by TL Ferrell
The 2012 Microsoft SharePoint Conference was held in Las
Vegas the week of November 12. It was an enlightening, interesting, and at times
exciting experience.
Conferences such as this are usually two parts education, one part networking, one part dog-and-pony show, and one part pep rally; this gathering was no exception. It was a somewhat surreal experience to be one of 10,000 SharePoint evangelists, enthusiasts, and worker bees for four days of seminars and assorted activities.
Witnessing the well-oiled machine of the Mandalay Bay catering team as they funneled us into a cavernous facility with endless repetitive buffet lines for meals was worth the trip all by itself. Throughout the conference, the social networkers among us (including me) checked in on Foursquare and Facebook and posted Tweets with the hashtag #spc12. During the keynote presentation, so many of us Tweeted that #spc12 was the number one trending hashtag. I also earned a Swarm badge on Foursquare.
Conferences such as this are usually two parts education, one part networking, one part dog-and-pony show, and one part pep rally; this gathering was no exception. It was a somewhat surreal experience to be one of 10,000 SharePoint evangelists, enthusiasts, and worker bees for four days of seminars and assorted activities.
Witnessing the well-oiled machine of the Mandalay Bay catering team as they funneled us into a cavernous facility with endless repetitive buffet lines for meals was worth the trip all by itself. Throughout the conference, the social networkers among us (including me) checked in on Foursquare and Facebook and posted Tweets with the hashtag #spc12. During the keynote presentation, so many of us Tweeted that #spc12 was the number one trending hashtag. I also earned a Swarm badge on Foursquare.
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| 1-The SharePoint Faithful |
The conference officially kicked off with a keynote
presentation, led by Microsoft’s Senior Director of Product Marketing, Jared
Spataro. (You can watch the presentation online at http://www.mssharepointconference.com).
Comedic sketch attempts aside, this presentation to launch SharePoint 2013 set
the tone for the whole conference: It’s a brand new SharePoint. All the
familiar elements are there, all the tools and features you are used to, but
SharePoint 2013 is a sleek, updated platform with more punch than ever before.
With 2013, Microsoft has done what it always does; taken a look at what’s
happening in the digital world and synthesized pieces, absorbing the new
realities of how people work and interact with digital devices. As is also
typical, they’ve built on these realities and added their own twist.
The result is an interface that will look oddly familiar to
about one billion people; anyone
who dabbles in social networking for either work or personal use will be impressed
with the vast improvements in the way these paradigms are incorporated into the
collaborative focus of SharePoint. There are significant changes in some of the
underlying technology and implementation options. There are also improvements
in ease of use, performance, power, feature sets, and extensibility. As usual,
there are also shortcomings; improvements or enhancements that would seem to be
obvious which aren’t there, or features that still fall short of what might be
desired. There are changes that are puzzling in some ways. There are rumblings
of more changes to come that may not sit well with the community. With any new
release there will also be glitches as all the bugs get worked out as the
software is released into the wild. So, there’s a lot of change; whether good
or bad in each case may depend on one’s perspective.
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| 2- I never understood what this breakout room was for |
I’m not going to detail the many changes and new features
here, but I will hit a few of the major potential game-changers.
The Cloud, The Cloud, The Cloud. The Cloud. Have I Mentioned The Cloud?
Cloud computing is all the rage, albeit controversial. Just
as Microsoft seems to have bet the OS farm on the radical changes seen in
Windows 8, they have placed a large bet on the cloud being the wave of the
future. SharePoint, along with Office, Outlook, and other tools,
can now be deployed via Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud platform. If one takes
the presentations at this year’s conference at face value, Microsoft simply
assumes that everyone will be moving to Office 365 as a matter of course. The
differences in Office / SharePoint as implemented in Office 365 vs
implementation onsite are minor; we were assured over and over that the code
base is identical. (The primary difference seems to be in application integration;
it is slightly better in Office 365 since O365 is a truly unified system.)
