SharePoint Conference 2012 Keynote

As expected, Microsoft had a lot to highlight in their two hour key note.   Rich Wood graciously let me capture the highlights of the entire session while he will hit on a few topics to give them justice.  But first, the stats:

• 10,000 attendees
• From 85 countries
• 200 sponsors and exhibitors

It started out with a few key announcements that many will find interesting. Of most import is the fact that as of SharePoint 2013, Microsoft will no longer follow a three year release cycle. instead, they intend to push out updates every 90 days.  This will happen on Office 365 automatically.  We will see a faster release cycle for installed instances but time will tell what that cycle is.  It should be faster than three years though.
Jeff Teper, walked us through the agenda which includes three key categories.

1. Experience
2. Innovation
3. Ecosystem

Experiences

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Jeff Teper, corporate VP SharePoint
2.5 years ago, split the engineering team to work on Office 365 and the next release of SharePoint.  This including the laying of the infrastructure to allow for 90 day releases.

• Showed the new interface which runs on any browser.  It was Office 365
• This has the new Windows 8 look and feel
• Documents has a better experience
  • Personal Document feature is SkyDrive Pro.  It’s on the mysite
  • Can follow documents across the entire SharePoint site
  • FAST provides documents recommendations
  • Integration with Office to remember where you were in the document
    • Like Kindle for example
• Search is also much improved.  The search is scoped from your location
• It’s now much more social, it allows you to see who has seen it and do it inline
• Jeff also showed a drag and drop features without the need for active x control
• The hover panel shows a preview of the document
• The Ribbon is gone (yeah!)  All you have now is a sync button.

• Skydrive Pro is available with the Surface but working on iOS, Android, and other applications.
• Sites hub has been completely redesigned
  • Includes the sites published, sites you follow, and even recommendations.
  • Ribbon has also changed. It’s much simpler with share, follow, and sync.
  • The sites feature is very AJAX friendly.  You can change the look of the site much easier.
  • The starting page also includes a newsfeed and recent documents.
  • The newsfeed has a lot of functionality inline to let you work within the feed.
    • It’s a conversation type view which can be filtered.
    • You can embed video in the feed.
    • Posts include the ‘@’ to highlight people and have conversations.  Also allows you to use’#’ to tag it.
• Includes a task aggregator so you can see everything from all your sites in one place.  This includes tasks from Outlook.
• You can follow people, document, sites, and tags.
• Probably the most anticipated features includes the mobile version of this.   Jeff showed a windows phone app available in the windows phone marketplace.  They are working on iOS.  No Droid. (Doh!)
• Note: the demo was run off Office 365 against a datacenter in Europe.  He wanted to highlight the speed of the back end.
• Yammer. Microsoft acquired Yammer to take social to the next level.
  • Yammer’s development cycle is very analytics feedback focused. Look at what’s enhancing productivity and what’s not being used.  Let things like that drive the next set of improvements.
  • Of course, Yammer existing as a cloud offering also excited Microsoft.
  • Social Networking gives a new way to communicate that dramatically improves the ability to find and interact with people.
  • Yammer has over 200,000 organizations in the network. This include 855 of the fortune 500 across 150 countries and 24 languages.
  • 61% of organizations have an enterprise social network
  • David Sachs and Adam Pisoni spoke on Yammer
  • “social has been both the catalyst for change and the solution to deal with the massive influx of information.”
  • Social should help people work better regardless of where they are.
    • That means putting Yammer into the tools people use.
• Integrating Yammer and SharePoint
  • OpenGraph is used to integrate the two
  • New button in the ribbon allows you to post to Yammer
  • Want to make it easy to share and talk about files in SharePoint today.
    • New option allows you to select a file from SkyDrive.
    • The file remains in SharePoint but you can discuss it, preview it, etc.
    • Yammer is working on an integration with Office where you can discuss it from within Word for example.
  • Yammer will soon release a native Windows 8 app.
• Yammer’s roadmap includes:
  • Today: basic integration with open graph and web parts
  • Tomorrow with deeper integration to feeds, documents and identity
  • The future will include new experiences that embed social with collaboration, email, IM, and voice/video
  • They want everyone to have access to Yammer.   This means that Yammer will still be available for free with a startup package.
  • All SharePoint online customers will get Yammer for free
  • Yammer will also be included at part of Office 365
• Nationwide insurance posted a video about their Yammer and SharePoint experience
  • They call it spot.
  • They wrapped the search around Yammer and SharePoint
    • That’s the biggie.
  • Of course, creating with a nicer interface didn’t hurt either.

