During a recent presentation, my colleague Matt Morse shared his thoughts around SharePoint 2013. Matt, a SharePoint practice director, responded to three questions about the new release that he’s frequently asked:
- Where is Microsoft going with SharePoint 2013?
- What do we know about SharePoint 2013?
- What’s new in SharePoint 2013?
In this post, I’ll cover the first question Matt addressed. I’ll summarize his answers to the second and third questions in subsequent posts.
Whether speaking with a customer, or a colleague, Matt said he often gets the question, “Where is Microsoft going with SharePoint 2013?” – or some derivation thereof. Without a doubt, there is a lot of buzz in the marketplace related to the SharePoint 2013 public preview that Microsoft recently released. As Microsoft went through the development of this new release, they boiled their investment down to two things and symbolized them with shapes: a heart and a cloud. These two giant investment areas were the main focus on the new product release.
The Heart
So, why the heart? Microsoft research indicates that 78% of Fortune 500 companies are SharePoint users. Despite the fact that SharePoint has made inroads with IT, users didn’t necessarily love it. In this wave, Microsoft wanted to focus on the user experience of the product. Microsoft’s investment in the user experience was four times – both in terms of people and money from a research perspective – the amount of any prior version of SharePoint. Central to this investment was the end user experience, allowing users to fall in love with the product. Let’s make this an experience that people love and look forward to using every day.
Also related to the heart is compatibility. Microsoft wanted to make SharePoint compatible. Sure, the product worked great when on Windows and using Internet Explorer. But what happened if you used your iPad or some other kind of device? Microsoft focused intensely on making the new version compatible – no matter what the device. You choose the device, you choose the technology, and you can consume the content that SharePoint 2013 makes available.
In mobile situations, today’s user is very accustomed to the idea of an app store. Regardless of whether you are using an Android, Apple, or Windows device, you can go to the marketplace and extend the capability of the platform. SharePoint has always been an extensible platform, but it was complex to do so. Fortunately, in SharePoint 2013, there is an app store. This feature extends the functionality of the platform in a consumer friendly manner.
Social and search are also areas that appeal to the heart. Microsoft wanted to make the experience similar to what users see when they log on to consumer technology, i.e. Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Moreover, many individuals that go to the Internet looking for something start with the search experience – using Bing, Google, etc. They wanted to fuse this consumer grade search experience into SharePoint.
The Cloud
The second shape is perhaps not a mystery to those of us in the technology field. There is certainly a trend of moving information out of corporate data centers into shared cloud space.
One of the things that SharePoint 2013 provides is much more parity in the Office 365 offering with what you would get if you installed it in an on-premise scenario. Office 365 is the branded version of Microsoft’s hosted versions of SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync that they have available in the Cloud.
SharePoint 2013 enables a number of use cases for SharePoint Online that did not exist in the past. Companies didn’t have a choice before – what they wanted to do on the platform wasn’t available with Office 365.
Before moving on from this question, Matt reminded us that this is a high level overview of where Microsoft made its investments in SharePoint 2013 – investments that allow users to love the platform, and make sure it’s available in either a cloud scenario or a corporate data center. In my next post, I’ll cover the second question, where Matt explained what we know about SharePoint 2013, and how we know it.
