The Future of Social in SharePoint

In an August 2011 article for CMSWire, I made some predictions about the future roadmap of native social features in SharePoint — as well as how these capabilities would span across every flavor of SharePoint you might be running (on prem or online):

As SharePoint continues to grow and iterate, we’ll see expansion of the most common (and expected) social computing features, likely with increasingly seamless movement between on-premises and online (both dedicated and multi-tenant) environments, allowing the social tools to cross these divides. The future will include capabilities that span your entire SharePoint footprint — in a secure way, of course. For example, news feeds that provide a snapshot of activity, security-trimmed, across various platforms that an end user can access, allowing the user to quickly move between those environments and seamlessly collaborate with multiple teams, customers and partners.

In the short term, the real punch will come through developments in Office365, which may be the most viable extranet model for SharePoint. As a parity of features is reached between Office365 and on-premises platforms, we will see Microsoft strengthening their position in the social computing space. Partners will lead much of this innovation, providing tools to help synchronize between these platforms and enabling collaboration online and offline, between on-premises and cloud-based components, and using a variety of computing and mobility devices.

We’re not quite there yet with SharePoint 2013 and/or Yammer, but I’m anticipating more news out of the SharePoint Conference (#SPC14) in Las Vegas next month, and am excited to be presenting one of the European SharePoint Conference (#ESPC14) keynotes in Barcelona with Microsoft’s Mark Kashman on this very topic.

Btw, if you’re going to Vegas, be sure to attend my session SharePoint in the clouds – select, mix, and deploy what’s right for you