Mark Kashman (@mkashman), Senior Product Manager at Microsoft presented on the New SharePoint Online (e.g. as part of Office 365). It’s currently in a preview mode so it’s only in three data centers but it will launch next year.
This version is the first version designed as part of a service rather than a product which makes it more cloud friendly.
At a Glance
They have done a lot of work to increase the amount of files, size of files, size of what you can put online. This means increased scale for larger companies. The image below includes a number of change
changes made to SharePoint Online
- There is, of course, a brand new look and feel that looks more like what you expect with Windows 8 UI. You will also see a lot of simplified interfaces to hopefully make your experience easier.
- You can now make guest links for non-SharePoint users to access content in SharePoint. This is mainly geared towards sharing of documents.
- You can now use Powershell online
- There are native mobile apps which will hit the online. It include Windows 8 and iOS
- BI: PowerPivot and PowerView are available now. Build offline and then publish online
- You can do a hybrid search. FAST has had a lot of changes.
- Microsoft Project will come online. It’s an add-on as a separate web app called project web app. (Mark noted that Project has been ready for a while, they just needed to make some changes first.)
- The cloud app model with a separate and loosely coupled app works perfectly in SharePoint online. (see the notes on the keynote). It essentially lets you push the app to SharePoint and SharePoint Online provisions a Windows Azure server to run the app and make sure it’s securely accessible from SharePoint
- Question: the new guest links, is it available to just documents or are other types of content shareable? Answer: for now it’s only documents.
- Question: How do solutions like Bamboo work? Answer: the ecosystem of ISVs is available. They have been doing “Ignite” training and will support a sandbox for these vendors to test and ensure these solutions built on SharePoint remain accessible. If you go to dev.office.com, you can start to muck with the dev app model. (per Mark but I may have misunderstood)
- There is a new tool called Napa (??) that is Visual Studio site that would allow you to develop everything online. This helps you make a hosted app that is available on a hundred site collections. Takes advantage of the new cloud app model I’m sure.
- Question: with SharePoint online, do I get the full Office apps? Yes, you can either access Office online or as part of the subscription you can download the full office apps.
- Question: Can you tell me what the experience would be for just one line of business using the hybrid tools. Can you easily combine this? The answer is yes. Mark promises to walk him through this. In Exchange, the call this “federation co-existence”
- BCS was brought to the cloud late and only half of it was brought in a patch release early on in the Office 365 lifecycle. Now, you have much more access to BCS functions and you have access directly to SQL Server on Azure.
- Hybrid search will allow you to search both online and on premise indexes. This makes it easier to combine SharePoint on Premise and Online. Brad Stevenson is the expert when it comes to this. See a concurrent session on Hybrid Search. FYI, Microsoft is starting to move all team and portal sites to SharePoint online and they will use hybrid search. This will be a multi-year process for Microsoft.
- Question: How many different site collections can you setup per tenant. Right now it’s one public site per tenant. Online allows up to 3,000 site collections so perhaps there will be the ability to change that. That depends on decisions made above Mark since it’s technologically feasible.
- SkyDrive Pro extends SkyDrive to SharePoint. Pro just means the files are stored in SharePoint and available online. It works really well with SharePoint online because the setup is already done for you. It also includes folder sync for team site libraries. SkyDrive pro will give you a lot more space. Up fron 500 MB to 7 Gigs.
- Question: can you talk to he BI features? Aside from PowerView and PowerPivot, Online also support Excel services. You can access data from a number of locations outside of the cloud. The big question is latency from cloud to on-premise data. To be clear, the powerpivot gallery will not be supported online.
- Question: What are the updates like in SharePoint Online? The SharePoint Online does service pack or cumulative updates for you. They send a notification email and note that there will be a read only email of 30 minutes. They resend at 48 hours before the update. It is abstracted from normal users and mostly abstracted from the tenant admins. The upgrade from Office 365 (SharePoint 2010) to the new SharePoint online will be an optional experience. You can run the upgrade on each site collection. Caveat: once you commit then there’s no going back.
- SharePoint Dedicated instances have a different upgrade path. But the idea of an upgrade is that they db schema and the site collection upgrades are de-coupled. Schema upgrades take 30 minutes to do. Once done, you have the ability to upgrade on a site collection by site collection basis.
- Question: Can you dump content from SharePoint Online to an on-premise installation. Technical answer: No but tools like AvePoint, Quest, Tsunami, and others would allow you to target a source and “migrate” it to your on-premise. It’s actually the reverse of a lot of the ‘to the cloud’ migration.
- Question: what can BCS hit? Anything you want but it requires a WCF endpoint for each of the data sources.
More Proof Points
Mark had to cut the questions short so he could get to his second slide. There are a number of things that are different between online and on-premise.
Online and on-premise still have some key differences.
Demo
- You can embed a document with an embed link in a variety of places. That’s a great use of RESTful type services to do what slideshare does. Two thumbs up on this.
- Office 365 has a new top navigation to access Outlook, newsfeed, people, skydive, and sites
- Storage ranges from small business to large enterprises. They are designing to support 2GB documents. They will charge $0.20 per GB per month.
Cloud based applications are becoming more popular. People are consuming content in different ways and need to access files remotely. The need for more space makes cloud based applications attractive.