SharePoint Goes Social - Redmond mag

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SharePoint Goes SocialNew social networking features in SharePoint 2013 can turn just about any organization into a social enterprise. Here’s what they’re capable of doing and how to implement them.

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Become a Social Enterprise with SharePoint 2013

When Microsoft released SharePoint 2013 late last year, it became clear that social business is the new normal—and SharePoint can be your organization’s social hub.

Put aside the fact that Microsoft last year acquired enterprise social networking site Yammer for $1.2 billion and is on a path to tie it with SharePoint and Microsoft’s other wares ranging from SkyDrive to Dynamics. SharePoint 2013 introduces Community Sites and My Sites, which provide a social interface for internal business collaboration, but are also designed to leverage the security and other business and enterprise manage ment features of SharePoint. This is a natural extension of collaboration among workgroups and partners.

“[Chief Digital Officers] are looking at social in terms of being able to close the gap between strategy and execution, execution and measurement, and measurement and strategy,” social business

analyst R. “Ray” Wang told the MIT Sloan Management Review (see bit.ly/141upih). Wang, who is CEO of Constellation Research Inc., believes CTOs understand that SharePoint can be the platform to integrate these

SharePoint 2013 introduces Community Sites and My Sites, which are designed to leverage the security and other business and enterprise management features of SharePoint.

SharePoint Goes Social

How to implement the new social networking features in the latest version of the Microsoft collaboration and content management platform.BY MAGGIE SWEARINGEN

SharePoint Live!If you’re a SharePoint admin or developer, check out the SharePoint Live! conference, Nov. 18-22, in Orlando, Fla. Key topics will include SharePoint social, business intelligence, search and content capabilities, as well as Office 365 and how to run SharePoint in the cloud. live360events.com

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technologies and bring innovation in-house—provided there’s a social business strategy and plan.

I’ll look in-depth at three social aspects of SharePoint 2013— Community Sites, My Sites and the new Newsfeed—that set SharePoint 2013 apart from its predecessors and make upgrading a smart and foward- thinking decision.

Community SitesFor many of you, your most vivid memories of SharePoint consist of images of a hard-working, collaborative team and some document libraries—also known as the Team Site (see Figure 1).

So, what’s changed? Enter Team Site’s more social sibling, the Community Site (see Figure 2, p. 3).

Unlike other SharePoint site templates, the Community Site relies on user-generated content in the form of threaded and categorized discussions. Top contributors are automatically featured on the community homepage, ranked not only by their number of posts but also by the value of those posts.

Creating a new Community Site is simple: select Community Site from the list of Collaboration site templates available in SharePoint (see Figure 3, p. 3).

Depending on the business role of the community, site owners can select one of four permissions levels for Community Sites:

• Private: Only selected members can see or interact with the community.

• Closed: End users can read content, but only members who receive approved requests can contribute content.

• Open with explicit membership: End users can read content and join the community automatically to contribute content.

• Open: Anyone can contribute content.The Community Site template, like other

SharePoint subsites, can inherit or disinherit permissions from the parent site. The basic permissions and security constructs stay the same—Community Sites simply build on this construct using the permissions levels previ-ously described. Despite this architecture,

Unlike other SharePoint site templates, the Community Site relies on user- generated content in the form of threaded and categorized discussions.

Figure 1. The Team Sites interface before Microsoft updated it.

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it’s considered a better practice to use unique permissions to manage community membership, and organizations using communi-ties at the site level will need to be aware of this setup.

There’s nothing stopping the Community Site owner from adding apps to extend the base capabilities of the Community Site. For communities where document libraries, task lists, calendars, wikis, and more are desired or necessary, app addition mimics the Team Site and publishing site models.

But the key feature in Community Sites isn’t the discussion list, which is really just a retooled and updated version of a feature already introduced in previous generations of SharePoint. And it’s not the out-of-the-box capture and display of top community contributors. The key to the Community Site’s adoption lies in its built-in moderation capabilities.

Many organizations are understandably reluctant to turn content creation over to the masses. But the thought becomes more palatable when management and moderation are in the hands of not only the site owners, but trusted site advisers assigned by the organization.

The key to the Community Site’s adoption lies in its built-in moderation capabilities.

Figure 2. Community Sites display discussions and provide access to relevant information.

Figure 3. The interface to create a new Community Site displays key setup parameters.

