This is an important question many customers ask themselves. Microsoft is heavily promoting their Cloud services with SharePoint Online as their showpiece. The SharePoint Online platform did mature over the years and has become a worthy and realistic replacement for SharePoint On-Premises. SharePoint Online offers Intranet and Extranet business solutions and contains the latest SharePoint features. Although this sounds great, many customers aren’t sure and are hesitant of the Cloud. What they really wonder: is SharePoint Online a friend or a foe?
6. • Workloads suitable for SharePoint Online
• Recognize and overcome SharePoint Online challenges
• The main differences with SharePoint On-Premises
Share Conference | 6
What I’ll Cover
105. Azure AD
Password Sync.
Office Online
real-time co-authoring
The New
Office
Improved Sharing
Emails
Office 365
Adapter
Embedded
Images
PDFs in Word
Online
Updated Lync mobile
clients
OneNote for iPhone
and Android phones
Q&A manager
Power Map for Excel
Directory Sync Max Objects
Auto Increase
Windows Azure Active
Authentication
DirSync Scoping
and Filtering
Exchange Online
Inactive Mailboxes
PDF support for
SharePoint Online
Lync Online Integrated
Reporting
Office Online Update
Windows Azure Active
Directory Sync
Tool-update
Admin Add
Retention policy
and tag
management
Office 365 SSO with SAML
2.0 Identity Providers
Exchange Online Address
Book Policies
Excel Online update
SharePoint
Newsfeed App
for Windows 8
Lync meeting
scheduling from OWA
Exchange Online
Archiving add-
on
Rights Management
Services
OneNote
for iPad
New features since 2013…wow!
SharePoint
Online Platform
Improvements
IM mute
EXO: 50 GB Mailboxes
Exchange group
naming policy
Directory Sync
Max Objects
Auto Increase
New SharePoint
Workflows
Yammer basic
integration
Encrypted Data
Project codename
“GeoFlow” preview
for Excel
Directory Sync Max Objects
Auto Increase
Office 365 Admin
Mobile App
OneDrive for Business
Sync for Windows
Lync Online Remote PowerShell
Lync mobile
clients
Office Mobile for iPhone
& Android phones
Go Daddy
Integration
OWA for iPhone
& OWA for iPad
Lync and SharePoint Service
Reporting
Connecting
Skype & Lync
OneDrive for Business apps for
Windows 8 & iOS Message Center
Shared with Me
50 GB mailbox
Office 365
Switch Plans
OneDrive for
Business
Storage
increase
Lync Online Q&A
manager
138. • SharePoint Online is a suitable option for certain
workloads
• Create a SharePoint Governance structure to “control” the
impact of SharePoint Online changes
• Office 365 is the future for SharePoint innovation / new
features
• Review your business requirements before making a
decision between the Cloud or on premises
Share Conference | 138
Key Points to Take Home
141. Resources
OneDrive plans & pricing
OneDrive official blog
One place for all your work files - introducing OneDrive for Business
OneDrive for Business updates web user experience
File and Folder Considerations with OneDrive for Business
One-Way Outbound Hybrid Search Step-by-Step and OneDrive for Business
SharePoint Online: software boundaries and limits
What is Windows Azure Rights Management?
Manage external sharing for your SharePoint online environment
Share sites or documents with people outside your organization
Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Online
ADFS VS DIRSYNC WITH PASSWORD SYNC: THE USER EXPERIENCE
Implementing Office 365: Password Sync vs. ADFS
142. Resources
Drag and drop requirements & limitations
SP24 - SharePoint Online vs On-Premises vs Hosted - Making the Right Choice
Pre-Release Programs
Hybrid for SharePoint Server 2013
SharePoint Hybrid, what you do and don’t get
Hybrid SharePoint Environments with Office 365
Office 365 Demo
Request permission as external user
Office 365, SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2013 On-Prem Feature Matrix
File Migration for SharePoint Online & OneDrive for Business
Information Protection and Control (IPC) in Office 365 with Microsoft Rights
Management service (RMS) whitepaper
Yammer brings conversations to your OneDrive and SharePoint Online files
Editor's Notes
Anyone on BPOS?
SharePoint Online 2007 was part of BPOS. The first Cloud version of SharePoint 2007 On Premises. BPOS was released in 2008 around 1.5 to 2 years after the On Premises release. BPOS really offered a light version of SharePoint 2007. The features were aimed at building basic Intranet Portals with:
Company brand / look & feel
Document Management
Team Sites
News
Workflow with SharePoint Designer 2007
I worked on really nice and functioning SharePoint portals for internal collaboration.
There was still a major gap with SharePoint On Premises that prevented companies moving to the Cloud. The major differences were:
Search: It wasn’t possible to search through multiple Site Collections. The Search was limited to one Site Collection. Customers with many site collections had to maintain multiple Search centers. This was very time consuming.
Business Intelligence: SharePoint Online 2007 didn’t provide any support for Performance Point to create advanced management dashboards.
