Since this is the week for Sharepoint’s conference, I thought I would track the news from the conference.

Quick hits and info:

• Microsoft has sold 125 million licenses of sharepoint
• Sharepoint 2010 has sold 62 million licenses so far
• SharePoint by itself would be one of the top 50 software
  firms
• 67% of firms have deployed Sharepoint
• SharePoint rated # 1 in satisfaction, awareness,
  etc.

Three Guiding Priciples for SharePoint:

1. Redefine collaobration
2. Unleash the ecosystem
3. Build a world-class platform

Redefine collaboration

It’s about self-service for IT. It’s about self-service business intelligence (BI).  It’s about using Excel, Access services, etc. to create custom views and publishing to SharePoint.  Note that this is more about data in the self service.

Collaboration should include a common social fabric wherever you may be in the intranet.  It should also be tied in with other communcation tools.  This includes Outlook social connector where you can see what others are doing in SharePoint, Facebook, etc.

Collaboration should transcend the company. It should extend collaboration to customers and partners.  Sharepoint for internet sites shows huge growth.  Spacex uses SharePoint for collaboration, production tracking, secure content, and even social.  Spacex also uses it for sharing with partners via their extranet.

Next Release isn’t a focus of this conference but it’s in play now and promises to be a huge and ground breaking release.  They are using 4 times the number of visual designers for the next release of SharePoint.

Unlease the Ecosystem

Announcement: the first update to Office 365 will include Business Connectivity Services to enable it to integrate to a variety of different systems.

Announcement: Microsoft Certified Architect (MCA) as a new certification will allow you to understand who has true enterprise SharePoint depthc.

Big focus is on Visual Studio, REST, and Business Connectivity Services.  If you are a developer, you should be looking at this.

Building a World Class Platform

Microsoft has tried to build a unified platform.  Document Management can be brought together with collaboration for example.  Supporting real time updating of a notebook is another example.  This brings a new level of support for key business needs.

This brings more “knobs” in admin management.  Governance should be key to any large enterprise implementation.  Microsoft just published scalability testing results.  They showed off a huge SAN with a virtual Sharepoint server farm with 1 Terrabyte of memory.  (microsoft.com/vision for the logical architecture).  The database has 14.4 Terrabytes of data.  They pulled wikipedia content to showcase this.

The server farm can run around 150,000 people in concurrent sessions.  The FAST index has over 107 million items with sub-second response time.  SQL Server Denali in “always on” configuration allows for high availablity.  For Disaster Recovery, they showed pulling the network connectivy of the first DB and within 20 seconds, a failover of the entire site to the backup db.  This was a failover of a 14.4 Terrabyte db and the complete SharePoint farm.

Microsoft’s Strategy

1. Continue to lead in office producivity, portals, etc.
2. Bring the products you know and love and make sure they work in the cloud
3. Deliver a unified platform on the client, server, cloud, etc.

Cloud

First two weeks of Office 365 saw 50,000 organizations sign up for it. Microsoft believes that the online experience will drive a lot of adoption in the near future.

A few key statistics:

• 65% are deploying social networking withing organizations
• 84% of organizations allow remote and mobile work
• 4 million millenials enter the workforce each year
• 70% of IT budgets are spent maintaining inflexible and siloed data or systems each year

Office 365 provides Lync, Exchange, Sharepoint, and Office in the cloud.  It’s also about tying the cloud back to the clients or users.  80% of the Office 365 small and medium size business have never used Exchange and other servers.

Key messaging for Office 365

• Save Money
• Enable the cloud on your terms
• Connect people around the world
• supplement scarce IT resources

Azure

They showed a voting for charity applications using a back end db to capture the data and then send it to a Sharepoint List.  The Sharepoint list provides the data necessary to create a rich set of charts that show real time voting progress.  The bottom line is that it took an online database and the use of services to push it wherever it needs to go.

Recent Blog Posts

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But Don’t Stalk Me Fri, May 10th 2013 6:21a Michael Porter Back in March, I mentioned a Global Survey Oracle did on customer experience. That’s been a hot topic of late in my world. As part of that survey, they continue to build off of the nuggets of information found in that survey. Emil Fernandez pointed me to an update on that survey that includes a video on millenials and how they wish to engage or be engaged. The short video highlights a few way they would prefer to engage. I found it hilarious that at about 45 seconds, one teenager say [read] Keywords: oracle

101

Portal Beauty and the User Experience Thu, May 9th 2013 6:18a Michael Porter Dr. Marci Stochak-Chavez just posted an article on our health blog somewhat related to yesterday’s post. She focuses on whether beauty is in the eye of the beholder for a portal. In here article, she references a design a portal challenge in New York City. This challenge pushes contestants to create a nice interface while also using key standards like the Blue Button and the Direct Protocol to transmit medical records. Dr. Marci makes one quote it’s easy to agree with. I be [read] Keywords: interface

