Microsoft’s Hosted Solutions Bring Big Company IT to Small Business

by Robert Schley 

 

At the SharePoint Conference 2012, I was blown away by the ideas that Microsoft is putting out. In the past I've seen them as wanting to slowly creep into controlling every aspect of what IT folks want to do. It could just be that I'm in a different place now and not as directly involved with IT platform work. I think that may only be part of it, though. I am farther outside of the server farm than I have ever been, but I see the IT infrastructure more from a business perspective now. It's not, "Wow, that's awesome. I want it." I now see IT as, "What can it do for me and is it worth the money I put into it?" 

 

I know that not every IT professional sees their work as an opportunity for more toys. I do know that, just as in every field, there are more technical points that are really only appreciated by the professionals of that field. In the case of SharePoint’s new direction, there are a lot of finer points being addressed. The biggest take-away that I got was that Microsoft wants to push a more business-oriented experience. They want to get away from the IT folks wasting time trying to upgrade to the next version. In their minds, the idea of versions is becoming obsolete, and they want to push minor releases every 90 days. What this holds in store for major revisions, I'm not really sure. 

 

With this attempt to remove upgrading and the IT focus from their products, they are opening up a new market for their company. With Microsoft’s hosted solutions of Office 365 and SharePoint Online, the company is bringing big company IT to small business.

 

At this point, I'm on board. I'm not just sipping the Kool-Aid, I want to guzzle it. Beyond the point that Microsoft now gets to feel the pain of using their own product on a massive scale (one of the speakers at SPC declared that 13k+ servers are being used across their worldwide data centers!), I think they are seriously looking to change the direction of their product. It's a requirement in this day and age. Good enough computing, a term for computing power going way over the average users’ requirements, has replaced the need to have the next best thing. Coupled with the economic downturn and the need to get information anywhere, companies are pointing toward a reduction in IT costs by increasing their return on investment for any Information Technology.

 

As part of my desire to buy into Microsoft's plan, I am going to convert to their new scheme for everything I do. I have interest in creating webpages for some professional friends that need help. In addition, my crusade will be to find the line of benefit for small business having O365 and determine when having a dedicated IT section is a better choice. Lastly, my boss doesn't believe my evangelism, so this is partially to show him the benefits as well.

 

I will consider this a case study and record my journey, along with what I want to accomplish and how it gets accomplished.

 

The first thing I want to do is sign up for an Office 365 account, so I Google "Office 365 signup." The top sponsored link and the top returned match are both Microsoft's page for the service. I choose the top returned link as we all know that the top sponsored links are usually scams and not what we are looking for. I'm going to choose to look at the Pricing and Plans to see what I might want to sign up for. This page shows some pricing points that don't exactly tell me what I want; I'm looking to turn over e-mail, business files, and to start a SharePoint Online site. 

 

The lowest account of "hosted e-mail" is out the window as I want more than that. I think the P1 "small business" will work, but let's dig a little deeper; besides, it has a free trial. I fire up the plan advisor to verify my choice. It confirms my choice as far as email and my level of tech support. I choose no tech support because I don't want to work very hard on this, and leveraging my tech skills defeats the purpose of evaluating this for general small businesses. The plan advisor didn't ask me about SharePoint, though, so I'm skeptical. Let's give it a try. It's a free trial so we don't lose anything, right?

 

I hit the button for free trial. I expect the heavens to open up and shower free money on me for the smart move I have just made. No such luck. =) I get a trial signup page beginning with country of origin. This has a nice little explanation of using this choice to configure what data center I will be assigned as well as currency used for billing. The second choice, "Organization Language,” surprises and pleases me: My choices are English and Española, but this is still a huge step to even have an option. 

 

I fill in the rest of my personal information and enter my current email address for administrative purposes. And I have to finish up with a domain name of “something”.onmicrosoft.com. Hmm... my mind spins with attempts to be clever. My first attempts of "ComputerGuy" and "Apostle" fail, so I fall back to a default of robertschley.onmicrosoft.com. I choose a username and set a password; acceptable security 8-16 chars and no limit on special characters. Some CAPTCHA, a spot to accept Microsoft marketing emails, and "I accept" button sets me up. Surely, heaven opening and accolades at this point, right? 

