Sharepoint and the Evolution of Enterprise Social Networking

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SHAREPOINT AND THE EVOLUTION OF ENTERPRISE SOCIAL NETWORKING

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> Microsoft Details Plans to Integrate Yammer with Office 365, SharePoint Page 9 > Working Together: Office and SharePoint Page 13 Untitled-1 1 10/11/12 4:29 PM SharePoint and the Evolution of Enterprise Social Networking

Key Piece Microsoft’s plan to upgrade SharePoint in the cloud first is complete, but the puzzle for IT is still coming together. BY JEFFREY SCHWARTZ

ow that Microsoft has released SharePoint 2013 and its online counterpart via the latest rev of Office 365, IT decision makers must choose whether to deploy it in-house or use the latest cloud-based iterations of the Ncollaboration platform. In many cases decision makers may have less influence—and in some instances absolutely no say—in that decision. That’s because those who manage line-of-business apps can now sidestep IT and procure SharePoint in the cloud on their own, thanks to a variety of self-service options from cloud providers and the new Microsoft SharePoint Online service. That service is available in the revamped release of Office 365, which Microsoft released on Feb. 27. Moreover, customers can opt to have Microsoft or a third party

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build apps and manage their SharePoint instances in the cloud. But even in midsize and larger shops, where IT’s role may be changing, it’s far from diminished. Most enterprises are still aligning their tech- nology organizations with the business, whether they continue to run SharePoint in-house or in the cloud. “The business side is interested in transferring capital expenditures to operational expenses, but there’s resistance from those who manage the infrastructure side of the business because there’s the perception they’re going to lose control,” says Sriram Jayaraman, director of technology for enterprise solutions at Aditi Technologies, one of Microsoft’s top cloud partners. Jayaraman says Aditi, with headquarters in both Seattle and Bangalore, India, explains to customers how IT can shift control to minimize the number of SharePoint workloads, so that they can focus on maintaining quality of service and business continuity. How do these discussions play out? “It’s not a one-time conversation, I’ll put it to you that way,” he admits. “We have to demonstrate how they can do that.” Analysts and partners say demand for the new SharePoint 2013 release is outpacing that of previous new versions at this stage. Some of the key selling points of the new SharePoint release are a modernized UI, improved support for mobile devices and social networking features “The innovation including some new ties to Yammer, the cloud-based enterprise social we’re bringing to networking service Microsoft acquired last year for $1.2 billion. the cloud will New SharePoint Code come to the Microsoft has updated the code base in SharePoint 2013, which is on-prem version the same cut of the software that powers SharePoint Online in Office afterward.” 365. The latter, of course, includes Exchange and Lync, all delivered in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The changes appearing in Mark Kashman, Senior SharePoint Product the new Office 365 SharePoint Online will work their way into an Manager, Microsoft update or service pack to the premises-based version of SharePoint 2013, which Microsoft released to manufacturing in November 2012 (see “Under the Hood of SharePoint 2013,” December 2012). The release of SharePoint Online in the new Office 365 release marks Microsoft’s completed transition toward adding new features to SharePoint by rolling them out first in the cloud version and subsequently in the premises-based edition, explains Mark Kashman, Microsoft senior SharePoint product manager. “The innovation we’re bringing to the cloud will come to the on-prem version afterward,” Kashman says.

