⚙️ Powell Manager
Suggested field mapping
Powell Manager introduces suggested field mapping for content type views, making it easier to configure the fields used by Mobile App views and reducing manual configuration.
- Access suggested field mappings directly from Manager.
- Review the proposed mappings for native content type views.
- Configure the fields used by the native views according to your needs.
Mobile App content options
Native view configuration in Powell Manager has been extended with additional options, providing administrators with more control over the way native mobile views are configured.
❤️ Time-based version limits for lists and libraries
Administrators can now manage version limits for SharePoint lists and libraries based on time, providing greater control over version retention and storage management.
This capability introduces time-based version management within Powell Manager.
📱 Mobile application
❤️ Faster and smoother mobile experience
The Powell Mobile App receives significant performance improvements across startup, lists, popups and the organizational chart.
Startup performance
- The app now opens on your tabs in approximately 3.5 seconds, compared with 4.6 seconds previously.
- This represents a substantial improvement compared with the 8.8-second startup time measured before the summer.
Smoother navigation
- News, Events and Documents lists now scroll much more smoothly.
- The slowest frame time has dropped from approximately 500 ms to 170 ms.
- Popups now open without stuttering.
- The organizational chart loads approximately twice as fast.
Improved stability and compatibility
- News and Event details no longer cause crashes on Android.
- The application now also runs on devices without Google services.
❤️ Native views from notifications
Mobile notifications can now open their associated content using dedicated native views, providing a more consistent and mobile-oriented experience when accessing content from a notification.
🛠 Stability & fixes
Beyond new features, each release cycle includes continuous work on platform reliability. Since our October release note, many fixes have been delivered, most based on feedback sent to our Support & Q&A teams ❤️
Search & webparts
- Advanced Search keeps the words you type in the query generated by the AI, waits for that query before showing results, and keeps the configured search scope if the AI request fails.
- User cards open faster when reopened and now work for users with no email address in SharePoint. Group details show the group that was clicked.
- Graph lists in table view display user photos and names correctly, and author pictures no longer appear empty on Content Search cards.
- The Timeline view of the Search webpart follows the configured date format.
- The Gamification Leaderboard can filter actions on sites with more than 5,000 user actions.
- New or modified content types appear in the content type list of the search query builder without a new synchronization.
- Floating buttons (Sentiments, Bot, Scroll to top) move above the SharePoint Copilot button instead of overlapping it.
Events, Must Read & sharing
- All-day Outlook events no longer appear one day off in the Events webpart.
- "Add to my calendar" keeps the correct times when the event is opened or edited in Outlook.
- The Must Read readers list no longer repeats names between pages, the CSV export shows the actual date and time of each reading, and the export button works wherever you click it.
- Sharing on LinkedIn works as expected.
Newsletter & notifications
- Images are displayed in the web version of a newsletter.
- Newsletters broadcast to Teams apply the article title and description overrides and the author and date settings.
- Notification images display correctly, including for pages created with AI Page Builder.
Publishing & Powell Manager
- Synchronizations on tenants using App-Only authentication no longer fail randomly with a certificate error.
- Exporting a page configuration to Powell Manager keeps all webparts, including native Microsoft webparts and Discussion, so synchronized pages no longer lose content.
- Copy to existing deploys each selected item independently, and an error now names the item concerned.
- The Powell form opens correctly from the Edit button after moving to a news item on another site collection.
- Section backgrounds: the text color now follows the overlay set in the page layout.
- Cloning a navigation bar includes its icons.
- The Views tab of a list template no longer loads indefinitely.
- Clearing a date in Site properties is now saved.
- The "Multilingual items" option is saved when an existing list is edited from the site structure.
Advanced Analytics
- Several metrics are now more accurate, so some figures change from the date of the fix. Average session duration goes up because it measures the real session length. Page views and pages per session go down because duplicate navigations are removed. A document opened from a navigation webpart counts as a view of the document. Only new desk bookings count, so desk activity, active users and churn may go down. Earlier periods are not recalculated, so a break will show in the curves.
- Likes are attributed to the right content and follow the user filters in content ranking, and the search results click rate reflects clicks.
- PDF export shows the final values, as displayed on screen.
- Engagement labels have been corrected in English, French and German.
Languages & multilingual sites
- The Powell Text webpart shows the right language on the original page, whatever the language of the user.
- "Manage translations" is available for lists with a space in their URL and for lists added directly on a site.
- Creating an item no longer fails on a non-multilingual list when a multilingual list uses the same content type.
- Changes to Yes/No fields are kept when a page is duplicated and translated.
- My Profile shows taxonomy values in the page language, and a term with no translation falls back to the default language instead of appearing empty.
AI Page Builder & chatbot
- AI Page Builder (Preview) adapts text and images to your request when it reuses a page template, and its quick replies are easier to read.
- The chatbot signs in silently when single sign-on is available, and uses the theme font whatever the font file format.
Mobile application
- Flexdesk: maps display correctly with new zoom and full-screen buttons, the List / Map switch is hidden once a desk is selected, and opening today's booking no longer crashes the app on iOS.
- Events display their images, and an event can be liked even if nobody has liked it yet.
- Sign-in is more reliable on Android and iOS.
- On Android, the burger menu reopens correctly after opening a node.
- On iOS, the in-app notification count updates when a notification arrives in the background.
Thanks for your feedback!
Your feedback helps us continuously improve Powell Intranet and build a better digital workplace experience, together.
Powell Software · Release notes · November 2026