SharePoint Summit Will Emphasize 'Connected Workplace' with Office 365
Microsoft is expected to share what's next for SharePoint during an event scheduled for May 16 and it should come as no surprise the announcements involve further integration with Office 365, OneDrive, Yammer, Windows, PowerApps, Flow and the new Microsoft Teams chat service.
Corporate VP Jeff Teper, who oversees SharePoint and Office 365, is scheduled to lead the virtual event, joined by Corporate VPs James Phillips and Chuck Friedman, who will explain how Office 365, connected with Windows and Azure, "is reinventing productivity for you, your teams and your organization," according to the invite posted by Microsoft. In addition to introducing new products, the company at this point has only indicated that attendees will "learn how to create a connected workplace." Vague as that is, the teaser is consistent with Microsoft's focus on bringing a more social and connected user experience with SharePoint and Office 365.
The roadmap update is scheduled slightly more than one year after Microsoft held its Future of SharePoint event in San Francisco, where Teper introduced the new SharePoint Framework, marking the official launch of SharePoint Server 2016. At last year's launch, Microsoft promised to release upgrades to the on-premises server edition in 2017 but said the company will continue to emphasize Office 365 and hybrid cloud implementations. The forthcoming event isn't being promoted as a major launch but as an informational update that will include some release news.
It continues to beg the question: to what extent are SharePoint shops embarking on moving the collaboration suite to the cloud, either hybrid or purely online? As noted last week, a survey conducted by a team of graduate students at the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University and Christian Buckley's CollabTalk, which is sponsored by Microsoft, a number of ISVs and several media partners including Redmond magazine, aims to shed light on the extent to which SharePoint shops are moving to either hybrid or all-cloud deployments. According to preliminary results:
- 31 percent are using hybrid SharePoint solutions, with almost 50 percent remaining entirely on-premises.
- More than 60 percent of those with hybrid in place are managing SharePoint on-premises.
- Of those entirely on-prem, almost half plan to shift to hybrid within the next one to three years.
The survey is much deeper than that, and today's the last day to weigh in here. We look forward to sharing the results next month in advance of Microsoft's event.
Posted by Jeffrey Schwartz on 03/22/2017 at 11:53 AM