Should Microsoft kill SharePoint?
The link refers to an interesting article on Memeburn that appeared on the internet and is based on Gartner’s analyst Jeffrey Mann’s opinion. The header attracts, but the message is different.
Should SharePoint stay or should it go? What is your opinion?
About the article and on the statement.
To some extent I agree with the article. This really boils down to the hot topic of the moment “Cloud vs On-Premise”.
SharePoint is now a very big beast and is built on code that’s 10 years old. Upgrades and migrations are really hard, probably too hard. Maintaining backward compatibility must be Microsoft’s biggest nightmare and I can’t even begin to imagine how much they spend on regression testing a new version of SP. It’s hard enough for my company to test DocRead against all the different versions and configurations of SharePoint. God knows what it’s like for the mammoth that is SharePoint itself!!
Microsoft are faced with a dilemma. How do they compete with other cloud only companies (who don’t have tons of legacy code to support) and also keep releasing on-premise versions of the product. This is a massive challenge and the reason that 365 is being pushed wherever you turn. The good thing is SharePoint has Microsoft behind it so it can still compete on very uneven terms for a while yet.
To get us all into 365, the battle they have on their hands is how they keep the army of partners, developers, admins who have built a career and business around on-premise SharePoint happy. If their marketing teams push too hard, they will be met with a lot of Cloud resistance. After all, the SharePoint community are the very people who are working in the very organizations that MS are trying to market 365 to. If their job feels threatened by 365, they are hardly going to paint a good picture to their CIOs.
Microsoft’s success has been largely due to it’s community and they shouldn’t lose sight of this. In fact, I don’t think many other companies in the world enjoy such support!Â
In order for SharePoint (on-premise) to die, they are going to need to do these things :
- Improve the development tooling around Office 365. (Sort out the App model so you can build more than just a weather app 😉
- Find ways to help IT Pros retrain, maybe the “Site Collection” will eventually become the new Central Admin. Get them to embrace 365 with passion rather than fear!
- Provide another release of On-premise SharePoint that allows organizations to seamlessly work with 365 (a hybrid release).
- Provide really easy migration tools to allow a company to push and pull data from 365.
- Love their community. The closure of the MCM and Technet subscription service is not good PR. (Charging $2000 for a conference that’s probably going to all be Cloud isn’t good either – what’s the $600 increase for!).
- Address organizations fears about downtime, security, speed, DR, protection of data and all of the other issues that make them nervous.
Anyway, to summarize, it’s not the end for SharePoint just yet! Looking at our poll (329 responses), Office 365 is only used in 6% of organizations with on-premise making up a hefty 94%. This will take years to sway and hopefully by then, cloud vs on-premise won’t even be a conversation worth having!
BTW – If anyone from MS reads this can we have someone from the product team to do an SPChat ?
Interesting article, makes you wonder which road people will take. The commentary at the bottom is also quite interesting. SharePoint has come so far… it would be a shame to lose its worth. We embrace both SP and the cloud and will operate and offer both! Thanks for the read!