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Most experts are in agreement that a growing number of SharePoint implementations will run in the cloud, either via the SharePoint Online service in Office 365 or through a cloud infra- structure provider such as Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), Rackspace U.S. Inc., Microsoft Windows Azure or thousands of alternative hosters and managed services providers (MSPs). Where the experts’ projections differ is the extent of SharePoint cloud implementations. A Forrester Research Inc. survey of IT decision makers shows 62 percent plan to deploy SharePoint 2013 on-premises, while only 8 percent will do so in a Microsoft datacenter, presumably via Office 365. Only 4 percent will run SharePoint in the datacenter of a Microsoft partner, while 26 percent will deploy SharePoint in a hybrid mode, both on-premises and online. While that shows a clear majority still planning to run SharePoint Most experts are in-house, it’s a marked decline over the current state of SharePoint in agreement deployments, in which 82 percent of surveyed companies are running it in their datacenters, 5 percent have hybrid implementations, 4 percent that a growing are using a Microsoft-hosted service and 5 percent are hosting it with number of a third-party provider. SharePoint Another survey recently released by Metalogix Software Corp. had similar findings, showing 55 percent intend to continue running implementations SharePoint entirely in-house and only 10 percent plan to run it purely will run in the in the cloud. The remaining 35 percent are planning hybrid SharePoint implementations. cloud. “While Microsoft has steadily improved the online version of SharePoint by eliminating functional gaps, customers are still moving slowly to adopt Microsoft’s Office and SharePoint cloud services,” according to a February Forrester report authored by analysts Rob Koplowitz and John Rymer. Nevertheless, the analysts expect that to shift. “Despite the current slow adoption of Microsoft’s SharePoint Online, we expect that customers will begin to adopt it in greater numbers as they eventually start seeing the service’s advantages,” they wrote. Others believe a much larger percentage of organizations will run SharePoint in-house, particularly those addressing larger enterprises. Errin O’Connor, CEO of Houston-based EPC Group, a consultancy that specializes primarily in Microsoft SharePoint and SQL Server solutions, says 80 percent of his customers intend to keep SharePoint on-site.

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“I don’t think the cloud has matured enough for large organizations with 1,000-plus users,” O’Connor says. “They’re not comfortable with deploying data in the cloud because of security. The cloud is good for quick SharePoint environments that people want to stand up that will play nice with IT, or for smaller organizations.” Shyam Oza, senior product manager for administration, migration and cloud strategy at AvePoint Inc., believes it’s hard to predict how rapidly SharePoint will move online. “I think those numbers are up in the air,” Oza says, when asked about the Metalogix survey. “While that number may be accurate as a snapshot of right now, I think that figure is in a state of constant flux. We’ve had phone calls with customers in the middle of last year who said, ‘We won’t go to the cloud, it’s not on our roadmap, our content is too sensitive.’ As recently as a week ago, [those same] customers have reached out to us and said, ‘We’re thinking of moving to SharePoint Online.’”

Case for the Cloud “There will Predictions and studies notwithstanding, it’s no secret that Microsoft is looking to ultimately wean as many SharePoint customers as possible always be large off of the datacenter and into the cloud. Most agree this won’t happen organizations and overnight, and there are some SharePoint implementations—existing governments that and future—that will never go off-site because of compliance, data governance or other regulatory requirements. will never move “There will always be large organizations and governments that their servers will never move their servers off-site. They’ll want control, but this technology is moving at such a fast pace that in seven to 10 years offsite.” the majority will be in the cloud,” says SharePoint MVP Christian Christian Buckley, Buckley, director of product evangelism at SharePoint tools vendor Director of Evangelism at Axceler Corp., Axceler. “Certainly SMBs will be 100 percent in the cloud and the SharePoint MVP large majority of enterprises will be in the cloud, as well, but hybrid will have a long life.” Stephen Murphy, CEO of Metalogix, attended a SharePoint conference last month and suggests his company’s findings that 35 percent are planning hybrid implementations may be on the low side. “The numbers definitely are dependent on the type of content,” Murphy says. “From a hybrid cloud perspective, we’re starting to hear regularly, ‘I’m going to move my social to the cloud, I’m using My Sites.’ Now we’re starting to see and hear file shares. There’s a massive amount of content, and customers are looking for alternate

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cost and availability models. When you’re talking about someone who’s looking at less-mission-critical content, I think their intention is to move to a cloud—Office 365 being one of [the options there]— and those numbers will increase.” Whether you use SharePoint 2013 on-premises or elsewhere, the new SkyDrive Pro component will give all users a taste of the cloud (see “Working Together,” p. 13). It will allow users to more securely share files in the cloud than public cloud services like Box, Dropbox and a slew of other services. “This is a much-needed enhancement to allow users to move between devices and have access to their content,” wrote Gartner Inc. analysts Mark Gilbert and Jeffrey Mann, in a report on SharePoint 2013 released in February.

