Microsoft Corp. is holding two conferences this week for its products – Convergence, for the Dynamics family in Atlanta; and SharePoint, for that suite, Yammer and Office365 in Las Vegas.
While Convergence will be getting most of the ink here because our colleague Brian Jackson of IT Buiness.ca is there, there’s lots of noise coming out of Nevada from Microsoft and its partners. – some of it from the floor and some of it online.
Gartner’s Jeffrey Mann noted that a blog this week from SharePoint general manager Jared Spataro “made clear” that the future of the suite’s on-premise version is limited.
“While we’re committed to another on-premises release of SharePoint Server—and we’ll maintain its social capabilities—we don’t plan on adding new features,” Spataro wrote.
Last October Mann predicted SharePoint will disappear, with customers turning to SharePoint Online for building portals and Yammer for social media capabilities.
Instead, it looks like SharePoint on-prem will be around for another year. After that …..?
In addition, Spataro outlined new product capabilities:
–Yammer’s concept of the Enterprise Graph is being extended across Office 365 to create he Office Graph.
Using signals from email, social conversations, documents, sites, instant messages, meetings, and more a map is created that shows the relationships between the people and things that make a business go.
“Just as consumer social networks connect you to people and information you’d otherwise never be able to keep up with, the Office Graph will plug you into the very fabric that makes your organization work,” he wrote.
One app will use the capability to it search and find people and information across the enterprise.
–Office 365 users will be able to create a group anywhere in the cloud suite that will automatically provision a corresponding inbox, social feed, calendar, and document library that group members can use.
The group’s Yammer feed and inbox will both display the same conversation, so users who are more comfortable in Yammer can participate in the group through the feed, and users who prefer email can participate in the group through the inbox, Spataro said. Groups are open by default to enhance discoverability and sharing, although they can be made private.
–social media can be added to Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics, and any other app, service, or line-of-business system.
So, for example, Yammer conversations can be added to documents in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, and updates, documents, and emails to can be posted in Yammer from SharePoint Online and Outlook.
In the future, he added, Yammer will be integrated with Lync and Skype.
Meanwhile, as often happens at these conferences, partners are taking the opportunity to announce related upgrades to their products.
–OpenText launched SharePoint Services (SPS) for Extended ECM for SAP Solutions to help deliver comprehensive governance and compliance assurance capabilities to customers.
The solution allows SharePoint users to work with content managed by OpenText Extended ECM for SAP Solutions.
“OpenText’s new SPS offering leverages the existing investments customers have already made in Microsoft SharePoint and SAP ERP to help them fully utilize enterprise content to drive their agenda of innovation and growth,” said Kevin Cochrane, OpenText’s chief marketing officer, by helping to reduce the risks and costs of any records mismanagement, increasing information worker productivity, and enhancing a company’s ability to comply with regulations.
Because the solution provides a full view into systems, companies can eliminate the need for separate solutions for compliance reporting, archiving or records management, OpenText says.
— Qumu, a business video platform provider, said it has included Speech Search along with several other features to the Qumu Video App for SharePoint 2013.
The app delivers an integrated enterprise video solution within SharePoint that can scale globally for even the largest enterprises, the company said.
Users can search for words and phrases within individual videos and jump directly to the incidences where those words are spoken