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Community moderators have access to features that enable them to more effectively follow discussions, such as:

• Offensive content reporting: This is probably the most useful tool as it doesn’t require constant vigilance on the part of the moderator; rather it relies on the community policing model that’s common practice in well-run online communities. You can allow users to report offensive or inappropriate content in the commu-nity with a simple community settings configuration change (see Figures 4 and 5).

• Alerts: While the alerts aren’t new, they’re a moderator’s best friends. Moderators can, and should, subscribe to discussion list alerts via e-mail or—better yet—text message. For active communities immediate alerts might be a bit much, but daily and weekly digest options are still available and easily configured.

Community managers know community moderation isn’t always about being the bad cop. Most communities find their way surpris-ingly quickly to the community policing model. If you’re skeptical,

consider this: Have you ever ordered from a one-star seller on eBay? Probably not.

Community Sites give the moderator more time to actually build the community content and reward the community’s best and brightest. SharePoint 2013 lets moderators manage and expand the reputation of the community members. Moderators can promote discussion threads to “featured” status, grant “badges” to outstanding contributors for consistent and relevant posting, and organize content tags.

The moderator is critical to the success of Community Sites. The Community Site’s value is only as strong as the human interaction behind the site. For those of you involved in the strategic outlay of these new technologies, take care to be well-versed in the human resources costs associated with integrating new features into your SharePoint implementations.

Figure 5. The user can flag offensive content by clicking “Report to moderator.”

Figure 4. Rather than requiring a moderator, site administrators can set up an alerting mechanism.

Community Sites give the moderator more time to actually build the community content and reward the community’s best and brightest.

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Architecture for Community SitesArchitecturally speaking, setting up your community portal involves only a few critical decisions:

• Think scale. If you can get these communities rolling and producing content, they’re going to become big quickly. If there’s a case for isolating communities into their own site collection, don’t think twice, just do it. Scale the solution now—you’ll thank yourself later.

• Think services. For communities to work efficiently, users must be able to access each other’s profiles, tag content and use search. According to the Microsoft TechNet Library page, “Overview of communities in SharePoint 2013” (bit.ly/ 11FxxMR), the user profile service application, social and profile databases, managed meta data service, search service, and databases are all optional when implementing a community solution—and technically they are—but implementing the Community Sites minus the profile and personalization features that accompany them can be catastrophic for user adoption.

For many organizations, SharePoint 2013 Community Sites will be less about technical implementation and more about strategy and execution. Community management is an obvious addition to any SharePoint governance plan, and governance committees will need to ask (and answer) the following questions:

• Are SharePoint communities in line with our larger social business strategy?

• Who can create communities?• What are our policies around assigning moderators?• When do communities “close”?• When do we create Community Sites versus Team Sites or

publishing sites?Though the idea of community is inextricably intertwined with the

meaning of social, some organizations may choose to take a more “me”-centered approach. Extended My Sites capabilities and the new Newsfeed offer social capabilities without the extensive site management required to run successful communities.

The ‘Me’ in My SitesWhen I build SharePoint intranets for clients, the No. 1 sentiment I hear during the UX and interviewing phase is, “I don’t really care about other people’s stuff, or really even company stuff. I just want

For many organizations, SharePoint 2013 Community Sites will be less about technical implementation and more about strategy and execution.

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what’s interesting to me and relevant to my job right there on the homepage.” There’s technology at your users’ fingertips every day—why should you expect, or want, your company’s employees to wade through libraries of irrelevant information just to get to one important document? It’s a waste of efficiency.

SharePoint 2013 My Sites have the ability to give users exactly what they want—quick access to “their stuff.”

A user now has the ability to “follow” sites, documents or people. The “following” mechanism automatically creates lists for a user that are rendered in his My Site, both on the My Sites homepage and the Newsfeed page.

My Sites give a user one-click access to sites she follows and, based on various criteria, recommend other sites she might find useful or interesting (see Figure 6)—providing her permissions give her access to those sites.

But following doesn’t just allow a user to build personalized site navigation. It also allows him to create a site driven mainly by the content of his choosing.

Newsfeeds are dynamically updated content generated by the activities of fellow users (see Figure 7, p. 7). They embrace the now-ubiquitous hash-tags and “@ mentions,” and closely resemble Twitter or Facebook feeds. Unlike in external social networks, however, organizations can exercise some control over which activities appear on the Newsfeed from within the User Profile

Figure 6. The user can view SharePoint sites he’s following, while also seeing suggested relevant sites to follow.