Migration Issues Microsoft is talking up the parity of SharePoint 2013 and the online edition in Office 365. But critics point out that, while that’s fine for The new SkyDrive new applications, for shops with existing SharePoint farms on older versions, Office 365 is not designed to let IT simply move that content Pro component or apps with custom-developed or third-party applications to the cloud. will give all users Microsoft’s Kashman says while Office 365 indeed can’t run a taste of the so-called “trusted code” or apps designed to run on existing SharePoint farms on-premises, his team has worked closely with cloud. third-party tools providers and ISVs to mitigate that shortcoming. “We don’t see that as a blocker,” Kashman insists. Among those that offer SharePoint migration and management tools are AvePoint, Axceler, the Dell Quest Software unit and Idera Inc. For its part, Metalogix last month added Office 365 support to its Content Matrix migration software. The release in February of AvePoint DocAve 6 SP2 adds support for those migrating from older versions of SharePoint—as well as other content management offerings including EMC Documentum, IBM Lotus Notes and OpenText Livelink—to SharePoint 2013 and Office 365. And the newest update to Axceler ControlPoint for SharePoint Administration allows IT to enforce SharePoint governance in the 2013 release and Office 365. “Having good migration pathways and working with our partners to make sure their tooling is compliant with the changes we’ve made in 2013, it doesn’t mean you can’t go from 2007 to SharePoint Online, which is based on SharePoint 2013,” Kashman says. “There are things to be considered in the what—and how—but we think we’ve addressed that pretty well.”

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In addition to those running hybrid implementations, the improved SharePoint 2013 Business Connectivity Services (BCS) provides connectors to Office apps, SQL databases, the Open Data Protocol (OData), and other Web services protocols and .NET sources, as well as connectors to popular applications such as those provided by Oracle Corp. and SAP AG.

Alternative Cloud Options Many talk about SharePoint Online via Office 365 as the obvious option for running SharePoint in the cloud. But major Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers—including AWS, Rackspace, Dimension Data and even VMware vCloud Director-based IaaS provider Bluelock—say they have thriving businesses letting customers run SharePoint either via dedicated hosting services or on multi-tenant (shared) virtual servers. SharePoint MVP Shane Young, founder of SharePoint911, which Rackspace acquired last year, says there’s less reluctance from customers to run the collaboration service online, but he believes they want more control than Office 365 allows even with “If you look at its migration options. “If you look at Office 365, it’s a very cheap option, but it’s also Office 365, it’s not the most flexible option,” Young says. “Either your data is so a very cheap massive, or it’s corrupt and you’re afraid to touch and move it, or you’ve added so much custom code and add-ons that you know option, but it’s moving it to SharePoint 2010 or 2013 will be a monumental task also not the most because you’ll have to redeploy those customizations. For those flexible option.” people, Office 365 is not going to meet their needs because they’re Shane Young, Director not going to be able to move those customizations to a multi-tenant of SharePoint Service, shared environment.” Rackspace U.S. Inc. Young, now director of the Rackspace SharePoint Service, is aiming to capture those customers via a fully managed service Rackspace rolled out in February, where the company will actually build a SharePoint farm and provide support services running in its public IaaS offering. And within the next quarter or two, Young says Rackspace will offer SharePoint 2013 in its multi-tenant IaaS environment. With this multi-tenant SharePoint farm, a customer will essentially be buying SharePoint site collections from Rackspace. IT won’t have central admin access, nor will it be able to deploy code on the server, much like the Microsoft SharePoint Online offering.

