In the last 3 – 4 years, one of the most common buzz words in the IT industry is “CLOUD”. Most of the IT Software / Hardware / Service / Application providers have been busy setting up their own cloud platforms ( Azure, Office 365, Amazon, Google cloud, Oracle Cloud , Apple, Samsung etc) in order to create their own eco-system to provide better, cheaper and faster services to their customers.
From a SharePoint perspective – Microsoft is pushing us to use Office 365, Azure, Sky Drive and so on, rather than the on-premise platforms that we have all come to love and learn. You only have to look at the stats below to see how the last 2 SharePoint Conferences have played out.
- SharePoint Conference 2011 : There were a total of 18 Cloud Sessions and 219 On-Premise Sessions. (see ‘SPC-2011_Sessions’). That means 7.6% of all sessions were Cloud.
- SharePoint Conference 2012 : There were a total of 106 Cloud Sessions and 164 On-Premise Sessions. (see ‘ SharePoint Conference 2012 Sessions’). That means 39.2% of all sessions were Cloud.
- So from 2011 to 2012 we saw 5 time more Cloud related sessions. When you think that Yammer is now a big part of the stack, 2 guesses how this figure will grow in 2013! In fact I would make a big guess that 60-70% of the sessions will now be related to Cloud.
The big question is – what is this doing to our careers ?
I have personally been working with .Net (and later SharePoint) for the last 14 years. I have also started working with the Windows Azure platform (as a Beginner) for a current client. It’s amazing to see that using Cloud tech (Office 365 and Azure) is not only impacting the IT technical people, but it also drives the business to think about their processes and solution in very different ways.
I am posting my question to the community to get your opinion and here your experiences when working with Office 365 / Azure
- Cloud, Office 365 , Azure – Is it the beginning of the end of the on-premise platform?
- Are you finding ways to re-define your job role and move with the times ?
- What will it do for our jobs (i.e how does it impact the SharePoint Business / Analysts / Developer / Architect / Infrastructure users?)
- Is it cost effective compared to the on-premise solution ? (Azure pretty expensive still).
I have been working with Office 365 for a while now. There is a lot to like and equally a lot to hate. It would be interesting to not only see what sessions would feature, but where the bias would lie. Some of my thoughts with working with the online version;
– Deployment and configuration of SharePoint, Workflow Manager, Lync etc. is no longer a mountain to climb. Its already done for you. When setting up link; you know how tedious it can be.
– A lot more thinking on which API/Object Model to use; the Server Object Model (SOM) is out of the window, within the Client you have options between the RESTful approach or the .Net client libraries, the Silverlight and each has slightly varied support. Together with this documentation can be misleading (although I have not personally encountered much discrepency in this regard – just dead ends!).
– Leading on from that, some things are possible in on-premises deployment, but not so with the online version (such as packaging and download, especially when using the Client models).
– Little guidance on the future of Sandbox solutions (but that’s a general comment with SharePoint 2013).
– App Model is not mature. Certain apps can be hosted within SharePoint ‘box’, others need azure or self hosted; yet there is also little guidance on self-hosting – i.e. how to configure your servers.
– Local host debugging is a pain.
– Certain types of development (e.g. remote event receivers) require a dedicated host other than the SharePoint box (Azure or your own).
– Authentication from ‘some clients is more of a challenge than needs to be.
There are others but that’s adequate as a sample. I hope, in the conference, they simply don’t emphasize the positives, but also delve deeper into some of the pains and future path certain things are taking.