Line of Business: SharePoint Online 2007 didn’t support an integration with Line of Business systems.
Development: There wasn’t an option to work with full trusted code. Customers were limited to JavaScript, JQuery and SharePoint Designer to customize SharePoint Online 2007.
In 2011 Microsoft dropped BPOS and introduced Office 365. SharePoint Online 2010 proved to be a more mature version of SharePoint Online with many of the same features as SharePoint 2010 On Premises:
My Site
Term Store (Managed Metadata)
Search multiple site collections and refinement panel
Sandbox Solutions for more development options
BCS
This new release introduced new scenarios:
Extranet through the external invites system
Internet through the Internet template
For the first time an release schedule was introduced to new features. One of the first updates were:
BCS
External Invites
These were features that weren’t available during the release of SharePoint Online 2010.
Although SharePoint Online 2010 was a major improvement compared to SharePoint Online 2007, there were still gaps compared to the On Premises version. These were the most important ones:
Business Intelligence: There was still no support for Performance Point Services. There were more BI options by using Excel, Access and Visio Services. Excel Services made it possible to publish Excel sheets and display charts and data.
Search: Although the Search engine was a major improvement compared to SharePoint Online 2010 there were still features missing:
FAST Search
Custom iFilters
Control Crawl schedules
Internet: The Internet capabilities of SharePoint Online 2010 weren’t comparable to SharePoint 2010. Customers had to use templates and gadgets provided by Microsoft. The out-of-the-box WCM features for SharePoint 2010 Internet Sites weren’t available.
Office 365 version 2.0 was introduced in 2013 with all the 2013 version of Exchange, Lync and SharePoint. This time the release was only a couple of months after SharePoint Server 2013. Microsoft announced their Cloud first strategy at the 2012 SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas. From this moment, new features and updates are released in SharePoint Online 2013 first before available for SharePoint Server 2013.
The differences with SharePoint Server 2013 are so minor that the online platform stepped out of the shadow of SharePoint Server and finally matured. New and improved features such as:
Social
Search
eDiscovery
PowerShell support
App store
Information Rights Management
A fully functional release cycle was introduced.
Why should you use SharePoint Online/OneDrive for Business for a storing online work documents?
1 TB: Every business users receives 1 TB to store documents, pictures or videos. You can limit the storage to 50, 100, 250 or 500.
Standalone subscription: You aren’t required to buy SharePoint licenses to use OneDrive for Business. You can acquire a standalone subscription. Very reasonable prize for 2.50 dollar per month per user.
Office Online: You are able to work with Office Online to create or edit Office documents within the browser.
Apps: Apps are available for Windows 8 Desktop and RT and iOS. Android has Office Mobile
Yammer: Post documents to Yammer to share with all your colleagues or a group
Sharing documents: Very easy and user friendly to share documents with colleagues or external users
Only show when features aren’t available yet.
Auditing: No auditing system in place, to get an overview of all your end-users sharing of document with external users. You have to visit each site, per colleague, to view what documents are shared and with whom.
Sensitive content: By enabling external sharing you can’t prevent users adding documents with sensitive content in OneDrive and sharing it with external people.
Governance: How do you apply Governance without auditing and controlling sensitive content? Totally rely on trust of your employees.
Start typing = start finding. The new OneDrive for Business search box is now smarter. You simply start typing to find a document that was shared with you, or one that you tucked away several folders deep. And just as important as finding what you are looking for is taking immediate action—like sharing these files—directly from within your search results. Note the circular sharing icon in the image below.
The OneDrive for Business search box is scoped to the content, documents, and folders that have been shared with you and files that live in your Site Folders. This means you’ll find what’s closest and most relevant to you much faster.
Start typing = start finding. The new OneDrive for Business search box is now smarter. You simply start typing to find a document that was shared with you, or one that you tucked away several folders deep. And just as important as finding what you are looking for is taking immediate action—like sharing these files—directly from within your search results. Note the circular sharing icon in the image below.
The OneDrive for Business search box is scoped to the content, documents, and folders that have been shared with you and files that live in your Site Folders. This means you’ll find what’s closest and most relevant to you much faster.
Most of us work in projects and most of the time with our customers or partners. Wouldn’t it be great if we can collaborate and share content from one central location? Easy accessible by yourself, your colleagues and external team members? Building a customer project portal in SharePoint Online is a perfect workload to facilitate in the Cloud.
The solution for an efficient external collaboration process is the combination of SharePoint and Yammer.
Quick deployment: You don’t need to set-up local resources such as a separate server with an AD and SharePoint Portal
Licenses external users: You don’t have to buy additional licenses for external users. You can invite them. Licenses can be acquired and are relatively cheap.
Lower costs: Overall costs are a lot cheaper then realizing this scenario within your on premises. This is based at local hardware, software, configuration and licenses.
The Project Site contains all the features you require for project collaboration with external partners.
Tasks & Timeline: The project leader can assign tasks to all the project members. An overview of all the project tasks is presented at the home page of the project site.