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What’s the point of a SharePoint Online-like offering provided by a third party? According to Young: “There’s no moving your data out of Office 365 once you’re in there, and that’s going to be our value proposition.” AWS also has a significant customer base that uses its EC2 services to run their SharePoint farms. One of AWS’s largest integration partners, 2nd Watch Inc., offers what it describes as a superior alternative to Office 365 called 2W SharePoint. “What we’ve done is simplified that to one click, so a company with 1,000 users can have a SharePoint site running [on Amazon] within hours,” says Jeff Aden, co-founder and president of Seattle-based 2nd Watch. Customers can also use 2nd Watch to bring their own SharePoint licenses to Amazon. “In either case they end up with the same product—it’s just a question of how quickly they want to get there,” Aden says. The company last month announced a partnership with Slalom Consulting, which will work with clients to provide custom Microsoft is SharePoint development of applications hosted in Amazon via championing a 2nd Watch.

new cloud app Cloud App Store model for Whether you’re going to run SharePoint in the cloud, in your data- SharePoint 2013 center or in some combination thereof, Microsoft is championing a new cloud app model for SharePoint 2013 and Office 365. The and Office 365. apps for SharePoint can be found in the new Microsoft Office Store, where third-party ISVs can sell SharePoint tools, plug-ins, and apps either free or for a fee. Enterprises with their own in-house development organizations can also use the new SharePoint tooling in Visual Studio to build apps that can be offered in the public store or side-loaded into their SharePoint corporate catalogs, according to Kashman. Kashman says it’s early days for the new cloud app model, but he is optimistic that partners will quickly deploy new applications. “We think we’re going to see a lot of the ISV-level solutions coming into the store in the next four to six months, but we think at the same time, enterprise customers will have started to take advantage of the corporate catalog,” Kashman says. “We’ve gotten feedback that they will be taking more advantage of the cloud app model methods as opposed to writing code that sits in SharePoint.” R

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond.

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Microsoft Details Plans to Integrate Yammer with Office 365, SharePoint BY KURT MACKIE icrosoft’s plans for enterprise social networking will increasingly revolve around Yammer, with improvements rolling out this year, according to a Microsoft executive. Microsoft has two social networking applications, Mwhich may leave organizations a bit confused about where Microsoft’s product development is heading. Yammer was added to the Microsoft Office Division in July after Microsoft bought the Microsoft has two company for $1.2 billion. In addition to Yammer integration with social networking applications, which may leave organizations a bit confused about where Microsoft’s product develop- ment is heading.

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SharePoint, Microsoft is working to make Yammer work across Dynamics CRM, Outlook, Exchange, Skype and Lync. In an interview, Jared Spataro, senior director at the Microsoft Office Division, suggested that companies “go Yammer” when considering the social networking capabilities offered by SharePoint and Yammer. Spataro explained that the social networking user experiences between Yammer and SharePoint are “a little different” today. Organizations have a choice on which of the two applications to use for social networking, but he suggested that future trends are pointing to innovation happening more on the cloud-based Yammer side. During Microsoft’s Convergence event, the company demonstrated the integration of Yammer and Dynamics CRM using updated software. Microsoft had announced Yammer and Dynamics CRM capabilities on the Apple iPad in February. In addition to working on During Microsoft’s the iPad, Yammer and Dynamics CRM capabilities work on the iPhone, Android mobile devices and Windows Phone. Convergence event In other Dynamics news, Microsoft announced at the Convergence in March, the keynote that it has acquired Netbreeze, which will add social listening company and analytics capabilities to Dynamics CRM. The company also demonstrated the announced that it has added some marketing management capabilities to Dynamics CRM with a new MarketingPilot 15 release. integration of Spataro outlined a roadmap for Yammer social networking Yammer and integration more broadly in his conference call. In November, he had Dynamics CRM. explained that Microsoft was working on adding identity, document management and feed aggregation in Yammer, which will be available as both a standalone product and as capabilities integrated with Office 365 solutions. Microsoft has pared down Yammer into two offerings, a free Basic offering and Yammer Enterprise, offered at $3 per user per month. Microsoft plans to ship Yammer Enterprise with all Office 365 products (E1 to E4), at no extra cost, but only for Enterprise Agreement licensing customers.

