Microsoft Straddles a Fine Line Between Office 365 and SharePoint

“SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint”

Yes, Microsoft’s Office Division General Manager Julia White actually said the word five consecutive times from the big stage at Microsoft’s Partners Conference last week. She had a big point to drive home—namely that her team remained “absolutely committed” to SharePoint.

That’s something that some SharePoint enthusiasts and customers weren’t sure about after attending Ignite, the company’s user conference, in May. This, even though Microsoft confirmed that there would be a SharePoint 2016, which was exactly what this particular crowd wanted to hear. White’s words at Ignite failed to put them at ease.

How do we know? White said that after Ignite she received 423 e-mails asking why she barely mentioned SharePoint in her keynote. It was a perception she had to fix in a hurry and the Partners Conference was her opportunity.

“SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint, SharePoint. We are absolutely committed,” she told the crowd. “We have a fantastic SharePoint Server 2016 coming out. Rock-solid code based on the cloud. For the first time, we're taking the cloud code base and delivering that with our SharePoint Server 2016, which means you get the great reliability, performance [and] scalability that we've learned from the cloud into the Server code base."

Why didn’t White make big enough a deal about this at Ignite? Because she was busy selling the crowd on Microsoft’s mobile-first, cloud-first future where Office 365, OneDrive and tools like Delve, Power BI,Cortana, Sunrise, and Wunderlist will most likely rule.

As if those tools weren’t sexy enough, there may have been other  distractions in the pipeline, like security software provider Adallom which Microsoft has since acquired, or the discovery of the fact that 4 out of 5 companies who use Office now use Office 365.

Add to that the success that the Microsoft apps are enjoying on mobile devices. Business Insider even ran an article about it in June, “Microsoft is taking over my iPhone”.

What does all of this mean to SharePoint users whose companies, for one reason or another, aren’t interested or able to move skyward just yet? White’s keynote at Partners assures them that they won’t be abandoned. That they have time to get to Office 365. And that Microsoft is looking for ways to get them the same great stuff (or at least some of it) that the Office 365/One Drive crowd gets (only later).

Is there reason to cheer if you’re a holdout? You tell us.

In the meantime, if f fear of migrating to the Cloud is what’s holding you back, we can help by making it easy. Check out Metalogix Essentials for Office 365!

And if you’re a SharePoint Administrator who’s worried about what his job might look like after the move, not to worry, we’ve got bigger ideas for you. Check out what we have to say next week.