Innovation

Innovation represents a huge area of change in SharePoint 2013.  From full support for any browser or OS to the inclusion of the recent Yammer acquisition, they have something for you.  Richard Riley showcased some of these features.

• SharePoint now has a single search engine.
• The search included typical type ahead and what they call personal “refind” links which show what you’ve search before
• The look and the feel has a hover card which previews some of the content. Clicking on the preview takes you to that point in the document
• It has a bunch of query rules so when you type in marketing deck, it understands that ‘deck’ is powerpoint and not a search term.
• Search now plays a foundational role for web publishing, ediscovery, etc.
• You can now use any design tool to write master pages.  Once created, you upload them via the design manager.  Then you can use the snippet gallery to add SharePoint controls. The snippet gallery is a gui interface to grab a snippet and then paste into dreamweaver.
• Search now drives a lot of the content for things like recommendations.  This finally makes it useful for the outside world.
• eDiscovery has search at the core as well.   “Lawyers cost money” so keep more in your pocket.  This is a big deal because FAST now spans Exchange and SharePoint.  Once discovered, you can place a hold on the content.
  • This will allow things like preview of the content
  • You can also export it and hand it off to the lawyers
• Site mailbox brings Outlook and SharePoint together.  You can bring documents into a Site mailbox.  It allows drag and drop of documents from an email into the SharePoint SkyDrive
  • Rich Wood calls this a big deal.
  • What’s coming: Move to the cloud and Office 365 to get the fastest upgrade path.  Microsoft really wants to push you to the cloud.
  • Architecture and IT represent significant investment

Ecosystem

The bigger SharePoint gets, the more you require enterprise scale and easier and faster ways to create and distribute applications.  This release leaves no doubt that building out the world for developers and admins continues.  One key note, the them is “cloud”

• Michal Gideoni showcased some of the enhancements.
• You can upgrade to 2013 right away without upgrading every single site collection.   A site collection could be moved and remain as a 2010 asset.
  • This includes a site collection health check wizard to help you plan it.
  • When you are ready to upgrade, do it via the site console
• SharePoint 2013 makes a 40% better use of bandwidth.  This includes optimized image compression, better use of caching.
  • 50% reduction in server side latency with better tuning of SQL Server
• 2013 has improved the IO with changes so that delta changes are captured rather than an entire new version of a document
  • This really cuts down on the size of the back end db
  • Building applications has become easier to build and easier to consume.
    • The Microsoft cloud includes Dynamics, Office 365, and Azure (cloud os)  The question is how do you develop to include the idea that SharePoint and other functionality can exist anywhere.
    • This release introduces a new cloud app model.
      • First: Let the app run across cloud and on site
      • Second: make the execution model loosely coupled
      • Support open source standards like oauth, open social, AJAX, etc.
• Demo
  • Visual Studio 2012 uses the Windows 8 ui as well.
    • New projects actually create two new projects
    • Lets you take advantage of all the new libraries
  • Model
    • Develop on the local machine but for the first time, you can build a manifest for office 365.
    • Security uses oAuth
    • Then just build your changes into the app.
  • Deployment can be done from within Visual Studio.  You deploy to Office 365 for example.
    • In essence, Windows Azure will host an app on your behalf.
      • Upload to SharePoint
      • SharePoint then sets up the application with all the security setup to Windows Azure.  (pretty slick)
  • As Jeff Teper said, they have a huge push to using the cloud.
  • Can also use a provider model if you have your own SharePoint instance
    • Register on SharePoint and point to where the app exists on Azure or elsewhere
    • The demo included a lot of Windows Azure with the ability to scale, reserve cpu power, provide back end data services etc.  Message: Use Windows Azure to setup and scale quickly.

Heres the bottom line for innovation: the new app model delivers a lot of power in developers hands to build using powerful tools and then easily deploy to a variety of locations including both of Microsoft’s cloud options.