Some in the community agree that the cloud is a no-brainer,
others believe it’s a non-starter, and many, many others are unsure. The
benefits can be considerable, but the potential drawbacks are certainly worth
considering. During the conference, Office 365 actually experienced a brief
outage. It’s one thing for an organization to experience downtime with systems
under their complete control; it’s quite another for it to happen when the
systems are under someone else’s roof. My crystal ball is out for repairs, so I
have no prediction for the outcome. I will say I’ve seen this thick-client vs
thin-client pendulum swing back and forth a few times in my career. Stay tuned.For further discussions of cloud computing, see the recent blog posts by our President, Jeff Cate:
SharePoint Social Is More … Social
The importance of social networking in today’s world is hard
to deny. It’s true that I know many people – including a majority of our
students – who don’t Twitter, who don’t LinkedIn, and who barely Facebook. Still,
social computing is a modern fact of life, and many people (especially the
under-30 crowd) see social applications as an integral part of their on-line
life. Many people are much more likely to text, tweet, status-update, check-in,
etc., than they are to make a phone call or send an email. Such communications
are briefer, faster, can be more connected to other communications and data,
and have the potential to be simultaneously broadcast to a wider audience and
targeted to self-selected recipients.
The MySites feature in previous versions of SharePoint was an
attempt to incorporate social computing into SharePoint, but it always seemed
to be a step behind current trends when a particular version was released. In
addition, it didn’t really integrate with the other sites the user might have
access to – it was more like an annex than a lobby. Many organizations did not
even implement MySites, choosing not to activate the feature at all. In other
organizations, MySites might have been activated but has never really been used.
It looked and functioned like an adjunct to the primary functionality and
purpose of SharePoint. It had clear business purposes, but it could be
difficult to convince users and decision-makers how it might fit into – never
mind improve – their current work habits. The terms “social networking” and
“social computing” are partly to blame, I feel. Decision makers believe or fear
that social = frivolous rather than
understanding that it just means collaborative
in this context. Unfortunately, the terms seem to be here to stay.
Enter SharePoint 2013. The case for social computing in
SharePoint – and in the enterprise – has never been clearer. In addition to the
personal workspace, profile information, and document sharing capabilities that
have always been part of MySites, the 2013 edition – rebranded as SkyDrive Pro
-- incorporates more collaborative, tracking/notification, and personal work
management tools than ever. Microsoft has picked up the flow of how sites like
Facebook and Twitter work and how users interact with them. They’ve folded
tagging, mentioning, following, and more into the new Newsfeed and other
elements. In addition, it’s possible to have “conversations” on individual
sites. Imagine a site centered around a particular project, and there on the
site is a newsfeed where the project team, stakeholders, management, etc., can
participate in an open conversation about the project. It’s right there on the
home page, less structured than a discussion board, and deeply familiar to the
vast majority of current computer users. Think of how that would drastically
reduce the number of emails that float around, and the increased documentation
and information sharing that would take place. Finally, there’s an increased
focus on providing aggregation of everything you are doing and tracking
throughout the SharePoint system in order to provide “one-stop shopping” for
all of your work. For organizations that already use MySites in a significant
way, 2013 should be welcomed with open arms. For organizations that don’t use
MySites, or who have it but don’t know what to do with it, a fresh look and
thoughtful implementation of SkyDrive Pro could be well worth it.
Yammer On
A twist to the integrated SharePoint social components is
Microsoft’s recent purchase of the messaging system Yammer. Yammer was
definitely a shiny new toy at the conference that Microsoft was eager to
showcase. It is estimated that over 80% of the Fortune 500 user Yammer in the
enterprise. Being a new purchase, though, Yammer is not yet integrated with
other Microsoft products. They promise that it will be incorporated in the
future, but right now it is redundant with other social features already in SharePoint.
