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A glimpse into the stone of seeing - The future of SharePoint

12/6/2013

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Greetings fellow office heroes...

Recently I've been asked to participate as a panelist at a Tweet Jam hosted by my fellow Knight Christian Buckley (@buckleyplanet). The topic of this Tweet Jam is about the future of SharePoint. A very interesting topic indeed, since there are different rumours about SharePoint and its future out there.
Here are the questions the host and the panelists will talk about:

Predictions for SharePoint in 2014

  • Q1: What was the biggest SharePoint story of 2013?
  • Q2: What 3 SharePoint features do you feel had the biggest impact for you/your customers in 2013?
  • Q3: Broadly speaking, what are your predictions for SharePoint in 2014?
  • Q4: What are your predictions for SharePoint on premises and/or hybrid deployments?
  • Q5: What integrations do you feel are missing between Office365 and Yammer, if any?
  • Q6: If Microsoft handed you a magic wand, what 3 things would you want for SharePoint in 2014?
  • Q7: If you're planning to attend, what are you most looking forward to from SPC14 in Las Vegas?

If you're new to the tweetjam model, it's fairly simple: using Twitter and a shared hash tag (#CollabTalk), a panel discusses a series of questions over the course of an hour, with other members of the community jumping in and joining the conversation in real-time. You can follow along with the tweetjam on Twitter by following the #CollabTalk hash tag, or you can go to http://twubs.com/CollabTalk to watch live or review comments after the event.

There are rumours about SharePoint out there like, all is moving to the cloud -> Who needs on-prem anymore, interest in SharePoint is dropping, etc etc. 
I believe that we still are in the beginning of the change how we deal with information on a daily basis.

In order to prepare for the Tweet Jam, I'd like to gather my thoughts on this topic and write them down in this article.

In order to look into the future, we need to look fist into the past and the present. SharePoint is now 12 years old. Since it fist hit the servers causing serious CPU whispers, quite some transformation has happened. But in its core, SharePoint stays still the same. What has been added since the first version of SharePoint are more features. That's a bit the deal with Microsoft products in general. The more the features, the better the product, because you can do more stuff with it. *thumbsup* for this one. In fact, people are using SharePoint still the same way like they used it since the beginning, mainly as a store for working documents. Period! Why is this so? That is a many faceted problem, but the main problem is value perception and tapping into it in my opinion. 
Let's look at holy grail of document management issues in SharePoint, Metadata. Why is so difficult for us to unlearn they way we organize documents? I'll have a more detailed post about this coming up next week. So I won't go into details now. But the main problem is here, that people don't see the value of Metadata. It's only taking precious time form them away to fill in metadata in the first place. But people don't know or don't see how metadata actually benefits productivity and the findability of documents in the long run.
So talking about past and present, we are still very stuck in the past generally spoken. Of course there are some SharePoint rockstars out there who know how to tap into its potential, but we are still way to few.

So let's look into the stone of seeing (Palantir) ourselves now...
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<Nerdmode>This picture shows a scene from the Movie "Return of the King" from the Lord of the Rings trilogy, where Aragorn shows the dark fiend Sauron, that he is not beaten and has returned to claim his right as King of Gondor as a true heir of the lines of Numénor.</Nerdmode>

Let's hope not to find Sauron ourselves :-)

Here are some of my predictions for SharePoint and SharePoint Intranets for the next upcoming years:
  • True and full integration of Yammer functionality with SharePoint. 
  • Intranets transform more into Social Intranets where Personal content and context comes into focus
  • Intranet on the go. Have access to Intranet content wherever you are and get location based content (e.g campus related info, local office services, call taxis, and of course the daily menu)
  • Akquisition of a mayor Gamification platform provider. In my personal opinion MSFT will buy Bunchball or Badgeville sooner or later and then integrate the functionality into the SharePoint product. But let's see if my intuition is right. :-)
  • Communication between people, teams, units, partners and customers gets more and more easy and more seamless.
  • More focus on content and context rather than structure and processes

Having said that SharePoint is far away from being dead. We just need to finally break free from the past and start embracing the new way of working. Share early, share often, engage with content and people! 
SharePoint is in a transformation phase, and it might not be called SharePoint anymore in the near future. So in the quintessence what SharePoint will do (hopefully) better, is to connect people to information based on time, space and context of the Organisation and person. That's at least how I would shape the product further...

If you are interested in hearing more about the topics mentioned above, your are more than welcome to follow the discussion at the Tweet Jam on 18th of December 9am Pacific time!

Happy advent to everyone enjoy this magical time with your family and friends!

Ser Jussi
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