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The Death of SharePoint?

It wasn’t long ago that SharePoint was the little upstart in a world filled with established document, records, and web content management systems. Now SharePoint is the old swiss army knife that admins are figuring out how to get value from and people are learning to use. A swiss army knife in a world of flashy and focused paring knives, all claiming to make document sharing and content management simple and easy. SharePoint can do a million things, but those million things get in the way of people just trying to share a document and have it on every device they use. Where your content lives is a critical decision, you will likely be tied to that solution for a long time. You want the best solution for your organization, how do you pick the right one? With so many new options out there, some claim SharePoint is dead.

The reports of SharePoint’s death are greatly exaggerated. In fact SharePoint is growing fast and the SharePoint product development team is focused on what matters to people more than ever before. If you are using SharePoint or thinking about using SharePoint, then join us for the upcoming AIIM webinar on July 23rd: Take the FUD Out of Implementing SharePoint - Just Ask the Folks at Microsoft . You will hear from myself, a longtime member of the SharePoint product development team, and Andrew SanAgustin from the Microsoft Records Management team.

SharePoint’s Past

Back six years ago excitement was high on the SharePoint product development team. SharePoint had just crossed the $1 billion in annual revenue mark. As a member of the SharePoint team I was there when we celebrated with the team gathering in Microsoft’s Building 16 to hear from the father of SharePoint, Jeff Teper. But what we were really excited for was the upcoming release of SharePoint 2010. Maybe it is just nostalgia, but it felt like magic was in the air as we put the finishing touches on SharePoint 2010 and announced its release at SharePoint Conference 2009.

Content Management Today

Fast forward six years and the content management landscape looks a whole lot different. Cloud services have empowered organizations of any size to deliver employee productivity and collaboration through file sharing, document synch, and mobile device access to corporate resources. Anyone looking for the right solution will find many options. Many of these options are new, and when new solutions successfully arise, the imminent death of the incumbent is declared. 2 in 3 enterprise users have SharePoint, which sure makes Microsoft look like the incumbent.

But possibilities to turn information chaos into information opportunity remain enormous. Almost half of all U.S. private sector workers are employed by companies with fewer than 500 employees. The results of a Microsoft survey show 86% of small business owners believe technology is important to their success, but only 30% are currently using cloud technology. Having worked with small businesses for years, I know the challenges they face. They often don’t have full time IT staff, they run systems without backup solutions and governance. They struggle to unlock and share the knowledge of their employees. The majority of small businesses out there still need great information management and productivity solutions. Cloud technology makes that possible.

SharePoint and Office 365 have solutions these small businesses as well as medium and large businesses need.

SharePoint and Office 365 Growth

SharePoint doubled in size between 2008 and 2012 and the truth is SharePoint and Office 365 are growing. Fast. Office 365 is now on a $2.5 billion annual run rate.

Here are some statistics from the keynote at SharePoint Conference 2014 held in March 2014.

·         500% active SharePoint user growth

·         Double digit SharePoint revenue growth

·         Office 365 $1.5 billion in revenue in 2013

·         60% of Fortune 500 using Office 365

But SharePoint isn’t just SharePoint. The acquisition of Yammer, which more than 400,000 companies are using, and integration with Exchange, Lync, and the Office clients are what make SharePoint more than the sum of its parts. Powerful solutions are created by leveraging capabilities across SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, Yammer, and the Office clients. This adds up to solutions that enable your organization to do more and be more.

SharePoint, Yammer, and Office 365 Innovation

At SharePoint Conference 2014 Microsoft announced key new innovations including the Office Graph, Azure Media Service integration, Yammer integration, Oslo, 1TB site collections, 25GB OneDrive for Business sites as a standalone option, multi factor authentication, and the Office 365 Compliance Center.

OneDrive for Business is becoming easier and simpler with site folders, smarter search, and simpler controls. Plus you get existing capabilities including document synch and compliance controls such as eDiscovery and retention.

SharePoint continues to grow and deliver innovation. With Office 365, you can stop worrying about managing servers and focus on delivering value. New capabilities arrive in Office 365 all the time. And if you aren’t ready for the cloud, there will be another on premises SharePoint release in 2015.

The reports of SharePoint’s death are greatly exaggerated. So to learn more about implementing SharePoint and to ask me those burning quesitons you might have be sure to attend Take the FUD Out of Implementing SharePoint - Just Ask the Folks at Microsoft on July 23rd. To learn more about SharePoint ECM take a look at my own Compliance, eDiscovery, and ECM blog.

Quentin Christensen, Program Manager, Microsoft