SharePoint Conference 2012 – Are we ready for SharePoint 2013?

Posted on February 4, 2013 Updated on November 1, 2013

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. Is that really true these days? With the advent of social tools, real time updates, gossip and rumours make it difficult for anyone to keep “secrets” (even for British royals!).

However, Microsoft’s choice to host the SharePoint Conference in Sin City was spot on once again. Las Vegas is still THE place where anything goes and where reality can be forgotten, even for just a few days. With any new products and launches, you are always going to get a lot of marketing hype and SharePoint 2013 is no different. With over 250 sessions and 10000 attendees to impress, Microsoft and its Partners did a great job entertaining us and taking us away from our day-to-day jobs and real world scenarios. The entertainment came not only in the form of Jon Bon Jovi and Gun’s n Roses concerts or Pamela Anderson’s surprise appearances but also materialised itself in the art of the possible of the new toys and displaying its flashy new features.
The big question however is whether some of these “dream scenarios” can actually become reality; for people like me, who spend the majority of time and a lot of effort trying to translate business requirements into deliverables, once again, this is the start of a new adventure 🙂

Apart from the disappointment of not receiving a complimentary Surface L, I will summarise my impressions into four separate strands:

CLOUD: SharePoint is now a 2 billion dollar a year business and there is no doubt that Microsoft is heavily committed to all aspects of collaboration and social but, by far, the biggest push seems to be towards “all-in” Cloud and SaaS. During the Keynote, Jeff Teper pointed out the big investments that have been made towards “global performance” and scalability backed by a live demo of some of the new SharePoint 2013 features on an Office 365 site hosted in Dublin! That should put to rest some of the concerns around lack of geo replication capabilities. Microsoft also announced that they are now committed to 90-day cycle releases, bringing fixes and new features to SharePoint without having to wait for a Service Pack or new Release. This alone could be massive.

APP MODEL
The backbone of the new “cloud model” is clearly the Microsoft Office Store and the new App Model. The ability to create standalone packages without server side deployments represent a huge shift from the way we do things today and the new streamlined user interface lends itself to easier customisation for the ever growing development community. The store is still in its infancy but you already get a flavour of the potential benefits, especially when combined with other cloud service such as Azure.

SEARCH: I think it is fair to say that the coolest demos were all search related. Search is probably the biggest architectural change in SharePoint 2013 mostly because the FAST engine is now baked into the product; so no more expensive FAST deployments to give SharePoint true enterprise search capabilities! Out of the box, you will now be able to surface data across Site Collections (finally!) and have the ability to play with indexed content in a way that was never possible before (think of how Amazon uses targeted results to present dynamic content to you). It was very disappointing however to find out during the “ask the experts” session that one of the key new search web parts will not be available on Office 365 (at least not for a while).
UPDATE October 2013: The CSWP is now available for Office 365 E3 plans.

SOCIAL: SharePoint is now finally social, yeah! Probably 3 years too late but at last Microsoft has built some decent social features into 2013 (how they left out the microblog feature in 2010, I will never know!). I am still trying to figure out how they got away with “cloning” not only the same features but also the same terms from Newsgator Social Sites. As a consultant, I will now find it very hard to sell plug-ins such as Newsgator, even though they will always provide added functionality. What will be even harder is to try to figure out how to upgrade existing SharePoint 2010 with Newsgator to SharePoint 2013 (stay tuned on that – post coming soon!).
Of course, there was a lot of anticipation for what the recent acquisition of Yammer would mean for SharePoint 2013. Unfortunately, as you probably know, not much was revealed during the conference and ever since. What did seem clear however is that Microsoft have big plans for Yammer, so much so that at times it felt like this was a reverse acquisition! Both Adam Pisoni and Jared Spataro confirmed that Yammer, who has become hugely successfully also thanks to its data driven approach, is already influencing the way Microsoft approaches software development (see 90-day cycle reference above) but did not give much away as to how the 2 products will integrate (if ever). When I asked Adam Pisoni if Yammer would ever be made available for on-premise customer, his answer was very direct: “We will never put Yammer on a DVD”.

CONCLUSION:
If I had to pick one word to describe the SharePoint conference this year, I would have to use “confused”.
Microsoft seems to have finally embraced change and I believe they are going down the right path but there are many conflicting messages that are being sent out. To give you a flavour of what I mean, when asked whether he would recommend Yammer or SharePoint 2013 to a customer that wanted to “become” social today, Jared Spataro replied “Definitely Yammer”. Does this mean the “death” of SharePoint on-premise? Have we just seen the last 3 year cycle? Hard to imagine right now. After all, as Jared Spataro himself stated 2/3 of SharePoint licensing revenue today comes from on-premise customers…

I am excited about SharePoint 2013 and I am currently setting out the strategy for a 2010 to 2013 upgrade for a major customer for both on-premise and online, but I do think we need to quickly exit the marketing hype and start to get some real enterprise experience before we can realise whether SharePoint is mature for the cloud in a way that would appeal to the majority of its users.

Happy SharePointing J