Is Share Point Disappearing or is it Taking over the World?

Another key capability of SharePoint as part of Office 365 is being able to provide a proactive and contextual search experience. This aids in solving the find ability problem that has been the holy grail of search for most enterprises. Microsoft's solution is the development of the Office Graph. The Office Graph maps the relationships between people and objects: managers, colleagues, files, appointments, emails, social posts, etc. As people within an organization work together, the graph gets signals from the applications that people use and the actions that people take. These signals are processed using machine learning to build and modify the graph. The result is a system that can help you find documents that you didn’t even know you needed to look for. The first product that makes use of the Office Graph is called Delve. In our experience, as we add documents to SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business, we have been finding it incredibly useful in our day-to-day work. We are applying our experiences and helping our clients find new ways to implement it to their most painful productivity issues.

Another productivity enhancer is the development of groups, a powerful, yet lightweight approach to giving teams a workplace that they can set up and manage quickly and easily. Typically, in SharePoint, when a team wants a team site to work on a project, they have to request the team site and follow a process that may take hours or days. By the time they get their site, the need may have passed. A group is a secure structure based on Exchange that includes a calendar, a shared mailbox, and a SharePoint document library. Groups can also tie in other Office components as needed. The ability to instantly create a space for discussion, scheduling and light-weight document management, all managed from the Outlook client, provides a great way for teams to become instantly productive without the overhead of team site management.

An additional capability is the Office 365 video portal and the new and improved video capability that Azure media services bring to the table. Many owners of intranets based on SharePoint have long struggled with attaining a seamless and responsive video streaming capability. With Azure media services, you get a simple management interface that allows you to select various formats and see the technology and protection level behind each of them. It provides support for a variety of formats, so if you have been dreaming of a great way to integrate video streaming into your current intranet, look no further.

A trend we see more than ever is a demand for quick, easy and secure ways to collaborate with outside partners. In the past, this would have been time and resource intensive. Many of our clients are embracing cloud or hybrid models to meet this demand. Using Office 365 capabilities like OneDrive for Business, Yammer External Networks and SharePoint Online, IT has more options than ever before, and this is often one of the first use cases that we see implemented in a Hybrid SharePoint environment.

SharePoint has been an essential building block for collaboration in a huge number of enterprises. The creation of a hybrid cloud and on-prem solution coupled with powerful new collaboration tools and concepts like the Office Graph and Groups is gaining huge traction with our largest clients. We see SharePoint and its surrounding, enabling tools contained within Office 365 as an unstoppable force in the enterprise. Long live SharePoint.

Avanade is a professional services company providing IT consulting, and services focused on the Microsoft platform with business analytics, business applications, cloud, digital marketing, technology and managed services offerings.