97

If You Build a Patient Portal Why Won’t They Come? Wed, May 8th 2013 6:21a Michael Porter Joe Jacobellis, a member of the Design Experience team at a client pointed out this interesting article about patient portals by Steve Wilkins. It’s titled, “If You Build a Patient Portal Why Won’t They Come?“ Before you read it, let me give you some history: The Affordable Care Act mandates that all patients have access to their medical record (lab test, allergies, discharge instructions, etc.) In various stages, hospitals and clinics need to give you electronic acc [read] Keywords: community email integration mobile

97

Salesforce Communities: The Portal is Dead…Long Live the Portal Thu, May 2nd 2013 6:18p Axel Newe Today Salesforce.com announced its long awaited release of Communities, which in Salesforce’s own words ended the era of legacy portal software. These are heady words, but Salesforce may have actually created something that is taking the portal concept into a different direction. The motor that is driving Communities is Chatter, Salesforce’s social collaboration platform. Salesforce.com used to have distinct offerings for Partner and Customer portals. With Communities, Partners, [read] Keywords: collaboration applications

54

Gartner Keynote: Don Norman on emotion Wed, May 1st 2013 4:18p Jonathan Distad Don Norman is well known cognitive scientist who has spoken and written extensively on emotion and design in everyday things. Today he is speaking at the Gartner Portal, Content and Collaboration Summit in San Diego. He talked about how why and how emotions drive our decisions and our behaviors. Something that we all know is important but in IT we often focus on the function and too little on the emotion. Employees are people. If they are seen as a cost center that is a missed opportunit [read] Keywords: collaboration application applications email google microsoft mobile server

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The Mobile Workspace – Connect, Share, Collaborate and Collide Wed, May 1st 2013 4:18p Glenn Kline The Gartner Portals, Content & Collaboration Summit 2013 provided an intriguing panel discussion called “The Mobile Workspace – Connect, Share, Collaborate and Collide.“ The attendees included Ken Parmelee – mobile and wireless, Karen Hobert – security and risk strategy consultant, Mike Gotta – social software analyst and Daryl Plummer of Gartner. The discussion was lively and informative and focused on the dynamics of mobility in the workspace where [read] Keywords: collaboration policies applications enterprise mobile security social software wireless workspace

71

Gartner Portal, Content and Collaboration – Opening Session Mon, Apr 29th 2013 10:17a Jonathan Distad Live blogging from the Gartner summit in San Diego, CA Engaging at the nexus of Social, Mobile, Information and Cloud. Innovation supports a new reality. The threat to China is the 3D printer and the reality is innovation is around us that are trivial and some that are game changing. They need to be in the context of our lives. Disruption is around us. We have to react to the disruptions. We need to apply disruptions in a positive way. Don’t be a deer in headlight when it comes [read] Keywords: collaboration blogging email enterprise mobile

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Salesforce: Customer Company – Chicago Thu, Apr 18th 2013 9:16a Jonathan Distad McCormick Place – Chicago Waiting for Marc to hit the stage in this ‘intimate’ town hall here is Chicago. A client of ours, Cars.com, is talking about how they use Salesforce to help sell and crunch data: Adding value to the data through customizing reporting back from the dealer giving a better experience for the consumer. “we love chatter” – it is THE tool that makes work better. Onboarding has never been more fun that using Chatter. Every person at t [read] Keywords:

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Sitecore a Strong Performer in WCM according to Forrester! Tue, Apr 9th 2013 2:14p Jamie Stump Forrester Research recently released the “The Forrester WaveTM: Web Content Management For Digital Customer Experierence, Q2 2013”, which is a report where they evaluated 10 of the “most significant” WCM providers. Forrester evaluated the providers in their current offerings, strategy and market presence. The paper is specifically geared towards developers; however it is not so technical that a non-developer couldn’t read through it with good comprehension. I would highly rec [read] Keywords: applications google integration microsoft network sharepoint

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Developing SharePoint 2013 Apps Mon, Apr 8th 2013 7:16a Mark Polly I recently purchased the book Microsoft SharePoint 2013 App Development to try to get more familiar with the changes coming about in SharePoint 2013 apps. The link points to the O’Reilly site, but you can also get it from Amazon too. (As a side note, I find it very hard to read a printed book anymore; everything I’ve read in the last two years has been on one of my mobile devices.) SharePoint 2013 introduces a new application model that Microsoft intends to correct several of the [read] Keywords: application applications development javascript microsoft mobile office security server sharepoint