Why should you expect, or want, your company’s employees to wade through libraries of irrelevant information just to get to one important document? It’s a waste of efficiency.

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Service Application (see bit.ly/120apPx for more information).

In the Newsfeed Settings screen, a user has considerable control over hash-tags, e-mail notifications, “People I follow” and “Activities I want to share in my Newsfeed.”

For the many organizations that will feel the desire to deny users this level of flexibility, refer to the long-forgotten SharePoint 2010 Activity Feed Web Part as a cautionary tale: too limited, too little, too late (see bit.ly/17pWsfV).

For a me-centered user, the power of the “I’m Following” Web Part can’t be over-

stated. With a simple four-category display, the user has everything needed to navigate efficiently to the aspects of the SharePoint site that are the most relevant to his work.

In past iterations of SharePoint, it was possible to implement Team Site functionality and virtually ignore My Sites. SharePoint 2013 makes it nearly impossible to leverage any social features and move forward with your SharePoint implementation without My Sites. It’s easier to make a case for a holistic approach to SharePoint implementation that simply wasn’t necessary before.

Risk vs. RewardIntellectual property and reputation are critical, and when imple-menting SharePoint 2013 it’s important to keep this in mind. The McKinsey Global Institute’s “The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity Through Social Technologies” (a PDF can be downloaded from here: bit.ly/13a7HU7) cites loss of intellectual property and reputation management, among other things, as one of the most touted risks of going social for business. However, the McKinsey report also points out that these are risks some organizations can and should be willing to take, given the dividends social can eventually pay.

Organizations can exert considerable amounts of control over their SharePoint enterprise solutions. Not only does SharePoint 2013 introduce the new moderation capabilities described in this article, it still actively incorporates approval workflows and even the expanded eDiscovery functionality, which gives records

Figure 7. The SharePoint 2013 Newsfeed is familiar to those who use social networks.

Intellectual property and reputation are critical, and when imple menting SharePoint 2013 it’s important to keep this in mind.

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managers and legal teams the ability to discover and preserve electronic content across SharePoint sites.

Costs of SocialThe enterprise architecture that’s necessary to run these tools effectively isn’t without cost. Beyond licensing costs, there are considerations for hardware and software, including SharePoint databases, Web front-end servers, application servers, SharePoint services and features, and architecture to support redundancy and performance.

Also critical is the hard truth that many organizations don’t have the technical or the business user expertise on staff to effectively administer—and train staff on how to use—SharePoint efficiently.

IT ImperativeSo, is the transition to SharePoint 2013 worth it? Microsoft certainly seems to think so. The company hasn’t been Yammering all spring for nothing. A recent Microsoft survey (bit.ly/114LOUh) compared social business tools to e-mail with regard to their capacity for increasing productivity and elevating change in an organization.

Forbes magazine recently cited two unrelated studies that indicate market trends support the move to social (onforb.es/11mdPGy). Both data firm Evolv Inc.’s study and a study conducted by Warwick Business School professor Joe Nandhakumar suggest that employees who engage with social media are ultimately more in tune with each other and their clients. Additionally, younger employees expect to interact with their colleagues in more social mediums than previous generations of employees.

Leveraging the social features in SharePoint 2013 can give organizations ample control over social business interaction while still protecting content and intellectual property—a win for both social employees and decision makers. R

Maggie Swearingen is a manger and SharePoint UX architect for Protiviti Inc., a global consulting firm specializing in IT consulting, risk and compliance, and internal audit. She has launched dozens of intranet and online Community Sites in SharePoint, and has worked for organizations in the corporate, association, non-profit, health care and legal industries. Swearingen has a master’s degree from Georgetown University in Communications, Culture and Technology.

The enterprise architecture that’s necessary to run these tools effectively isn’t without cost.

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KeyPiece

Now that Microsoft has released SharePoint 2013 and its online counterpart via the latest rev of Office 365, IT decision makers must choose whether to deploy it in-house or use the latest cloud-based iterations of the

collaboration platform. In many cases decision makers may have less influence—and in

some instances absolutely no say—in that decision. That’s because those who manage line-of-business apps can now sidestep IT and procure SharePoint in the cloud on their own, thanks to a variety of self-service options from cloud providers and the new Microsoft SharePoint Online service. That service is available in the revamped release of Office 365, which Microsoft released on Feb. 27.

