Microsoft SharePoint News

Since this is the week for Sharepoint’s conference, I thought I would track the news from the conference.

Quick hits and info:

• Microsoft has sold 125 million licenses of sharepoint
• Sharepoint 2010 has sold 62 million licenses so far
• SharePoint by itself would be one of the top 50 software
  firms
• 67% of firms have deployed Sharepoint
• SharePoint rated # 1 in satisfaction, awareness,
  etc.

Three Guiding Priciples for SharePoint:

1. Redefine collaobration
2. Unleash the ecosystem
3. Build a world-class platform

Redefine collaboration

It’s about self-service for IT. It’s about self-service business intelligence (BI).  It’s about using Excel, Access services, etc. to create custom views and publishing to SharePoint.  Note that this is more about data in the self service.

Collaboration should include a common social fabric wherever you may be in the intranet.  It should also be tied in with other communcation tools.  This includes Outlook social connector where you can see what others are doing in SharePoint, Facebook, etc.

Collaboration should transcend the company. It should extend collaboration to customers and partners.  Sharepoint for internet sites shows huge growth.  Spacex uses SharePoint for collaboration, production tracking, secure content, and even social.  Spacex also uses it for sharing with partners via their extranet.

Next Release isn’t a focus of this conference but it’s in play now and promises to be a huge and ground breaking release.  They are using 4 times the number of visual designers for the next release of SharePoint.

Unlease the Ecosystem

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Announcement: the first update to Office 365 will include Business Connectivity Services to enable it to integrate to a variety of different systems.

Announcement: Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) as a new certification will allow you to understand who has true enterprise SharePoint depthc.

Big focus is on Visual Studio, REST, and Business Connectivity Services.  If you are a developer, you should be looking at this.

Building a World Class Platform

Microsoft has tried to build a unified platform.  Document Management can be brought together with collaboration for example.  Supporting real time updating of a notebook is another example.  This brings a new level of support for key business needs.

This brings more “knobs” in admin management.  Governance should be key to any large enterprise implementation.  Microsoft just published scalability testing results.  They showed off a huge SAN with a virtual Sharepoint server farm with 1 Terrabyte of memory.  (microsoft.com/vision for the logical architecture).  The database has 14.4 Terrabytes of data.  They pulled wikipedia content to showcase this.

The server farm can run around 150,000 people in concurrent sessions.  The FAST index has over 107 million items with sub-second response time.  SQL Server Denali in “always on” configuration allows for high availablity.  For Disaster Recovery, they showed pulling the network connectivy of the first DB and within 20 seconds, a failover of the entire site to the backup db.  This was a failover of a 14.4 Terrabyte db and the complete SharePoint farm.

Microsoft’s Strategy

1. Continue to lead in office producivity, portals, etc.
2. Bring the products you know and love and make sure they work in the cloud
3. Deliver a unified platform on the client, server, cloud, etc.

Cloud

First two weeks of Office 365 saw 50,000 organizations sign up for it. Microsoft believes that the online experience will drive a lot of adoption in the near future.

A few key statistics:

• 65% are deploying social networking withing organizations
• 84% of organizations allow remote and mobile work
• 4 million millenials enter the workforce each year
• 70% of IT budgets are spent maintaining inflexible and siloed data or systems each year

Office 365 provides Lync, Exchange, Sharepoint, and Office in the cloud.  It’s also about tying the cloud back to the clients or users.  80% of the Office 365 small and medium size business have never used Exchange and other servers.

Key messaging for Office 365

• Save Money
• Enable the cloud on your terms
• Connect people around the world
• supplement scarce IT resources

Azure

They showed a voting for charity applications using a back end db to capture the data and then send it to a Sharepoint List.  The Sharepoint list provides the data necessary to create a rich set of charts that show real time voting progress.  The bottom line is that it took an online database and the use of services to push it wherever it needs to go.