(LAS VEGAS, NV) If there was one, overarching message delivered by CEO Steve Ballmer in his keynote unveiling Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (at the annual SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas): SharePoint is no longer just an intranet solution, it’s been architected for all forms of web scenarios.

 

“SharePoint is one of my favorite Microsoft products…. It’s true,” says Ballmer. “SharePoint, in my estimation, is kind of magical.  I don’t think there’s anything like it in the market. It has become a platform for a whole big set of scenarios that were served by niche (products).”

 

New scenarios include all of the typical intranet scenarios, but all the Internet scenarios they can attack. To drive the point home, Ballmer cited many companies already using MOSS 2007 for their public website including:

 

·         Kraft Foods (consolidated 200 websites to a single platform saving $2 million per year)

·         Volvo (36 languages, 70 countries)

·         Pfizer

·         Library of Congress

·         Hawaiian Airlines

·         Kroger

·         Conservation International

 

However, it remains to be seen whether the improvements to MOSS’s web content management will be sufficient to quell the traditional content publishing and management concerns of marketing and communications managers who operate external websites. The new UI for web content management is a marked improvement – in-context editing deploying the ‘ribbon’ UI introduced in Office 2007.

 

Ballmer announced that MOSS 2010 will public beta test this November (no specific date was delivered). The MS chief also spent a lot of time talking about “the cloud” and was even so bold as to state that “SharePoint is in the center of the cloud.”

 

“It’s all in the cloud–we certainly agree with that,” said Ballmer, who stressed that SharePoint Online has more than 1 million online users (and 7,000 partners). “SharePoint is more capable, more extensible, more Internet & cloud focused. It’s an amazing product.”

 

NEW FEATURES / TOOLS:

 

·         “Ribbon” interface (in-context editing)

·         "Visual web parts” (“no more hard-coding of web parts”)

·         Supports development / design on Vista & Windows 7

·         Access services (publish Access dbases through SP)

·         New sandboxed solutions

·         Integrated rich media & Silverlight

·         Improved Visual Studio & SQL

·         Upgrades from 2007 will include a complete migration of an existing home page design / UI to 2010

·         Improved social computing (blogs, wikis, tagging, ratings, etc)

·         Improved search algorithms and FAST Search integration

·         New site scenarios for:

o        Pricing analysis

o        Hiring processes

o        Citizen management (citizen portals)

o       Project tracking

o       Sales reporting

o       Conference planning

o        Delivery scheduling

o        Compliance review sites

 

SOCIAL COMPUTING

 

“We needed to facilitate this next generation of social computing,” stated Ballmer, though not convincingly, when asked about the improvements on social media – a notorious weakness of the MOSS 2007 platform. “We’ve done this with My Sites, mashing-up, etc. I think we’ve moved towards 3.0.”

 

Improvements to the highly criticized social computing of MOSS include:

• Better blogs, wikis, calendars
• Co-authoring
• Content tagging
• Tag clouds
• Ratings
• Bookmarks
• MySites “Smart Profiles” and feeds
• Browse colleagues and experts
• “Share This Site.”

 

“There isn’t an enterprise on the planet that doesn’t want to embrace social computing, but they worry about how to do it,” explained Ballmer. “If we can show a path to CEOs and CIOs that we can let people interact with each other the way they want to (and still protect privacy and security) then they will embrace social computing.”

 

CONTENT MANAGEMENT

 

Improvements to ECM include:

 

·         Document management: The ceiling limit on a document library moves to 10 million, and within a site collection, to hundreds of millions of documents; no longer will you have to right click to bring up the actions / options of a document, the ribbon hosts all of the options / actions the user needs

·         Taxonomy management: you will be able to have consistent content types taxonomy across server farms (applied at the document level)

·         Pictures: photos no longer have to be in an SP library, but can be uploaded from your hard drive

·         The addition of true Digital Asset Management

 

GOVERNANCE

 

Perhaps the biggest criticism or flaw of SharePoint has been the issue of governance, which Microsoft has only addressed half-heartedly, as reflected in Tom Rizzo’s comments: “There’s a lot we’re doing on governance, but its only 20% software, and 80% process,” says Rizzo, Senior Director, SharePoint. “We’ve invested a lot in best practices, centers of excellence. We’ll continue to invest, but I think we’re still need near the beginning, than the end.” In other words, governance is more the client’s responsibility than Microsoft’s.