Microsoft’s plan to upgrade SharePoint in the cloud first is complete, but the puzzle for IT is still coming together.BY JEFFREY SCHWARTZ

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Moreover, customers can opt to have Microsoft or a third party build apps and manage their SharePoint instances in the cloud. But even in midsize and larger shops, where IT’s role may be changing, it’s far from diminished. Most enterprises are still aligning their tech-nology organizations with the business, whether they continue to run SharePoint in-house or in the cloud.

“The business side is interested in transferring capital expenditures to operational expenses, but there’s resistance from those who manage the infrastructure side of the business because there’s the perception they’re going to lose control,” says Sriram Jayaraman, director of technology for enterprise solutions at Aditi Technologies, one of Microsoft’s top cloud partners.

Jayaraman says Aditi, with headquarters in both Seattle and Bangalore, India, explains to customers how IT can shift control to minimize the number of SharePoint workloads, so that they can focus on maintaining quality of service and business continuity. How do these discussions play out? “It’s not a one-time conversation, I’ll put it to you that way,” he admits. “We have to demonstrate how they can do that.”

Analysts and partners say demand for the new SharePoint 2013 release is outpacing that of previous new versions at this stage. Some of the key selling points of the new SharePoint release are a modernized UI, improved support for mobile devices and social networking features including some new ties to Yammer, the cloud-based enterprise social networking service Microsoft acquired last year for $1.2 billion.

New SharePoint CodeMicrosoft has updated the code base in SharePoint 2013, which is the same cut of the software that powers SharePoint Online in Office 365. The latter, of course, includes Exchange and Lync, all delivered in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model. The changes appearing in the new Office 365 SharePoint Online will work their way into an update or service pack to the premises-based version of SharePoint 2013, which Microsoft released to manufacturing in November 2012 (see “Under the Hood of SharePoint 2013,” December 2012).

The release of SharePoint Online in the new Office 365 release marks Microsoft’s completed transition toward adding new features to SharePoint by rolling them out first in the cloud version and subsequent-ly in the premises-based edition, explains Mark Kashman, Microsoft senior SharePoint product manager. “The innovation we’re bringing to the cloud will come to the on-prem version afterward,” Kashman says.

“The innovation we’re bringing to the cloud will come to the on-prem version afterward.”Mark Kashman, Senior SharePoint Product Manager, Microsoft

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Most experts are in agreement that a growing number of SharePoint implementations will run in the cloud, either via the SharePoint Online service in Office 365 or through a cloud infra-structure provider such as Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), Rackspace U.S. Inc., Microsoft Windows Azure or thousands of alternative hosters and managed services providers (MSPs). Where the experts’ projections differ is the extent of SharePoint cloud implementations.

A Forrester Research Inc. survey of IT decision makers shows 62 percent plan to deploy SharePoint 2013 on-premises, while only 8 percent will do so in a Microsoft datacenter, presumably via Office 365. Only 4 percent will run SharePoint in the datacenter of a Microsoft partner, while 26 percent will deploy SharePoint in a hybrid mode, both on-premises and online.

While that shows a clear majority still planning to run SharePoint in-house, it’s a marked decline over the current state of SharePoint deployments, in which 82 percent of surveyed companies are running it in their datacenters, 5 percent have hybrid implementations, 4 percent are using a Microsoft-hosted service and 5 percent are hosting it with a third-party provider.

Another survey recently released by Metalogix Software Corp. had similar findings, showing 55 percent intend to continue running SharePoint entirely in-house and only 10 percent plan to run it purely in the cloud. The remaining 35 percent are planning hybrid SharePoint implementations.

“While Microsoft has steadily improved the online version of SharePoint by eliminating functional gaps, customers are still moving slowly to adopt Microsoft’s Office and SharePoint cloud services,” according to a February Forrester report authored by analysts Rob Koplowitz and John Rymer. Nevertheless, the analysts expect that to shift. “Despite the current slow adoption of Microsoft’s SharePoint Online, we expect that customers will begin to adopt it in greater numbers as they eventually start seeing the service’s advantages,” they wrote.

Others believe a much larger percentage of organizations will run SharePoint in-house, particularly those addressing larger enterprises. Errin O’Connor, CEO of Houston-based EPC Group, a consultancy that specializes primarily in Microsoft SharePoint and SQL Server solutions, says 80 percent of his customers intend to keep SharePoint on-site.

