Reflections from SharePoint Conference 2012

​Just a few days removed from Microsoft SharePoint Conference (SPC) 2012, it’s gratifying to me to know that a little project code named Tahoe back in 2001 has grown to bring in more than $2 billion annually in sales for Microsoft and generated an $8 billion ecosystem, according to Jared Spataro, Senior Director of SharePoint Product Marketing at Microsoft.

More than 10,000 people packed the keynote address at SPC 2012 in Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas, NV, where Spataro specifically named AvePoint as the premier infrastructure and governance management company for SharePoint in the first three minutes of his keynote address. He, and other Microsoft executives including Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President, SharePoint, went on to showcase SharePoint 2013 and all of its new features, including:

· New SharePoint Experience – The User Interface is redesigned in an effort to make the user experience cleaner and simpler, with quick access to newsfeed, documents, and sites as well as streamlined ways for saving documents, editing lists, sharing content, and theming sites.
· Social Networking – SharePoint 2013 adds rich new microblogging, newsfeed, community, and other social features. With the acquisition of enterprise social networking platform Yammer, it’s clear that we will see more connections between Yammer, SharePoint, and other Microsoft technologies. While it’s still early on, it’s important to give time to see how this integration plays out in the future.
· Search – Microsoft made it very clear during the keynote and throughout the conference that one of the largest investments it made in this release of SharePoint was combining FAST technology with learnings from Microsoft Research and Bing to provide more powerful navigation of documents, sites, people, conversations, videos, reports, and more.

And that wasn’t all. Another key takeaway for me was the reinforcement that Microsoft is in fact “all-in” on Cloud. Microsoft announced during the keynote that all new releases will go into Office 365 first with 90 day release cycles. This represents a very significant shift in Microsoft’s product release strategy – Spataro said himself that “We’re at the end of three-year release cycles.” – and AvePoint is well situated to meet that new paradigm with our tremendous R&D and support resources.

It was also fantastic to hear from Yammer executives – Co-Founder & CEO David Sacks and Co-Founder & CTO Adam Pisoni – talk more about the future of enterprise social and how they are looking to integrate Yammer into Microsoft technologies. Interestingly, Yammer will still act as a standalone cloud platform given its 200,000 customers. I believe that right now Yammer/SharePoint integration is in its nascent stages, and it will be interesting to see as the acquisition closes how deeply Microsoft decides to integrate Yammer. Pisoni had an amusing comment, stating that “Yammer is the water cooler of today’s companies.” From a Compliance Officer’s perspective, though, do you really want your water cooler conversations heard by everyone in the company?

And therein lies the rub in today’s business landscape: addressing the dichotomy of vast collaboration and security. As SharePoint continues to grow into being a total information worker productivity platform, AvePoint and its solutions for compliance, governance, and management are better positioned than ever to enable enterprise collaboration with confidence.