 

Nope, a quick note for account resets and recovery using a phone number I choose; I’m not sure how I feel about Microsoft not pulling my phone number from the previous form. I decide that it makes sense to have a separate number from my listed profile number and view my new domain. The interface seems pretty easy to look at and fairly logical from a System Administrator Standpoint. I'll have to get another opinion from a non-tech perspective or try to find my user glasses to give a better overview. The signup process seems very easy with a few pleasant surprises as far as unexpected customizations. So far the experience is not exactly trumpets from heaven, but I would say it is as easy as checking my email in the morning.

 

I'm going to play with it a bit and get back to you on my findings.

Being Picky Has Hurt a Lot of Companies When It Comes to SharePoint – Do you have any examples to share?

by Jeff Cate

I think one of the reasons a lot of companies have had so much difficulty with SharePoint deployments and adoption over the past ten years is simply their “pickiness.”  I know this is true because I have seen it over and over again with my own eyes in my role as a consultant and trainer.

The kind of pickiness I am talking about is related to changing the software just because they would like for it to be a certain way or look a certain way.  To many people in enterprise environments this doesn’t seem wrong.  “We are big, we are important, we are complicated, and we have the development resources.  So, why shouldn’t we get it the way we want it?” 

What they aren’t thinking about is:

·         the additional costs that these changes cause during design and development

·         the opportunity costs related to the delay of getting the benefits from SharePoint until these changes can be properly made and tested

·         the opportunity costs related to the other, more important things their development resources could be working on which would benefit the company

·         (the biggest one of all, in my opinion) the hard costs or opportunity costs that result when three years down the road the company either A) can’t upgrade to the new version of SharePoint at all because they modified their existing version so much, or B) have to spend big again to handle a very difficult migration to the new version because they modified the existing version so much.

There is no doubt in my mind that as much as 50% of the organizations that implemented MOSS 2007 are still in this situation today.  MOSS 2007 was a marketing and sales bonanza for Microsoft.  The penetration of the product in the market was huge in the 2007–2009 timeframe.  But a big number of the adopters during that timeframe came out of an era where customizing enterprise software was what every large organization did.  It was unthinkable to try to use enterprise software like SharePoint out-of-the-box.  The prevailing thought was that “our requirements are just not that simple.”

I wish I had a nickel for every time I have had someone at a large enterprise tell me “our requirements are not that simple.” Nine out of ten times what is really going on is that their organization is so screwed up and complicated and the resistance to change is so great that they just start modifying the software to keep the peace in the company.

I can give you an example of this scenario (this one is from SharePoint 2010 – I couldn’t quickly find a MOSS 2007 environment to get one from, but in general, this kind of thing is even worse in MOSS 2007), and you can use my example to judge whether I would think of you as unnecessarily picky when it comes to SharePoint.

Example: Assume you have a site and have granted some users read-only permissions to the site.  You’ve enabled the publishing features on the site and discovered that your read-only users still see the Site Actions menu and the View All Site Content menu option:

This is simply how the software works out of the box.  There is really no harm in it – if you ask me.  Yes, the read-only user can click on the View All Site Content option and see the list of all objects in the site that they have read access to.  What problem does that cause?  I don’t see any.  Does the presence of the site actions menu and this option cause any clutter or confusion for those read-only users?  Maybe some people would say so, but what a minor issue to be concerned about in the grand scheme of trying to have a successful business!

Would this example be a deal breaker for you or your company?  Would you just “have to have this fixed” before you could roll out this site to users?  If so, I would probably think of you as unnecessarily picky.  If you were one of my employees, I would wonder if you are very good at seeing the big picture.  (Incidentally, here is one solution for “fixing” it.  And, if you implemented this solution it would just be one more thing you would have to take into account at upgrade time.)

As a society in the U.S., I think we have evolved into a very picky population of consumers.  Consumer product companies have fueled this fire with their marketing in their never-ending attempt to win the consumer and get a leg up on their competitors.  I think this mentality has spilled over into the workplace and is costing companies a lot of money – especially when it comes to their use of packaged software.  Why not just learn how to adapt to the software as it is instead of modifying it because you don’t like something about the way it comes out of the box?

Do you think I am nuts?  Do you have any good examples of companies that were too picky about SharePoint and it cost them down the road?  If so, I’d love it if you would share them in the comments section.