Yammer Milestones for Office 365 Spataro provided an update about when Yammer will get integrated with Office 365 products. In the summer, Office 365 customers will have the option to replace their newsfeeds with Yammer. Microsoft will release a Yammer application in the SharePoint Store around that time that will let users of a SharePoint site add a Yammer group feed to it. This Yammer app will also work with SharePoint newsfeeds when

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SharePoint has been installed on the customer’s premises. Microsoft plans to offer guidance this summer on how such a hybrid deployment can work. In the fall, Microsoft will offer a single sign-on experience with Yammer when used with Office 365 solutions. The user experience will become more natural with this update. Yammer will also get document handling capabilities in conjunction with Office Web Apps at that time, enabling the editing and coediting of Excel, PowerPoint and Word documents. Microsoft is promising to move to a more frequent Office 365 update schedule going into next year, which will help to accelerate Yammer innovations. This new update cadence will be about once every 90 days, starting in 2014. Research and Yammer in Hybrid Networks consulting firm Yammer is an enterprise social networking application delivered as a Gartner Inc. has multitenant service via Microsoft’s datacenters. As such, it doesn’t get installed at the customer’s premises. For that reason, some advised that companies may not want to use Yammer, and in those cases Yammer is the Microsoft recommends sticking with SharePoint for social networking. way to go to Spataro outlined how Yammer works in hybrid scenarios, combining cloud-based Yammer and SharePoint Server on premises. avoid possible “They [customers] can use the social capabilities of SharePoint future deprecated Server or they can also choose to replace SharePoint newsfeed with features in their Yammer network,” Spataro said. “And this is a really exciting scenario for us because it essentially represents a very easy, under- SharePoint. standable, seamless type of hybrid deployment. You’ll be able to keep the stuff you know and love with SharePoint on prem…and you’ll be able to again remove the SharePoint newsfeed and overall navigation, replace that with Yammer, and then allow your users to go and click on that Yammer path and start to get an experience that starts to feel more and more integrated.” Research and consulting firm Gartner Inc. has advised that Yammer is the way to go to avoid possible future deprecated features in SharePoint on the social networking side. Larry Cannell, a research director at Gartner, speculated in a Webinar last week that Microsoft may have to offer Yammer capabilities for its on-premises SharePoint customers, stating that “in my opinion, Microsoft is going to have to provide a Yammer-like experience within SharePoint for companies that can’t use the cloud.”

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However, Cannell’s comment was speculation, as Microsoft hasn’t announced such plans to date. Nonetheless, Spataro did acknowledge the demand for an on-premises SharePoint newsfeed, although he touted the benefits of the cloud. “There clearly is demand for on-prem SharePoint newsfeed that is not in the cloud,” Spataro said. “A cloud service for us has two advantages in the social space that is tough to get with an on-prem implementation of social. No. 1, the cloud services have a tendency to be much more tuned for viral adoption, and this has to do with everything from security settings to just the ability to take advantage of data that you’re getting—signals that you’re getting from the service—and understand what’s really driving viral adoption. With “We see this as a social, it really only matters when you get a lot of people using it. If you only have a small group of people using social, the network space that will effects don’t combine. So that online—that cloud approach—in social continue to really helps with viral adoption.” reinvent itself.” Spataro’s second point on the cloud-enabled advantages of social networking had to do with the evolution of Yammer, which will be Jared Spataro, senior director, Microsoft Office facilitated by social analytics. Division “We see this as a space that will continue to reinvent itself,” Spataro said. “Users will use it [social networking] more than they do today. And the reason that’s true is that we use analytics and a new approach to development to really measure how people are using it as we push up new features to measure if those features are sticking or not. And to tweak and tune the service the way that a high-end Web site in the past has tweaked and tuned its experience to get kind of off-the-wall performance. And that means that this kind of incremental innovation we get in Yammer is just something we are not going to be able to replicate the same way in an on-prem deployment.” R

Kurt Mackie is online news editor for the 1105 Enterprise Computing Group

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PHOTOGRAPHY/ILLUSTRATION BY SHUTTERSTOCK/REDMOND STAFF Working Together

Now you can collaborate using the new Microsoft Office release with SharePoint 2013. BY BRIEN M. POSEY

harePoint may very well be the most baffling product Microsoft has ever created. While SharePoint has been around for more than a decade, IT pros are often unable to To some, agree on what it really is. To some it’s a content-manage- SharePoint is a Sment system; to others, it’s a development framework. Still others rely content-manage­ on SharePoint as a collaboration tool. One of the reasons for the diversity of opinions on what SharePoint ment system; to really is could be the fact that Microsoft has integrated its other others, it’s a products, such as SQL Server, Exchange Server and Visual Studio, development with SharePoint to varying degrees. Recently, however, Microsoft has upped the ante by incorporating extensive SharePoint support into framework. the new Office 2013, released in late February. I spent some time working with the new Office 2013 suite tied to

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SharePoint 2013, both of which are available for use on-premises or with a revamped release of the new Microsoft cloud-based Office 365.

