A recent analyst’s claim that wide-scale acquisition of Microsoft’s SharePoint Online through the cloud could ultimately inhibit its success and development is well wide of the mark.
Speaking at the Gartner ITxpo in Sydney in November, analyst Kenneth Chin predicted SharePoint would be “as popular a platform for enterprise content applications as the iPad and iPhone are for consumer applications” by 2015.
He also warned SharePoint could be “less successful” if customers acquired it as a service through Microsoft’s Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) without the engagement of a partner.
Chin said the success of SharePoint may be dampened if the partner ecosystem stalls or becomes fragmented.
That last point was certainly valid. Partners are critical to Microsoft’s BPOS offering and Telstra’s SaaS portal, T-Suite. But for developers, SharePoint Online provides a common platform to focus on solutions that are repeatable between customers due to decreased customisation and system complexity.
SharePoint Online allows them to create a suite of well-defined solutions that can be sold via an online channel and deployed by customers with minimal consultant or developer interaction. This environment allows customers to get on with using SharePoint and its add-ons to drive their business.
Partners can make integration of SharePoint into a business easier, but implementation through the cloud can be substantially cheaper than an on-premise installation.The beauty of T-Suite is customers can purchase BPOS (and therefore SharePoint Online) online and be up and running within 24 hours.
And there’s the rub.SharePoint Online makes getting to SharePoint a lot easier for most organisations, as they don’t need to spend large amounts of time researching how to deploy it, or purchase additional licences. They can simply purchase the subscription, create a site collection and start working.SharePoint Online (and largely BPOS) allows organisations to get online quicker.
It frees IT departments from the requirement of becoming SharePoint experts. Once up and running, they can engage a partner to extend their SharePoint solution by creating custom applications and solutions which are designed to work within the SharePoint Online framework.Getting organisations on to SharePoint Online also opens the doors to further revenue opportunities for the partner, if for example the customer is still running Office 2003 (and there are plenty of them still out there).
To truly take benefit of the integration functionality of SharePoint and Microsoft Office the customer should move up to Office 2010. The opportunity for the partner is both in the supply of licensing and services costs to help the customer move to the current platform.There are critical factors for an in-house IT professional to consider if they don’t go down the SaaS route.
First, which SharePoint licence do you use – the free (SharePoint Services/Foundation), the paid standard (SharePoint Server with Standard CALs), or the paid enterprise features (SharePoint Server with Enterprise CALs)? Once that’s decided, there are big issues around planning and deploying server resources and databases. There are crucial questions about what to patch and back-up.
It can take rigorous testing to ensure all add-on applications work well and don’t cause issues within SharePoint.Going to the cloud with SharePoint Online eliminates every one of those issues.
While the online version is functionally limited, that can be a blessing for most organisations. It allows for a cleaner approach to customisation and solution development, as there is a set framework and set of restrictions that must be worked with.
These are thoroughly documented on the Microsoft site in the form of the SharePoint Online Service Description and SharePoint Online Developers Guide.A lot of what applies to on-premise SharePoint implementations still applies to those delivered via BPOS: taxonomy, governance, content management, architecture and workflows.
For most corporates on the smaller end of the scale, SharePoint Online provides more than enough functionality. Organisations do not require much customisation to their SharePoint in their initial ramp-up phase. They do require the services of a partner to plan and deliver the solution correctly, but once on board the online capabilities are quite sufficient for most organisations.
In addition, Microsoft’s program of investment in its cloud services – including the highly anticipated release of Office 365 – will see the feature gap between on-premise and cloud continue to narrow.The key thing for businesses is to simply get SharePoint in their organisation.
Once it’s there they can start using it and driving their business away from the dark ages of file systems and towards the light of information management and productivity. Since our company Paradyne formed in early 2010 to focus on Microsoft Online Services, we have rolled out BPOS to almost 50 customers around Australia. We repeatedly improved their collaboration and productivity by moving them to SharePoint Online in a relatively short period.
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