CONTENT PROVIDED BY April 2013 Redmondmag.com SHAREPOINT AND THE EVOLUTION OF ENTERPRISE SOCIAL NETWORKING > Key Piece Page 1 > 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 1 SharePoint and the Evolution of Enterprise Social Networking 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. 2 SharePoint and the Evolution of Enterprise Social Networking 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. 3 SharePoint and the Evolution of Enterprise Social Networking “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 4 SharePoint and the Evolution of Enterprise Social Networking 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.