Most experts are in agreement that a growing number of SharePoint implementations will run in the cloud.

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“I don’t think the cloud has matured enough for large organizations with 1,000-plus users,” O’Connor says. “They’re not comfortable with deploying data in the cloud because of security. The cloud is good for quick SharePoint environments that people want to stand up that will play nice with IT, or for smaller organizations.”

Shyam Oza, senior product manager for administration, migration and cloud strategy at AvePoint Inc., believes it’s hard to predict how rapidly SharePoint will move online.

“I think those numbers are up in the air,” Oza says, when asked about the Metalogix survey. “While that number may be accurate as a snapshot of right now, I think that figure is in a state of constant flux. We’ve had phone calls with customers in the middle of last year who said, ‘We won’t go to the cloud, it’s not on our roadmap, our content is too sensitive.’ As recently as a week ago, [those same] customers have reached out to us and said, ‘We’re thinking of moving to SharePoint Online.’”

Case for the CloudPredictions and studies notwithstanding, it’s no secret that Microsoft is looking to ultimately wean as many SharePoint customers as possible off of the datacenter and into the cloud. Most agree this won’t happen overnight, and there are some SharePoint implementations—existing and future—that will never go off-site because of compliance, data governance or other regulatory requirements.

“There will always be large organizations and governments that will never move their servers off-site. They’ll want control, but this technology is moving at such a fast pace that in seven to 10 years the majority will be in the cloud,” says SharePoint MVP Christian Buckley, director of product evangelism at SharePoint tools vendor Axceler. “Certainly SMBs will be 100 percent in the cloud and the large majority of enterprises will be in the cloud, as well, but hybrid will have a long life.”

Stephen Murphy, CEO of Metalogix, attended a SharePoint conference last month and suggests his company’s findings that 35 percent are planning hybrid implementations may be on the low side.

“The numbers definitely are dependent on the type of content,” Murphy says. “From a hybrid cloud perspective, we’re starting to hear regularly, ‘I’m going to move my social to the cloud, I’m using My Sites.’ Now we’re starting to see and hear file shares. There’s a massive amount of content, and customers are looking for alternate

“There will always be large organizations and governments that will never move their servers off-site.” Christian Buckley, SharePoint MVP, Director of Evangelism, Axceler Corp.

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cost and availability models. When you’re talking about someone who’s looking at less-mission-critical content, I think their intention is to move to a cloud—Office 365 being one of [the options there]—and those numbers will increase.”

Whether you use SharePoint 2013 on-premises or elsewhere, the new SkyDrive Pro component will give all users a taste of the cloud (see “Working Together,” p. 16). It will allow users to more securely share files in the cloud than public cloud services like Box, Dropbox and a slew of other services. “This is a much-needed enhancement to allow users to move between devices and have access to their content,” wrote Gartner Inc. analysts Mark Gilbert and Jeffrey Mann, in a report on SharePoint 2013 released in February.

Migration IssuesMicrosoft is talking up the parity of SharePoint 2013 and the online edition in Office 365. But critics point out that, while that’s fine for new applications, for shops with existing SharePoint farms on older versions, Office 365 is not designed to let IT simply move that content or apps with custom-developed or third-party applications to the cloud.

Microsoft’s Kashman says while Office 365 indeed can’t run so-called “trusted code” or apps designed to run on existing SharePoint farms on-premises, his team has worked closely with third-party tools providers and ISVs to mitigate that shortcoming. “We don’t see that as a blocker,” Kashman insists.

Among those that offer SharePoint migration and management tools are AvePoint, Axceler, the Dell Quest Software unit and Idera Inc. For its part, Metalogix last month added Office 365 support to its Content Matrix migration software. The release in February of AvePoint DocAve 6 SP2 adds support for those migrating from older versions of SharePoint—as well as other content management offerings including EMC Documentum, IBM Lotus Notes and OpenText Livelink—to SharePoint 2013 and Office 365. And the newest update to Axceler ControlPoint for SharePoint Administration allows IT to enforce SharePoint governance in the 2013 release and Office 365.

“Having good migration pathways and working with our partners to make sure their tooling is compliant with the changes we’ve made in 2013, it doesn’t mean you can’t go from 2007 to SharePoint Online, which is based on SharePoint 2013,” Kashman says. “There are things to be considered in the what—and how—but we think we’ve addressed that pretty well.”

