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SPC Keynote: For IT Pros

This is going to be a hard hitting session with lots of stats and lots of new features delivered rapid fire.  Hence my heavy use of bullets. 30% of all IT spending will be in the cloud by 2020.  It’s IT as a service.  Keep in mind, SharePoint is one product but there are many clouds:

  • 30% of all IT spending will be in the cloud by 2020Infrastructure as a Service
  • Platform as a Service like MySPC
  • Software as a Service – Office 365

The cloud is massively scaleable.  The hands on lab leverage 6,000+ cores and terabytes of memory and capacity assigned to the labs. Would be impossible to do without the cloud.
Microsoft wants to enable IT Pros by building the tools to help you be the value added service broker.
SharePoint Server 2013

  • November 2012 launched
  • Launched multiple features throughout the year
  • Just launched Service Pack 1 launched 2/15/2014)

With Service Pack one, you have the tools to be the cloud on ramp broker.  This service pack contains all the cumulative updates and the public updates.  Even more so, it’s about the functionality.  That includes:

  • One Drive for Business
    • Personal storage in the cloud.  It’s the rebrand
    • Added a lot of new funcitonality
    • Better Yammer integration
    • Windows Server 2012 R2 support
    • Better JSON Light support
      • Now less verbose JSON for the developer

Now also have new compliance capabilities
Added 5 classifications

  • Finland
  • Poland (3 separate classifications)
  • Taiwan

Demo

  • Have an Office 365 options
    • Can configure Yammer
      • Easy.
      • It’s on or it’s off
      • By activating Yammer you replace the newsfeed in SharePoint
  • Can configure One Drive sites and links
    • Associate My Site with your tenancy
    • Don’t need to deploy all users. Can specify audience by user(s) or group(s)
    • Can redirect pages in sites
      • Elect to redirect to cloud when creating “NEW” sites
      • Nice on ramp
      • One drive is a redirect to the cloud
        • It’s a simple process and MSFT keeps on pounding that we are “value added service broker”
        • When you click on Yammer, you are taken automatically to the Yammer UI
          • Integration is link and SSO, not necessarily combined UI
          • All these changes focus on a staged approach in your on-ramp to the cloud.
            • Aggregate the data across the cloud
            • I would love to hear about hybrid search

Calendar

  • You will see the next version of SharePoint, Exchange, and Lync on Premise

Office Innovation for IT Pros

Delivered a wealth of innovation within Office 365. One way to do it is with massive scale.  Think of this

  • 1 PB of tenants is billions of documents
    • Print this out and it would be 1,300 miles tall
    • Trust and Control – code name Fort Knox
      • Quote: the most innovative thing you will see when it comes to security
      • Last year supported shredded storage
      • Now they will support encryption of it. When you combine with shredded storage then you get a really hard to hack set of docs
      • Multi-factor authentication
        • Security questions are now supported
        • This came out in June 2013 on Office 365 for admins
        • On February 10th they extended this capability to users.
        • All users are synced to Active Directory.  This means that on premise users can be enabled for multi-factor………but only in the cloud
        • It’s for the web and the app experience.  It can be enforced for the phone, office apps, etc.
        • It’s very similar to the Microsoft Live implementation of two factor authentication
        • Encryption at Rest
          • Big support need for HIPPA
          • Yes, the focus is on seamless integration between on premise and hybrid but security continues to be enhanced.

Hybrid Cloud approaches

MSFT knows that realistically, it’s not easy to move everything to the cloud.  Your old experience is that they use power shell and a host of other tools.  Now, you can do power shell administration in the cloud. You can do directory synchronization.  IT Pros can build a completely new skill set.
Search

  • Yes, you can do hybrid search with query federation
  • That meant two discrete result sets with the resulting challenges
  • But it’s a step at least
  • Going forward, we will see more investment in search
  • Will do a remote index.  Crawl the cloud and create a single index
    • So good bye two result sets.

New Announcement: New IT Professional Network. Want to bring all the conversations together.  If you visit Yammer.com today you will see the IT Pro network.

Bottom Line

Microsoft has wasted no time this past year ensuring that you can manage both on premise and cloud based options. I’m especially impressed with the security and compliance additions. I work a lot with healthcare and the security and compliance question never ceases.

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Michael Porter

Mike Porter leads the Strategic Advisors team for Perficient. He has more than 21 years of experience helping organizations with technology and digital transformation, specifically around solving business problems related to CRM and data.

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