 

SHAREPOINT CONFERENCE STATISTICS:

 

·         7.5 miles of network cable

·         7,400 participants (up from 3,800) – 94% growth

·         297 world class speakers

·        70 countries

·        165 sponsors

·         300+ hours

·         240 sessions

·         45+ hours of hands-on labas

·         18 customer sessions (Delloite)

·         2 SharePoint marriages

·         Biggest Beach Party ever by Mandalay with Huey Lewis & The News

 

Follow my SharePoint conference updates on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TobyWard #spc09

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You’ve probably seen the term, or heard it bantered about by geeks, or maybe your head is in it… but you may not fully understand the term “cloud” or “SasS” (software as a service) or perhaps just think its another catchy marketing acronym like MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server).

 

The “cloud” refers to cloud computing that at the risk of over-simplifying is simply hosting – computer, server, software, and other hardware and infrastructure hosting. You’re already a cloud customer, probably many times over (someone is hosting your email, website, blog, etc. In fact, 56% of internet users use webmail services such as Hotmail, Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail – hosted email in the cloud).

 

In short, hosting is provided as a service over the Internet. SaaS is simply hosted software that could include your website content management system, search engine, CRM (Salesforce.com), etc. The cloud is merely a metaphor based loosely on those computer network diagrams that so cleverly depict little computers with wires running between each other, servers, firewalls, etc.

  

I was recently pressed on the subject of a “hosted intranet” and why an organization shouldn’t outsource their intranet to “the cloud.” God forbid we let professionals who know what they’re doing maintain our second-rate, after-though, cost-center of an intranet!

 

It is baffling to me that the intranet isn’t hosted externally for more organizations. Well, I’m well versed with clueless executives with knee-jerk reactions around “security”, privacy, and “the way things have always been done” but I guess I’m naïve to have faith that more would start to embrace the 21st century. If these dolts can Facebook then surely there’s hope, right?

 

The biggest obstacle blocking the migration of more intranets to the cloud is culture and fear of the ‘unknown’. If the host has proper security does it matter if it’s hosted elsewhere? We do our banking online now – we can’t access the intranet over the Internet?! Most of our benefits and compensation systems are now hosted elsewhere in the cloud – we’re talking about people’s pay, insurance and benefits!

 

In fact, if it costs me less money and I don't have to worry about the maintenance then you better believe I choose hosted – and I have told clients the same. Its one of the reasons the "cloud" is expanding so fast. It would be 10 times the size if people would just get beyond the knee-jerk reaction to have everything in-house where it costs more, and probably enjoys less security than the top of the line that many hosts employ.

 

The downside to avoiding the cloud can be far more expensive: I have one client (identity protected) who spent well more than $1 million on a new intranet design and platform and it crashed in the first few minutes, never to go live again because the organization didn’t have the proper infrastructure. One-and-one-half years later, the intranet is still not live. This would never have happened had it been turned over to a host. Instead, millions of dollars have been lost, and countless thousands of employee hours.

 

Has your organization embraced the cloud, or are you wasting valuable time and skills on hosting and maintenance?

 

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NEXT WEBINAR:

 

What do the best intranets look like? What are the best practices and principles for redesigning an intranet? Having designed and re-designed dozens of intranet sites (and websites), Prescient Digital Media’s Toby Ward and Catherine Elder will draw on their experiences to provide best practices in approaching intranet design.

 

Reserve your spot for: Intranet Design – A Business Approach to a Winning Design

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