SkyDrive Goes Pro Microsoft launched its SkyDrive storage service long before the term “cloud storage” came into vogue. Microsoft includes SkyDrive with free services such as Hotmail, and provides users with 7GB of free cloud storage. Additional storage is available for a fee. Even though SkyDrive has been around for quite some time, it never really caught on with businesses—which is perfectly under- standable, because SkyDrive has always been a consumer service. Throughout its history, the fact that SkyDrive is geared toward consumers has largely been a non-issue for businesses. Businesses have largely decided Figure 1. SkyDrive Pro is exposed through Office 365. to either use on-premises stor­age or an alternate form of cloud storage. But now, products such as Windows 8, Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 have forced businesses to pay attention to SkyDrive. Windows 8 was the catalyst for the new emphasis on SkyDrive. Unlike previous versions of Windows, Windows Figure 2. SharePoint 2013 and SkyDrive Pro are really the same thing. 8 asks users to log in with a Microsoft account. If a user decides to use his Microsoft account, then Windows 8 provides access to services such as Hotmail and SkyDrive. This might seem like a good thing, but it presents a major problem for businesses because Figure 3. Office 2013 defaults to saving documents to the cloud Microsoft accounts are not (assuming that the user is logged in using a Microsoft account). centrally controlled. If, for

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example, a user were to copy a document to his SkyDrive and then leave the company, an administrator would have no way of retrieving that document. Worse, most users now typically connect to SkyDrive from multiple devices, which means corporate documents stored in SkyDrive could be exposed to anyone who happens to use one of these devices, including colleagues, friends and family. At the moment, there are three main ways that businesses can deal with this problem: Don’t install Windows 8, use Group Policies to prevent the use of Microsoft accounts or use SkyDrive Pro. All three are perfectly valid Figure 4. My Word document is accessible through the Office 365 solutions, but the first two SkyDrive tab. aren’t practical because they deny the organization and the users the benefits of using Windows 8 and SkyDrive. The third solution, using SkyDrive Pro, is the most suitable option for IT. As the name implies, SkyDrive Pro is a business-centric version of SkyDrive. While it’s easy to assume that using SkyDrive Pro means paying a monthly subscription fee for cloud

Figure 6. Users can check out documents from within Office 2013. storage, that assumption is not necessarily accurate. SkyDrive Pro is actually implemented through SharePoint. This is the case whether you’re running SharePoint on-premises or in the cloud as part of an Office 365 subscription. The Office 365 Profiles screen (Figure 1) has a SkyDrive link at the top of the screen, which lets Figure 5. Office 2013 provides numerous options for sharing documents. users access SkyDrive Pro

