Knowing the shortcomings of the ‘old’ SharePoint the ‘new’ is showing Microsoft is accepting commercial developers can enhance their product range. Yes, it is reported the SharePoint 2013 will allow custom development despite previous rigid discouragement. This move means some applications will be outside SharePoint and be part of a cloud-based hosting system. Check out (NASDAQ: AMZN) AWS. It also means your application can live independently of your data centre, and you “can move SharePoint among new systems–even to the cloud–without having to change the core application server”.

How did this conversation come about?  We said our customer needs are moving us to a cloud environment and a greater social communication requirement and we note SharePoint 2010 lacks the maturity of Twitter and Facebook. If we just want enterprise collaborate such as customer records management – fine, but the lack of governance-aware tools is critical in making the decision to move forward.

The discussion (with a SharePoint developer) reached agreement that sophisticated social techniques will not be well adopted in the cloud. The increase in the number of venues like Twitter, Facebook, on-premises collaboration and multiple cloud-based document stores, will challenge and be taxing times for interface integration and/or individual patience. Although SharePoint 2010 had improved social networking, it lacks the maturity of Twitter and Facebook and this is a concern for some organizations that want to adopt SharePoint social tools as an ingredient of enterprise collaboration, in part this is due to the lack of governance-aware tools. It was further stressed by Co2Land org that SharePoint as we knew it requires skilled developers as the code is complex and poorly written code has caused some negative opinions to be prevalent and when something needs correcting and be tested it can even prove when preparing for upgrades. Added to these problems SharePoint server API requirements have meant fewer applications can be matched.

We also argued our current SharePoint developer in the conversation will need to be upgrading security and authentication skills for the new order of social communications and this in part will be caused by the rise in client extranets and hybrid cloud developments such as based on python code deployments or apples support for parallel or federated authentication beyond the traditional “Active Directory with LDAP for outside users” that is tradition in on-premises datacentre deployments.

Co2Land org was then told SharePoint 2013 will solve this, goto: 3 to get ready–SharePoint 2013 apps, servers and systems – FierceContentManagement http://www.fiercecontentmanagement.com/story/3-get-ready-sharepoint-2013-apps-servers-and-systems/2012-10-07#ixzz29b8zDyJZ

What does CO2Land org see as important? We use WordPress for our coloration tool; so it makes sense to benchmark against our future needs for social communications, cloud involvement, our governance needs and any new wave coming through. We are yet to benchmark what is coming – however as we see it:

Social communications will be more evident on more premises, it will not be universally accepted. Self-sustaining social collaboration is immature and it will be incremental increase for enterprise acceptance for it to be the normal communications interface.  Third party independent software vendors will be crucial in extending social functions and governance techniques in the cloud, the demand for users to adopt Personal Content (“PCM”) to aggregate and classify their own information will only increase, and large (e.g. SharePoint) sites need to guard against users feeling a personal voice is lost.

Direct quote “Cloud adoption will accelerate due to the escalated discussion about cloud-based solutions generated by Microsoft’s (NASDAQ: MSFT) reintroduction of SharePoint Online as core element of Office 365. We’ll see more cloud adoption in both Office 365 and such third party hosting providers as Rackspace and FPWeb. However, wholesale migrations of mature SharePoint 2010 environments will not be the principal use case, partly due to restrictions on custom coded solutions and functions”. This means wholesale new thinking will be required by ‘old’ Microsoft thinkers to the ‘new’ implementations with little on-premises SharePoint history, “most likely for content migration from non-SharePoint sources (legacy ECM or file system); proofs-of-concept and pilots”. It also means a new platform for document collaboration with external partners, clients and third parties will be necessary.

Governance is what all new users onto the platform will require to exercise care, guidance and oversight. Guidance is the essential for widespread adoption, for fostering sustained growth and usage and is the how and why you need management of you communications for business intelligence, social networking and nomenclatures.

The new wave will require the ability to handle extremely large content pools, and aggregate legacy platforms and divisional rafts (SharePoint calls “islands”) into a unified application and provides a competitive cost of ownership, and be a clear framework towards enhanced scalable capacity.

Ad-hoc quotes were sourced from: Chris McNulty is a strategic product manager for SharePoint Solutions at Quest Software, and blogs at http://www.chrismcnulty.net/blog and http://www.sharepointforall.com. Our SharePoint developed was Australian based and prefers to be anonymous