In the world of SharePoint, 2013 was all about showing that there’s a runway for success, while 2014 will be about companies actually getting on that runway and taking off. As described by David Roe on CMSWire, two major pieces of the runway missing are the integration of Yammer and Microsoft’s cloud first policy.
While the longevity of SharePoint has been put into question with Microsoft’s acquisition of Yammer and the roll-out of Office 365 with SharePoint Online, David quotes some strong statistics that I believe demonstrate how the tool is a hard habit to break. An estimated 125 million SharePoint licenses have been sold, and 67 percent of companies with SharePoint are providing access to all enterprise users, Roe reports.
SharePoint 2013 introduced an increase in social enterprise features, however the official party line has been to use Yammer when applying social within the Microsoft ecosystem. It only takes a minute or two to see that neither the built-in social features are fully functional, nor the roadmap for Yammer/SharePoint integration is a straight and smooth path. Don’t get me wrong, working in collaboration all these years, Yammer was the tool that opened my eyes to social capabilities, which are successfully changing the way we look at applications.
Another big push has been the “cloud first” and the delayed delivery, from late 2012 to mid-2013, of the new Office 365 demonstrated the complexity and power of multiple services in one centralized location. Very large organizations have received economy of scale, and small organizations have gained capabilities that they could never have access to in the past. The availability of social features in SharePoint Online allows users to “push information around the enterprise at a rate that was previously impossible,” Roe notes. For example, the ability to follow sites and documents and tag content makes the system more user-friendly.
These successes point many companies down the runway, but a fog of doubt stops them from adding gas to take flight. The excitement is building for the Microsoft SharePoint Conference in March to see if Microsoft will provide guidance and a roadmap of how SharePoint and Yammer will integrate.
Source: CMSWire, December 2013
