SharePoint: Enabling Knowledge Management

I had the chance recently to have chat with TechnologyAdvice’s Josh Bland (@JoshBlandTA). This interview was a part of the TechnologyAdvice Expert Interview Series. The series explores a variety of business and technology landscapes through conversations with industry leaders.

There’s plenty of great content there, including interviews with some of the speakers for the SharePoint Technology Conference – SPTechCon Austin – coming up February 21-24. If you register with code ANDERSON, you’ll get an extra $200 off any other discounts you might receive.

In this episode we discussed how I see SharePoint fitting into a successful knowledge management strategy, how modern work happens, big things that happened with SharePoint in 2015, and of course, the upcoming SPTechCon. If you enjoy this interview, you might want to check out the one I did with Josh last summer, just before SPTechCon Boston: Software Adoption: A People Problem, or A Technology Problem?

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Below is an excerpt from the conversation:

Josh: What would you say, Marc? How would you sort of summarize the year? What sort of big developments occurred and what would you say were some of the highlights from 2015 in SharePoint?

Marc: One of the biggest things is that the hybrid story that Microsoft is just telling is getting richer and richer. We saw some capabilities that are available on Office 365 starting to filter back on Premises, and that’s via hooking up to a SharePoint online instant. So that you can sort of take advantage of the best of the cloud but still keep your content in-house. And of course, we’re seeing tremendous strides forward in Office 365 as well. It’s hard at this time of the year to look back and try to remember, how many of these things actually got stuffed into this one year? And it’s pretty incredible when you look at how many things have changed over the last year in the SharePoint space. We have things like Delve and groups and the video portal, and all these things that have really come into their own this year and shown that Microsoft is not sitting still, that they’re — I’m very bullish on Microsoft in what they’re doing with Office 365. And I’m not an easy one to convince [chuckles]. But I see them doing some very cool things – Planner – just all kinds of new experiences as they say, with fantastic user interfaces that really are bringing the whole platform ahead in leaps and bounds.

Josh: I want to hear what were some of the sort of difficulties that you have experienced, not only with your customers, but just in general that you think the industry has seen from SharePoint?

Marc: An ongoing challenge for anyone using these platforms is that the development story continues to evolve. And that’s not a bad thing, but for your average developer who’s trying to sort of swim with both hands tied behind their back, sometimes, keeping ahead of what the enterprise wants, it’s difficult because we look at the different– historically we’ve had features and solutions, we’ve had the sandbox model now. We have the apps crossed out, add-in model, and we’ll probably see some evolution from here. People are continually having to keep their skills fresh. Now, that to me is a damn good thing. Anybody who stops learning and thinks that what they know now is going to serve them forever is sort of letting themselves die intellectually. The fact that we have to learn new things all the time is a good thing. We’re seeing an evolution from server site code toward JavaScript and client site code to a degree that is really — it’s been a bumpy ride for some people over the last couple of years to make that mental switch. As we’re seeing better experiences coming out of Microsoft, we’re seeing these challenges for the developers inside enterprises who are trying to build bespoke functionality that is unique to that organization, or something that that organization wants that Microsoft does not provide exactly. It’s that 20% that’s actually the hard part. That’s going to be an ongoing set of challenges – understanding how this hybrid model, as you mentioned fits into the organization’s ethos – is going to be a tough one for a lot of people to get to.

Two years ago we would have been talking about the tremendous fear about security and, “Does the cloud make sense?” And, now we always talk about it as, “Which part of the cloud makes sense to me? Which parts should I take advantage of? Where am I going to get the bang for my buck?” So, we’re on a different part of the learning curve for all of that. But the development story is tough. And that hybrid aspect just adds a little bit of complexity to the whole thing.

Josh: One final question here on SPTechCon 2016. Do you see a lot of differences between Boston and Austin? All that to say, what do you think will be different about this year, Austin 2016 vs. Austin 2015 or Boston 2015?

Marc: The obvious difference is that we’ve got SharePoint 2016 coming up. So — Yeah, new software smell. There are a couple things there. One is obviously there is some new software out there; new bits. So, people will be able to hear some good information about what’s there, why would you be interested in it, how does it work and that sort of thing. One of the best things though about SPTechCon is that they’re very careful to manage the mix between: here’s the shiny new stuff and here’s that stuff that you are actually still stuck working with [chuckles]. There are still a lot of people in the crowd who use SharePoint 2010, there’s still a lot of people who are using 2013 obviously. There’s a great mix of content across that spectrum as opposed to just going for the new stuff. Go to the Microsoft conference for that. They’ll only talk about the new things. But SPTechCon has been traditionally very good about having that balance, so that everybody who comes to the conference gets a lot of depth out of it.

This podcast was created and published by TechnologyAdvice, an Inc. 5000 company looking to help buyers find the best cloud storage, payroll systems, and more. Interview conducted by Josh Bland.