The new SkyDrive Pro component will give all users a taste of the cloud.



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In addition to those running hybrid implementations, the improved SharePoint 2013 Business Connectivity Services (BCS) provides connectors to Office apps, SQL databases, the Open Data Protocol (OData), and other Web services protocols and .NET sources, as well as connectors to popular applications such as those provided by Oracle Corp. and SAP AG.

Alternative Cloud Options Many talk about SharePoint Online via Office 365 as the obvious option for running SharePoint in the cloud. But major Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers—including AWS, Rackspace, Dimension Data and even VMware vCloud Director-based IaaS provider Bluelock—say they have thriving businesses letting customers run SharePoint either via dedicated hosting services or on multi-tenant (shared) virtual servers.

SharePoint MVP Shane Young, founder of SharePoint911, which Rackspace acquired last year, says there’s less reluctance from customers to run the collaboration service online, but he believes they want more control than Office 365 allows even with its migration options.

“If you look at Office 365, it’s a very cheap option, but it’s also not the most flexible option,” Young says. “Either your data is so massive, or it’s corrupt and you’re afraid to touch and move it, or you’ve added so much custom code and add-ons that you know moving it to SharePoint 2010 or 2013 will be a monumental task because you’ll have to redeploy those customizations. For those people, Office 365 is not going to meet their needs because they’re not going to be able to move those customizations to a multi-tenant shared environment.”

Young, now director of Rackspace SharePoint Service, is aiming to capture those customers via a fully managed service Rackspace rolled out in February, where the company will actually build a SharePoint farm and provide support services running in its public IaaS offering. And within the next quarter or two, Young says Rackspace will offer SharePoint 2013 in its multi-tenant IaaS environment.

With this multi-tenant SharePoint farm, a customer will essentially be buying SharePoint site collections from Rackspace. IT won’t have central admin access, nor will it be able to deploy code on the server, much like the Microsoft SharePoint Online offering.

“If you look at Office 365, it’s a very cheap option, but it’s also not the most flexible option.” Shane Young, SharePoint MVP, Director of SharePoint Service, Rackspace U.S. Inc.

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What’s the point of a SharePoint Online-like offering provided by a third party? According to Young: “There’s no moving your data out of Office 365 once you’re in there, and that’s going to be our value proposition.”

AWS also has a significant customer base that uses its EC2 services to run their SharePoint farms. One of AWS’s largest integration partners, 2nd Watch Inc., offers what it describes as a superior alternative to Office 365 called 2W SharePoint. “What we’ve done is simplified that to one click, so a company with 1,000 users can have a SharePoint site running [on Amazon] within hours,” says Jeff Aden, co-founder and president of Seattle-based 2nd Watch.

Customers can also use 2nd Watch to bring their own SharePoint licenses to Amazon. “In either case they end up with the same product—it’s just a question of how quickly they want to get there,” Aden says. The company last month announced a partnership with Slalom Consulting, which will work with clients to provide custom SharePoint development of applications hosted in Amazon via 2nd Watch.

Cloud App StoreWhether you’re going to run SharePoint in the cloud, in your data-center or in some combination thereof, Microsoft is championing a new cloud app model for SharePoint 2013 and Office 365. The apps for SharePoint can be found in the new Microsoft Office Store, where third-party ISVs can sell SharePoint tools, plug-ins, and apps either free or for a fee.

Enterprises with their own in-house development organizations can also use the new SharePoint tooling in Visual Studio to build apps that can be offered in the public store or side-loaded into their SharePoint corporate catalogs, according to Kashman.

Kashman says it’s early days for the new cloud app model, but he is optimistic that partners will quickly deploy new applications.

“We think we’re going to see a lot of the ISV-level solutions coming into the store in the next four to six months, but we think at the same time, enterprise customers will have started to take advantage of the corporate catalog,” Kashman says. “We’ve gotten feedback that they will be taking more advantage of the cloud app model methods as opposed to writing code that sits in SharePoint.” R

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond.

Microsoft is championing a new cloud app model for SharePoint 2013 and Office 365.


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SharePoint may very well be the most baffling product Microsoft has ever created. While SharePoint has been around for more than a decade, IT pros are often unable to agree on what it really is. To some it’s a content

management system; to others, it’s a development framework. Still others rely on SharePoint as a collaboration tool.

