This blog post is an interview with Daniel Cohen-Dumani, CEO of Portal Solutions and OneWindow Workplace, on Microsoft’s upcoming SharePoint event, “The Future of SharePoint”.
The event will be celebration of SharePoint 2016 and Microsoft will also be unveiling their long term plan for the SharePoint platform and addressing some shorter term concerns as well. Read on for Daniel’s take on the event, and register for the event here if you are interested.
Interviewer:
Can you tell me a little bit about this event that’s happening on May 4th?
Daniel:
It’s a new way of delivering product information. Microsoft has not done a lot of that in the SharePoint world in the past. It’s an online event. I think they’ve got almost 10,000 people that have registered, and at the event Microsoft will unveil their vision and roadmap for the future of SharePoint. This will be presented by Jeff Teper, who’s corporate vice president for OneDrive and SharePoint.
Essentially, they plan to outline their vision, their roadmap for the on-premises and the cloud version of Microsoft SharePoint. It will start with a keynote, and then there will be numerous sessions. It’s not just a short event, it’s a three to four hour event. It will be a time of excitement, and hopefully everyone will get some insight to what’s going on.
Interviewer:
Tell me a little bit about the importance of this event. Is it just important for SharePoint, or is there a larger story here?
Daniel:
I think it’s important for a lot of reasons. I think that there has been a lack of clarity and vision for SharePoint, all the way back to the last SharePoint conference in 2014. If you look back two years ago, Microsoft had what was known as the “SharePoint Conference,” which at that time attracted a huge amount of people. It was about 10,000, 12,000 people in Las Vegas two years ago. That’s when Microsoft started talking about some of the future for SharePoint.
At that time, they really said, “Hey, the future is in the cloud, nothing is going to happen on-premises.” As a matter of fact, we weren’t sure there was even going to be another version of SharePoint on-premises. That was two years ago. Fast forward a year ago, in May of 2015, and we heard slightly a different story, that there was still going to be SharePoint on-premises.
I think it was a lot of reaction from Microsoft community, I would say outrage or comments of negative feedback on this. Microsoft backtracked and said well, we’re still going to do on-premises, yet the future is still in the cloud, and here are some great capabilities.
A year ago, Microsoft kind of backtracked and said “Well, here’s our data strategy, but we’ve never had a long-term strategy.” They’ve never said “Hey, this is what’s going to happen two, three, four, five years down the road.” I’m hoping that’s some of what we’re going to hear from Microsoft at the event this Wednesday, May 4th. I’m hoping that we’ll hear a lot more about the long-term vision, the future.
Interviewer:
What are the top things you’re hoping to hear or get out of tomorrow?
Daniel:
The key take-away I hope to get is to understand the long-term vision, and to understand the steps that Microsoft is going to take to get there. That’s my hope. Short-term is also to better understand what’s coming in the next three months, six months, nine months. Again, it’s been sort of unclear, not sure, not a lot of clarity in the marketplace about the short-term future.
Interviewer:
Do you think excitement has been lacking?
Daniel:
I think it’s reinvigorating the excitement about SharePoint and the new 2016 release. It has been three of four years since people were last excited about SharePoint. Since then, I think they’ve been trying to figure their path. Are things going to the cloud, or on-premises? Which way? I think it’s been partly an internal struggle about what’s going to happen
Interviewer:
Last question, would you consider this a must watch event?
Daniel:
Yes, absolutely. If you’re interested in SharePoint, this is a must watch event!
For more information on this event and to register, visit Microsoft’s event page here.
