SharePoint Online Social Bar: The New Office 365 Feature

Microsoft understands that, for many organizations, SharePoint is being tasked with providing a social and communications function.  Microsoft has been focused on enabling and automating the tasks surrounding site layout and mobile optimization, so that SharePoint Site Managers can better focus on content creation.  Read more about this at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Blog/Refine-your-message-and-increase-your-reach-with-SharePoint/ba-p/109553

Microsoft has announced a new feature coming to Office 365 through SharePoint Online, called Social Bar. SharePoint Online Social Bar will appear on all current SharePoint Online pages except for the home page of a site. Social Bar will give users the ability to like a page, see the number of views, likes, and comments on a page, as well as see the people who’ve liked the page. Social Bar will be available for anyone with access to view the page.

Social Bar by default will be turned on, but as an administrator if you’d like to disable Social Bar for your organization, you can do so with the following PowerShell command.

To disable Social Bar on a tenant level:

Set-SPOTenant-SocialBarOnSitePagesDisabled $true

To disable Social Bar on a site level (for https://prepspo.spgrid.com site):

Set-SPOSite-identifty https://prepspo.spygrid.com – SocialBarOnSitePagesDisabled $true

Social Bar is scheduled to roll out to Targeted Release customers later this week, and it will be available for all organizations in April, 2018.