One of the reasons for the diversity of opinions on what SharePoint really is could be the fact that Microsoft has integrated its other products, such as SQL Server, Exchange Server and Visual Studio, with SharePoint to varying degrees. Recently, however, Microsoft has upped the ante by incorporating extensive SharePoint support into the new Office 2013, released in late February.

Now you can collaborate using the new Microsoft Office release with SharePoint 2013.BY BRIEN M. POSEY

PHOTOGRAPHY/ILLUSTRATION BY SHUTTERSTOCK/REDMOND STAFF

WorkingTogether

To some, SharePoint is a content manage ment system; to others, it’s a development framework.

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I spent some time working with the new Office 2013 suite tied to SharePoint 2013, both of which are available for use on-premises or with a revamped release of the new Microsoft cloud-based Office 365.

SkyDrive Goes ProMicrosoft launched its SkyDrive storage service long before the term “cloud storage” came into vogue. Microsoft includes SkyDrive with free services such as Hotmail, and provides users with 7GB of free

cloud storage. Additional storage is available for a fee.

Even though SkyDrive has been around for quite some time, it never really caught on with businesses—which is perfectly understandable, because SkyDrive has always been a consumer service.

Throughout its history, the fact that SkyDrive is geared toward consumers has largely been a non-issue for businesses. Businesses have largely decided to either use on-premises stor age or an alternate form of cloud storage. But now, products such as Windows 8, Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 have forced businesses to pay attention to SkyDrive.

Windows 8 was the catalyst for the new emphasis on SkyDrive. Unlike previous versions of Windows, Windows 8 asks users to log in with a Microsoft account. If a user decides to use his Microsoft account, then Windows 8 provides access to services such as Hotmail and SkyDrive.

This might seem like a good thing, but it presents a major

Figure 1. SkyDrive Pro is exposed through Office 365.

Figure 2. SharePoint 2013 and SkyDrive Pro are really the same thing.

Figure 3. Office 2013 defaults to saving documents to the cloud (assuming the user is logged in using a Microsoft account).

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problem for businesses because Microsoft accounts are not centrally controlled. If, for example, a user were to copy a document to his SkyDrive and then leave the company, an administrator would have no way of retrieving that document. Worse, most users now typically

connect to SkyDrive from multiple devices, which means corporate documents stored in SkyDrive could be exposed to anyone who happens to use one of these devices, including colleagues, friends and family.

At the moment, there are three main ways that businesses can deal with this problem: Don’t install Windows 8, use Group Policies to prevent the use of Microsoft accounts or use SkyDrive Pro.

All three are perfectly valid solutions, but the first two aren’t practical because they deny the organization and the users the benefits of using Windows 8 and SkyDrive. The third solution, using SkyDrive Pro, is the most suitable option for IT.

As the name implies, SkyDrive Pro is a business-centric version of SkyDrive. While it’s easy to assume that using SkyDrive Pro means paying a monthly subscrip-tion fee for cloud storage, that assumption is not necessarily accurate. SkyDrive Pro is actually implemented through SharePoint. This is the case whether you’re running SharePoint on-premises or in the cloud as part of an Office 365 subscription.

Figure 4. My Word document is accessible through the Office 365 SkyDrive tab.

Figure 5. Office 2013 provides numerous options for sharing documents.

Figure 6. Users can check out documents from within Office 2013.

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The Office 365 Profiles screen (Figure 1, p. 17) has a SkyDrive link at the top of the screen, which lets users access SkyDrive Pro directly through the Office 365 interface. For reasons unclear, Microsoft calls it SkyDrive on this screen, even though other screens in Office 365 reference SkyDrive Pro.

The important thing to remember as you look at this screen is that SkyDrive Pro is really just another component of SharePoint. This becomes evident as you look at the tabs located just beneath the Office 365 logo. You’ll notice in Figure 1 that there’s a Files tab and a Library tab. Clicking on either one of these tabs exposes a SharePoint toolbar (Figure 2, p. 17).

So where does Office 2013 fit into the picture? When Microsoft created Office 2013, the company did something unique (at least unique to Microsoft). For the first time, users have the option of logging in to Microsoft Office. In fact, when you get ready to activate Office, you have the option of either entering a product key or entering an e-mail address that’s associated with an Office subscription.

