Just wondering what your long term view is with regard to SharePoint in Office 365 vs SharePoint On-prem? Is it going to go like the water and power industries where everything is centralised and businesses that stay on-premises can’t compete due to economies of scale?Â
Or, do you think aspects such as security, availability, need for greater control, lack of functionality, heavy customizations will keep us using SharePoint on-premises for the foreseeable?
BTW, you should also have a read of ‘What are the reasons for staying on-premises in 2018?‘ for some further insight.
Because decision makers think in term of cost and ease-of-use, it is inevitable that SharePoint online will eventually become the only viable option.
I agree that the level of control and customizing provided by the on-premise version is significant. But, one of the reasons we tend to think that we can’t do without it is that, we continue to think about building solutions the “old way”. Think for example about how we limit ourselves when we build farm solutions. We need to use specific tools. We can only use Windows machines. Visual Studio. We need a copy of SharePoint binaries and so on. We create solutions within the boundaries of these limited tools and we continue to think that on-premise SharePoint environment is a must have. And logically so, since there was no other way to satisfy the requirements before the new O365 services.
With O365 and Microsoft opening to the open-source world, SharePoint is poised to take advantage of all the other common web tools. And by consequence, other proven technologies can be used as replacements of the on-premise solutions. SharePoint Framework is a good example.
The only other thing that will need to be addressed, is to craft a satisfactory solution for the data that some organizations must keep “very-private” or within their data centers. Probably not a big challenge with all the new connectors being developed. Â
 Organizations with investments in on-premise farms will probably go hybrid, but in the long run, the cost of running the SP farm infrastructure and maintaining it will be the decisive factor. Â
I’ll borrow an acronym for SharePoint on-prem environments -> FCC.Â
Flexibility for Customization and Control.Â
As much I like the new functionality or features that aren’t readily available from 365. There will be environments that will require the following for specific organizations:Â
- Stability i.e. don’t fix what isn’t broken,Â
- Flexibility to customize the platform as needed,Â
- Control the environment especially if regulatory bodies are involved i.e. testing/validation when changes occur.Â
On-premise SP is here to stay but the feature gap between the Online version and the on-premise SP version would increase as MS continues to provide these new/cool features on the Online versions. Agree with “Fevgatos” on the Hybrid model being the model for now/future.
i guess the hybrid model is the future… even if i don’t see it at my case, how. we have an on-premise server with a ton of handlers at the web apps and some other custom features that is hard to go online..
Hybrid for me. There are many issues for companies who have already invested heavily in on-premise. I do not expect hybrid to be long term solution though because Microsoft have a track record of forcing clients towards their strategic platform That means Cloud. BTW watched a very nice video from Beau Cameron – awesome dude, respect – in which he showed how to create a site template (requiring many days, weeks even of effort) when it takes a few clicks to create a site template in SharePoint. I was in danger of missing the point which It was really interesting to see how you can use the Cloud components to build powerful solutions.