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directly through the Office 365 interface. For reasons unclear, Microsoft calls it SkyDrive on this screen, even though other screens in Office 365 reference SkyDrive Pro. The important thing to remember as you look at this screen is that SkyDrive Pro is really just another component of SharePoint. This becomes evident as you look at the tabs located just beneath the Office 365 logo. You’ll notice in Figure 1 that there’s a Files tab and a Library tab. Clicking on either one of these tabs exposes a SharePoint toolbar (Figure 2). So where does Office 2013 fit into the picture? When Microsoft created Office 2013, the company did something unique (at least unique to Microsoft). For the first time, users have the option of logging in to Microsoft Office. In fact, when you get ready to activate When you get Office, you have the option of either entering a product key or entering ready to activate an e-mail address that’s associated with an Office subscription. The login process automatically connects Office 2013 with the Office, you have SkyDrive (or, in this case, SkyDrive Pro) account that’s associated the option of with the Office account. This connection is prominently used when it comes to opening or saving Office documents. If you take a look at either entering a the Microsoft Word 2013 Save As screen (Figure 3), you’ll see product key or the primary options for saving documents are SkyDrive or a entering an Microsoft SharePoint Team Site. Sure, you can still save documents to the local computer or to a network share, but cloud storage is now e-mail address the default option. that’s associated While this is certainly an interesting concept, you might be with an Office wondering what it really means in terms of users saving Office documents to the cloud. Click the Browse button and you’re directed subscription. to the Save As dialog box. Although the Save As dialog box has been part of Office for as long as I can remember, it has undergone a radical transformation in Office 2013. SharePoint is directly exposed through the Save As dialog box. You’ll see the SharePoint logo as well as links to SharePoint document libraries. Again, users have the ability to save documents locally, but this is the screen that’s displayed by default when a user clicks the Browse button. During my evaluation, I saved a document using the name “Brien Poseys Sample Word 2013 document.” I chose this particular name because Microsoft misspelled my name when it set up my reviewer’s account for Office 365 (as shown in some of the previous figures). Therefore, any document that had my name spelled correctly was obviously a document I created, and not a sample document

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that was created by default. I saved my sample document into the Documents container. When I returned to Office 365 and went to the SkyDrive tab, my Word document was displayed (Figure 4, opposite page). Of course, I could’ve just as easily saved the document to a SharePoint Team Site. Earlier, when I described the Word 2013 Save As screen, you might’ve noticed in Figure 3 that the column on the left features a Share option. The Share option is another way in which Office 2013 integrates with SharePoint 2013. When I click on the Share option, you can see that the location of my document is Microsoft Team Site\Shared Documents (Figure 5). More important is the Invite People icon I can use to send other users an invitation to view the document. There’s also a Post to Blog option, which I can use to upload the document directly to a SharePoint blog. Office 2013 lets I’ve described options that Office 2013 provides users for saving you check out documents, but before I move on, I’ll point out a few capabilities related to opening Office documents. When you click the Open link to open documents from a an Office 2013 document, Office displays recent documents by SharePoint library, default. The documents shown on this list can span a variety of without ever having locations, both local and in the cloud. The screen provides a variety to open the of options for opening documents, but tends to favor cloud locations. The ability to open documents saved in the cloud is one thing, SharePoint Web but what about editing those documents? If you’ve worked with portal. previous versions of SharePoint, then you’re probably familiar with the concept of checking out a document from a document library. Checking out a document gives the user the ability to edit the document without having to worry about other users making simultaneous modifications. Office 2013 lets you check out documents from a SharePoint library, without ever having to open the SharePoint Web portal. Instead, you can simply go to the Info tab and then choose the Check Out option from the Manage Versions section (Figure 6).

SharePoint and Outlook Although it’s easy to think of Microsoft Office support for SharePoint 2013 in terms of the ability of Office to interact with SharePoint document libraries, Outlook has also been extended to offer better SharePoint integration. This is evident from the very first time a user opens Outlook. A default e-mail message indicates Outlook can

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connect to SharePoint news feeds. In addition, Exchange Server 2013 supports a new type of mailbox called the site mailbox. Site mailboxes are designed to link Exchange 2013 and SharePoint 2013. The idea is a mailbox can be created for a SharePoint site. This mailbox can be opened in Outlook, and allows site members to e-mail one another as a way of collaborating on projects. The interesting thing about site mailboxes is that Outlook provides a Documents folder for them. Users can use the Documents In Office 2013, folder to save or access SharePoint documents. support for Better Together SharePoint is Even though the last couple of versions of Microsoft Office included a degree of SharePoint integration, the SharePoint support almost front and center. seemed like an afterthought. In Office 2013, however, support for SharePoint is front and center. It’s as if Microsoft is encouraging its customers to move away from using file servers for Office document storage and use SharePoint instead. R

Brien M. Posey is a seven-time Microsoft MVP with more than two decades of IT experience. He’s written thousands of articles and several dozen books on a wide variety of IT topics. Visit his Web site at brienposey.com.

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