The SharePoint Blog

Last week, I attended the Microsoft SharePoint Conference and was very interested in the tone of the entire week related to Microsoft's Services Online for SharePoint and how the future adoption was a focus from Steve Ballmer's Keynote to a majority of the topics throughout the event. Developer, Administrator, and Business sessions included references to the product and how it will change the topology of IT's operations.

I think explaining the service and for many to understand how the service operates is pivotal to deciding to adopt the platform or to seek more information about other options (on-premise hosting or choose another option).

A little background on my experience in the MSO space, in late 2007 a generous-sized portion of my company was sold from Ingersoll Rand to the South-Korean company Doosan Infracore. This sale of the Bobcat Company was the largest acquisition by a South-Korean company of all-time and what needed to happen was that we needed to set up an entire IT infrastructure by the end of 2008. All the activities that required us to host this type of infrastructure would have been difficult for the amount of people we had in our organization, so we focused on a strategy which would allow us to stand up an environment in the best possible way with as little time as possible.

Enter Microsoft Services Online.

So that part of the story will end for another day or another location, but selecting the latest "cloud" service was a great part of our strategy and a successful deployment. What I learned about the service offering and how it will change in SharePoint Online 2010 is the story of today.

First, there are two flavors of SharePoint Online: Standard (Multi-tenant) and Dedicated. Standard supports 5+ seats, Dedicated supports 5,000+ seats for a large enterprise and has very different tools to manage the platform and support requirements. I would consider the "Standard" platform to be very vanilla in the current version and allows for very little customization and configuration. The Dedicated platform is a little different and offers a level of customization and enhanced configuration, but I like to think of both, in their current state, as "SharePoint with Sacrifices". Both offer High-Availability (HA), redundancy and allow your organization to feel confident that the SharePoint environment has the best people managing its capabilities.

So, what's missing now that will make the service better in 2010?

• Web Content Management: Currently not offered in either "cloud" environment, but there are vendors who have filled that gap and offer a similar product for those who want it. So that means no Internet public-facing web sites.
• PerformancePoint (Services)
• Business Data Search
• Microsoft Project Online
• Tenant Admin. Right now administrators do not have access to the Central Administration site and need to call/email support to have operations completed on their behalf. Having something will be better than no access at all.
• Shorter lead times and approvals for customizations within the Dedicated environment.
• More SharePoint 2010-specific features (Business Connectivity Services, Visio Integration, Access Services, Legal Holds, and Sandbox Solutions. In current version, some 2007 features were or are not available.

All of these additions will be a great and should be available by April 2011 (per Microsoft's guidance at the SharePoint Conference) based on the specific feature and will continue to build the service, but out of all of the new abilities, I think the Web Content Management piece will be the most impactful.

Web Content Management, both in the hosted and on-premise SKU, seems to lag behind the general adoption of SharePoint based on the cost to deploy for small- and mid-size businesses, and the overall feature set, but that will change in SharePoint 2010. Although there are no licensing numbers released, I see a change in the overall licensing model and pure guess would probably reduce the cost by half. This would not only drive enterprise adoption of SharePoint's WCM platform, but would encourage mid-size and larger small businesses to use the product, too. This could complete Microsoft's vision of a internal and external service offering that would compete with the leaders in all of these spaces.

Magic Quadrant for Web Content Management (Source: Gartner)

As you can see in Gartner's Magic Quadrant, Microsoft is a challenger in the WCM space and providing more quality features will move Microsoft's SharePoint 2010 product to the upper right-side (Leaders) of the space.

The Microsoft vision of a hosted SharePoint environment will improve greatly from early 2008 and I see push to continue to take place for IT organizations to focus resources on business-building projects and productivity enhancements to their Lines-of-Businesses versus on-site hosting or even offshore/outsourced hosting. Businesses and CIO want to control cost, but also need to contribute significantly to their respective organizations by delivering core solutions versus performing maintenance functions that do not return perceived value.

Microsoft will continue to build the "Software+Services" offering and that will ensure that SharePoint 2010, whether hosted internally or externally, will continue to grow as the biggest licensed product in their history.