The login process automatically connects Office 2013 with the SkyDrive (or, in this case, SkyDrive Pro) account that’s associated with the Office account. This connection is prominently used when it comes to opening or saving Office documents. If you take a look at the Microsoft Word 2013 Save As screen (Figure 3, p. 17), you’ll see the primary options for saving documents are SkyDrive or a Microsoft SharePoint Team Site. Sure, you can still save documents to the local computer or to a network share, but cloud storage is now the default option.

While this is certainly an interesting concept, you might be wondering what it really means in terms of users saving Office documents to the cloud. Click the Browse button and you’re directed to the Save As dialog box. Although the Save As dialog box has been part of Office for as long as I can remember, it has undergone a radical transformation in Office 2013. SharePoint is directly exposed through the Save As dialog box. You’ll see the SharePoint logo as well as links to SharePoint document libraries. Again, users have the ability to save documents locally, but this is the screen that’s displayed by default when a user clicks the Browse button.

During my evaluation, I saved a document using the name “Brien Poseys Sample Word 2013 document.” I chose this particular name because Microsoft misspelled my name when it set up my reviewer’s account for Office 365 (as shown in some of the previous

When you get ready to activate Office, you have the option of either entering a product key or entering an e-mail address that’s associated with an Office subscription.

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figures). Therefore, any document that had my name spelled correctly was obviously a document I created, and not a sample document that was created by default. I saved my sample document into the Documents container. When I returned to Office 365 and went to the SkyDrive tab, my Word document was displayed (Figure 4, p. 18). Of course, I could’ve just as easily saved the document to a SharePoint Team Site.

Earlier, when I described the Word 2013 Save As screen, you might’ve noticed in Figure 3 that the column on the left features a Share option. The Share option is another way in which Office 2013 integrates with SharePoint 2013.

When I click on the Share option, you can see that the location of my document is Microsoft Team Site\Shared Documents (Figure 5, p. 18). More important is the Invite People icon I can use to send other users an invitation to view the document. There’s also a Post to Blog option, which I can use to upload the document directly to a SharePoint blog.

I’ve described options that Office 2013 provides users for saving documents, but before I move on, I’ll point out a few capabilities related to opening Office documents. When you click the Open link to open an Office 2013 document, Office displays recent documents by default. The documents shown on this list can span a variety of locations, both local and in the cloud. The screen provides a variety of options for opening documents, but tends to favor cloud locations.

The ability to open documents saved in the cloud is one thing, but what about editing those documents? If you’ve worked with previous versions of SharePoint, then you’re probably familiar with the concept of checking out a document from a document library. Checking out a document gives the user the ability to edit the document without having to worry about other users making simultaneous modifications.

Office 2013 lets you check out documents from a SharePoint library, without ever having to open the SharePoint Web portal. Instead, you can simply go to the Info tab and then choose the Check Out option from the Manage Versions section (Figure 6, p. 18).

SharePoint and OutlookAlthough it’s easy to think of Microsoft Office support for SharePoint 2013 in terms of the ability of Office to interact with SharePoint document libraries, Outlook has also been extended to offer better

Office 2013 lets you check out documents from a SharePoint library, without ever having to open the SharePoint Web portal.

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In Office 2013, support for SharePoint is front and center.

SharePoint integration. This is evident from the very first time a user opens Outlook. A default e-mail message indicates Outlook can connect to SharePoint news feeds.

In addition, Exchange Server 2013 supports a new type of mailbox called the site mailbox. Site mailboxes are designed to link Exchange 2013 and SharePoint 2013. The idea is a mailbox can be created for a SharePoint site. This mailbox can be opened in Outlook, and allows site members to e-mail one another as a way of collaborating on projects. The interesting thing about site mailboxes is that Outlook provides a Documents folder for them. Users can use the Documents folder to save or access SharePoint documents.

Better TogetherEven though the last couple of versions of Microsoft Office included a degree of SharePoint integration, the SharePoint support almost seemed like an afterthought. In Office 2013, however, support for SharePoint is front and center. It’s as if Microsoft is encouraging its customers to move away from using file servers for Office document storage and use SharePoint instead. R

Brien M. Posey is a seven-time Microsoft MVP with more than two decades of IT experience. He’s written thousands of articles and several dozen books on a wide variety of IT topics. Visit his Web site at brienposey.com.

http://brienposey.com
