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The annual SharePoint Conference has been in the past the setting for important SharePoint announcements and this SPC14 is no exception! Clearly Microsoft has embraced the cloud model and social collaboration is at the forefront. Office 365 SharePoint Online will no longer be the limited version of SharePoint, rather it will be at the forefront for new features and enhancements.
As part of the Keynote, Microsoft laid out its vision that brings together the power of the cloud, social, big data, and mobile capabilities into an experience made personal for every Office 365 user.Microsoft positioned their vision as the “Future of Work” that enables a networked way of working together in teams, in groups and across organizations that can result in better customer responsiveness, collaboration, information sharing, discover-ability and more. Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jeff Teper stated “Today, the world has become a giant network where connections make information more relevant and people more productive. Most companies, however, are not working like a network, which we believe is vital for their ability to improve collaboration and respond to customers, competition and market changes” Further he said “The new Office 365 experiences powered by cloud, social, mobile and big data technologies enable people and teams to find the right connections and most relevant insights to get more done.” Microsoft argues that this will help people spend less time trying to find information or looking for people working on similar projects and more time getting things done. And that is good.
What became clear in executing the vision is that Office 365 platform will be the focus and the first to get new features with Azure solidifying its place as the unifying backbone across Office, SharePoint, Yammer and more. Specifically here are the highlights of the new announcements: Office 365
Social
What became clear in executing the vision is that Office 365 platform will be the focus and the first to get new features with Azure solidifying its place as the unifying backbone across Office, SharePoint, Yammer and more. Specifically here are the highlights of the new announcements: Office 365
- Office 365 will be the focus and new SharePoint features will first appear there
- Full Social integration of Yammer in 365
- Video portal, using Azure services
- New Power BI capabilities
- Full integration on Apple, Android and Microsoft Devices
- One Drive for Business for 365
- Simplified global RESTful API
- Preview of new REST based Office 365 APIs for developers
- Increased Storage limits
- Unclear long term vision, however did announce next version will be in 2015 – 16 timeframe
- It will get a subset of new features applied to Office 365
- More hybrid (on premise and cloud) capabilities
- On Drive for Business for On Premise and Hybrid models
- No replacement announced for InfoPath (glad we do not use it in our solutions!)
Social
- A new feature called “Groups” that allows users to create conversations across Yammer, Exchange email and calendars, and SharePoint team sites.
- Previewed Oslo, and application to show users of Office 365 across SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, Yammer and Office the content deemed most relevant and important to the individual user.
- and much more coming in this area.