You CAN Take It With You
SharePoint 2013 is multiple-device-centric. Not only are the
mobile device interfaces improved, but the assumption is that any given user
may be using SharePoint over a wide variety of devices – not only a desktop
plus a laptop, but perhaps a smartphone or a tablet. While Internet Explorer
will still (and probably always) provide the optimum experience, the attempt to
be OS/browser/device agnostic is even more earnest. Finally, the biggest change
– depending on how a given organization implements all the features – is that
there’s a shift to thinking about focusing the experience on the user rather
than the machine. The idea is that it doesn’t matter what device you are on,
you can always get to “your stuff” in a seamless way, without depending on
bookmarks/shortcuts which are device-centric.
Number Crunching – Even Crunchier
Business Intelligence tools have long been a part of
SharePoint, but with each version they become more and more robust. SharePoint
2013 is no exception. To me some of the most exciting enhancements are actually
part of Excel 2013. These include features like FlashFill data pattern
recognition, Slicers to provide customized data filtering options, and more.
Combine this with enhancements to Excel Services and you have a much more
robust feature set for displaying and manipulating data in spreadsheet form.
Access Services has also gotten a makeover, and Microsoft seems to have a
refreshed interest in Access in general. A new tool called PowerView provides new
capabilities for interactive data modeling. Enhancements in Visio Services,
PowerPivot, and PerformancePoint round out the package. There are
disappointments, but BI in SharePoint is definitely beefier and more tasty.
Apps Are the New Black
Anyone with a smart phone or a tablet device is familiar
with the concept of apps – applications. These are usually small programs with
a focused purpose. They may be a stripped-down version of a web site, or they
may be a stand-alone program of some type. Microsoft has embraced the app model
and married it to SharePoint. Not only can developers create open-source apps
to sell (or provide as freeware) in Microsoft’s app store to add or enhance
SharePoint functionality, but the data features in SharePoint – what we currently
call lists and libraries – are now apps.
Find What You’re Looking For
Search is an essential tool for information storage and
sharing in computing. The SharePoint search tools have been good in the past,
but the 2013 version is, as expected, even better. The big news is that
FASTSearch, which was a separately-purchased add-on for SharePoint 2010, is the
core search technology for SharePoint 2013. In addition, the way Search crawls,
indexes, queries, and displays content has been redesigned. Users can view a
preview of a document before opening it, and can even interact with it to a
limited degree. Results are often grouped or prioritized based on search
frequency, ratings, and context. The new Search is a rich area for improving
usability of SharePoint sites, and I look forward to exploring it further.
Bonus: Project Server
Project Server and SharePoint have been closely aligned
since SharePoint’s beginning. With each new release, the two platforms become
more integrated. There are those who even believe that eventually Project
Server will become a fully integrated part of SharePoint, becoming in essence
Project Services to parallel Access Services, etc. In this edition, Project
Server is also an optional component of Office 365 as well as being available
for onsite implementation. One of the most exciting features that I saw was
that not only can you publish a Project Professional plan to a SharePoint task
list (without Project Server), but
that that plan can then later be converted to a published plan in Project Server. In this way, the
project manager and directors/executives can still leverage all of the resource
and portfolio management tools in Project Server, while team members and
stakeholders can view (and in some cases, even interact) with the plan in the
SharePoint site. This opens up a whole new workflow paradigm, especially for
those teams or organizations who have been reluctant to use Project Server, yet
use SharePoint for the nuts and bolts of project documentation and
collaboration.
Note: Task lists themselves have had an amazing makeover,
and I can’t be more excited about the prospect of teaching this new
functionality. I don’t have the space to go into everything here, but in the
context of project management I do want to point out one innovation. A
soon-to-be-released App was previewed at a session I attended. This app will
allow users to view and manage a Task list in a graphical “tile wall,” typical
of agile project management. Again, this could be a huge improvement in
functionality for organizations that feel their project management style has
not been a good fit for Project / SharePoint. 