Harnessing Cloud Experiences While Maintaining SharePoint On-Prem

Over the last few years, the SharePoint brand had become buried within the broader messaging surrounding Office 365 and Microsoft’s cloud ambitions. In fact, the cloud messaging was so strong that many thought we had seen the last on-premises release with SharePoint 2013. But with the news of SharePoint 2016 last year, followed by the Future of SharePoint event on May 4th, 2016 in San Francisco, Microsoft has reinforced its messaging around ongoing support for SharePoint on-prem as well as for the cloud, and even reaffirmed their intent to support additional on-prem releases after SP2016.

Of course, there have been several voices within Microsoft that have tried to assure partners and customers for years that the on-prem platform was not going anywhere. The problem for those of us out in the field is that the volume and tone of Microsoft's sales and marketing messaging can sometimes drown out what the product team is telling us.

Microsoft has stated that they will continue to develop and deliver SharePoint on-premises as long as customers are buying it — and the number of net-new deployments continues to grow. And yet I continue to hear concerns from customers, and even some experts within the community, that they still have concerns about how much Microsoft is committed to on-prem.

For organizations who have made massive investments in SharePoint on-prem, the SharePoint Server 2016 release is a fortification of the SharePoint brand, and an optimistic signal that Microsoft not only understands their unique business requirements and cloud concerns, but that the company will continue to innovate on the platform.

SharePoint Server 2016 is a foundational release for Microsoft, this being the first on-prem release since Microsoft moved primary development to the cloud. What this means is that all innovation is developed on a single code base, and for the cloud. Within a two to three-year development cadence, the product team will then “fork” their code and customize the platform for on-prem delivery.

Not everything developed for SharePoint Online (part of Office 365) can be or should be delivered for on-prem, as many features rely heavily on the scale and dynamic nature of the cloud to deliver things like Microsoft Graph and the machine-learning capability of Delve.

However, much of what we're seeing and hearing from Microsoft should calm our collective nerves, as the messaging is improving -- and just about every new announcement makes the point of mentioning if or how it will support Microsoft’s on-prem or hybrid strategy in addition to the cloud.

Yes, the focus is still very much on the cloud, and almost everything we’ll see for on-prem has largely already been delivered for the cloud. But by connecting Office 365 experiences to on-prem data sources, organizations who cannot or will not move to the cloud (any time soon, at least) will still be able to leverage many of the latest cloud experiences — making an eventual transition to the cloud easier through these hybrid capabilities.

The biggest hybrid feature you need to think about remains search.

To make your hybrid SharePoint deployment successful, in fact, it all comes down to the search experience, IMO. Office 365 needs to provide a unified search experience across local and cloud environments. What this means is that your on-prem data should become yet another data source, enabling that data to appear within Delve and (hopefully) Office 365 eDiscovery. Thankfully, the documentation around all of this is much improved, and you can learn more here and here, as well as the blogs and whitepapers generated within partner ecosystem.

Unlike many of its pure-cloud competitors, Microsoft has a huge opportunity with hybrid where they can offer features that bridge the gap between on-prem and the cloud. So instead of pushing people to the cloud (“We’re all in! Are you all in!?”) hybrid solutions become more of a “pull” strategy, enticing customers with expanded hybrid capability.

In my experience, there are three primary reasons that customers push back on moving some or all of their production systems to the cloud:

• A lack of control over the user experience
• The lack of governance/administration parity between online and on-prem
• Concerns over performance (some imagined, some very much a reality)

The Office 365 team is working hard at answering all three, but they are all issues that organizations must address as part of their planning efforts. Unlike 2 years back, Microsoft does recognize that a hybrid SharePoint environment is a transition for many, but that hybrid will be a permanent state for a solid minority of customers. As Microsoft adds Office 365 and Azure data centers around the world, and continues their strategy of achieving various industry standards around security, compliance and governance, the number of organizations insisting on maintaining their own server infrastructure will decrease. Until then, hybrid will remain.