It is almost the end of 2012 and Microsoft has just released a TON of new information at the SharePoint Conference about SharePoint 2013. I was fortunate to be one of the 10,000+ people in attendance from all over the world to immerse myself into all the new features and capabilities that we all will be consuming in the future.
Many things have changed in the new versions and I plan to point out a few that I found intriguing.
Yammer
First off with Microsoft’s recent $1.2 billion acquisition of Yammer they plan on redefining social within the collaboration space. Jeff Teper, Corporate Vice President of Office Servers and Services Program Management, announced during the keynote speech that Office365 customers will be able to take advantage of Yammer for FREE! The live demonstration on how you can start a social discussion around a document and then be able to search for it was pretty slick but it did have a couple of minor issues for me.
When starting up a Yammer chat you move to the Yammer platform and lose the SharePoint banded experience. It is still a clean look and feel but you defiantly know you are not in SharePoint anymore. The search backend in Yyammer is not built with FAST search and has its own database but expect things like this to change over time. Since this was a very recent acquisition you can expect to see tighter integration over time especially with other products like CRM, AX and Skype.
Office365 and “The Cloud”
After the keynote Office365 and “The Cloud” was one of the biggest topics that I paid attention to. It was hard either as just about every demo was either ran entirely in the cloud or was demonstrating a hybrid model with on-prem and cloud capabilities together. It was very surprising to hear senior architect Paul Stubbs say that infrastructure as a service is just a stopping point on your way to SharePoint Online and that your end goal should be Office365.
This has me doing a lot of thinking about companies migrating from their traditional on-prem SharePoint farms to “Pie in the Sky” software as a service model with Office365. I defiantly think this is a great move for a lot of companies and I am currently working on a ROI calculator to help explain why. OK so it might be a little too hard to swallow moving all your data to the cloud, then maybe a hybrid model might be the right thing for you to start getting your feet /data off the ground. Spinning up search servers in the cloud, creating Dev/Test instances or configuring servers for DR backup are just the beginning of the possibilities you can do with a hybrid SharePoint model. 2013 could be the year of the cloud?
Migrating to SharePoint 2013
This was a key topic for me to learn about as many clients have already started asking about how the migration to 2013 works, maybe you are one of them. I will say I think Microsoft mailed hit this out of the park. When you first do a SharePoint 2013 install you get both a 14 and 15 hive. Yes, Both! Even if you don’t plan to upgrade any of your 2010 databases to SharePoint 2013. I think the first great feature is the ability to migrate your 2010 content onto a 2013 farm then create an read-only evaluation site. This way user can continue using their current content with a 2010 look and feel but take their time in evaluation the new 2013 look and feel to make sure all legacy code executes as expected. You can even create new 2010 site collections or sites with the existing 2010 look and feel during your migration process to allow the business to keep moving forward. This is because SharePoint installs with both the 14 and 15 hives from the beginning.
Secondly the only way to migrate to data to SharePoint 2013 is through a database attach migration. If you have migrated from 2007 to 2010 that database is required to be a fully upgraded. If you had planned to upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to 2013, think again, this approach will not work. You will need to either complete a migration to SharePoint 2010 first or manually move content from 2007 to 2013.
Attending a conference with over 10,000+ people is pretty wild, especially for a first time attendee. I had done my research and dressed comfortable and preconfigured all my social devices and brought multiple platforms to stay up date with what was going on. However with over 275 sessions, 300 exhibitors and many side conversations and vendor gatherings it was like drinking from a fire hose for 4.5 days straight and I LOVED every minute of it.
This is just the beginning of what is yet to come. My goal is to keep blogging about SharePoint 2010 and 2013 so please check back often. We will be also holding many events at our office so please sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date with what we are doing here at CSG Pro. No special equipment needed; just extraordinary performance to be gained.
To learn more about my experience at the event please register for our upcoming session "Debrief on the Pass SQL/BI Summit and Microsoft SharePoint Conferences".