Notebook: Every project site has an integrated OneNote Notebook. This Notebook is accessible through the browser and any mobile device through the OneNote App.
Calendar: A central calendar to add all important project events such as project meetings.
Yammer Feed: Connect to the Yammer Group for the project and use it to start discussion.
Document libraries: A central library to store all project documents instead of sending by e-mail. Collaboration within documents enable by the power of SharePoint Online.
Easy to share: The project leader, who is the site owner, can share the site and its content easily with the external project members.
Yammer really enhances the power of SharePoint Online with three features:
Connect & Collaborate: The power of Yammer is the ease of connecting people, internally or externally, and enable collaboration in an user friendly Social platform. It allows the project members to ask each other questions, come to agreements and review important documents.
Mobile Apps: Yammer is available as an App for all popular mobile devices. This enables to project members stay up-to-date and keep connecting and collaborating at anytime and anyplace.
How are you going to structure your project documents? Are you going to use folders? Metadata? A Taxonomy? Or even enable versioning?In case you don’t create an agreement or rules every project site will become different from the other and eventually become unworkable and chaotic. At my previous employer we had project sites without any Governance. Every project leader had his or her own methods and this resulted in different project sites and a complete mess for storing documents.
explanation
Auditing: No auditing system in place, to get an overview of all your end-users sharing of document with external users. You have to visit each site, per colleague, to view what documents are shared and with whom.
Sensitive content: By enabling external sharing you can’t prevent users adding documents with sensitive content in OneDrive and sharing it with external people.
Governance: How do you apply Governance without auditing and controlling sensitive content? Totally rely on trust of your employees.
SharePoint Online is part of Office 365 a
Cloud first
Monthly releases of updates and new features
Need to be aware of content of updates and impact on tenant
Change management
Impact on Apps
Current challenges of the release cycle:
App stability:
Unaware of coming updates/changes
explanation
explanation
First access to selected production service updates
Ideal for staging environments
First access to selected production service updates
After two weeks, after first release, updates are released to the general public (this takes time!!)
Pre release program, before features are released publicly
30 – 90 days
Public roadmap:
Screenshots
Impact
Timeline to first release
Released soon
Public roadmap:
Screenshots
Impact
Timeline to first release
Released soon
Rolling out new features takes time. For example the document library new top navigation. Took weeks before every customer had the new features. Also some people had the new feature within one company and others didn’t.
Hopefully we all by know that the most important thing in life is keeping the production environment stable, clean and safe. With our on premises farms this is done relatively easily with virtual machines, hyperV ect. For our SharePoint Online tenant we don’t have this luxury. To just create multiple staging site collection is a NO GO:
Shared Service Applications such as the managed metadata, including content type hub, search, user profile services. Making changes or tests within these application can have a big impact on your production environment.
You need to acquire an additional Office 365 tenant for test and acceptance. At the moment the downside is that you can’t control the MS changes to each tenant, so your production tenant can receive updates before your test tenant. This is hopefully going to change with First Release.
Managed Metadata: Changing the structure or parts of the structure such as groups, term sets, terms has an impact on the production environment. There is also one content type hub
Content type hub: There is only one content type hub. Adding new content types or changing current ones impact the production environment.
User Profile: Adding or changing profile properties impacts current users profiles
Search: Creating demo content such as documents are picked up by Search and can end up in the production search results
Not all companies want to migrate all their SharePoint workloads to the Cloud but want to start with a hybrid solution. This should offer a seamless integration between both an on premises and online SharePoint environment. End-users shouldn’t able to notice the difference. This isn’t as easy as it sounds.
The real exchange between data in SPO en On Premises is really limited to:
Search
BCS
Duet
You are able to view on premises search results in SPO and vice versa. This is limited to the result block.
Are you going to use this feature? Please make it clear to the end-users which results are from which platform.
Hopefully in the future results are combined within the main results instead of the result block
You have to make a large investment for a hybrid solution in the shape of extra hardware, licenses, software and a smart consultant to implement this for you. This isn’t a cheap solution!
You have to make a large investment for a hybrid solution in the shape of extra hardware, licenses, software and a smart consultant to implement this for you. This isn’t a cheap solution!
explanation
explanation
explanation
What are the main differences:
Control & automate: You have no control over the SharePoint Server such as the Central Administration. This limits you in changing timer jobs for example for the managed metadata service application to processes changes in the taxonomy. There is no control over Search crawls, this is automated by Microsoft and its unclear when you can expect new search results to appear. You can’t deploy content, solutions or execute maintenance of your SPO portal with the full feature set of PowerShell.
Internet Solutions: SPO doesn’t come with the full feature set of WCM capabilities to build Internet portals. Although the Office 365 Internet Solution is limited compared to on premises you can make very cool websites. Just take a look at the Sparked website.
Development: You are never going to be able to deploy full trust solutions in SPO. Microsoft developed the App model, that’s the future, for more advanced development solutions. The App model is the future of custom development for SPO.