Roadmap for Foundation 2016?
While in Chicago at Ignite, I had a couple conversations with people who supported customers who had long used the “free” version of SharePoint, many moving from WSS to Foundation with the SharePoint 2013 release. One of the questions for which they were looking for an answer was: will Microsoft continue to produce/support Foundation? The official response from Redmond is no, there will not be a version of Foundation shipped along with the SharePoint Server 2016 release, however they are still looking at how to deliver some of what Foundation has provided to its core constituency.
Translation: Microsoft wants your feedback on what it should provide.
Prior to talking with anyone on the product team, my feedback to these friends was twofold:
- The need for a free version of the platform is no longer valid. Yes, offering a free version certainly helped many organizations in the education, local government, and non-profit segments to utilize a powerful platform at a much reduced cost (because nothing is entirely free – if not from licensing, then from services and employee costs). But the Office 365 offering, with many free and reduced licensing deals for these same market segments, offers a very similar set of capabilities, at a much reduced overall cost and without the infrastructural/management overhead.
- If what they have today is working, why change? Organizations using the existing Foundation platform are not being pushed off their platform, so as long as they are getting value out of what they’ve built, they should plan to stay where they are – at least until they’re ready to move to Office 365.
Of course, there are arguments against these two points – the strongest being, in my mind, the fact that most of these licenses are not ”free” at all, but paid for through Windows Server and SQL Server licenses, and therefore deserve a more formal response — including a roadmap forward. WSS and Foundation have led many organizations from free to paid versions of the platform, so Microsoft must figure out the path that best serves not just the majority who could, arguably, make the move to the cloud, but also the large minority segments with special circumstances that preclude them from moving to Office 365.
In a related discussion over on SPCOM, SharePoint MVP and SPCOM co-founder Vlad Catrinescu (@vladcatrinescu) started a conversation and posted a screenshot from a recent YamJam in which Microsoft technical product manager Bill Baer (@williambaer) stated
Response to this topic has been huge, with over 3600 views to Vlad’s original post 2 weeks ago. It was enough of a response that Bill posted his work email (wbaer@microsoft.com) and asked people using Foundation to contact him and share their Foundation use cases so that he could better understand where and how Microsoft can support these customers and partners. His latest blog post on SharePoint Server 2016 Installation and Deployment goes through the many infrastructure specifications for the new release, and from these requirements alone make it clear that even if Microsoft offered an updated version of Foundation, it would require substantial infrastructure investments just to be able to deploy a “free” version of the platform, and again makes the costs of moving to the cloud seem more reasonable.
Are you still using Foundation? And if so, what are the barriers for moving to Office 365? Microsoft definitely wants to hear your feedback, so please – speak up!
Really appreciate you responding. I think Bill is already aware of some of these because I posted them on Yammer. Thank you also for your suggestion. We are competing with companies who have been doing nothing but ECM for 25+ years. Downloading forms and emailing them in just doesn’t stack up to what these guys offer. So while it might technically work, it is not a solution that will hold up in a competitive environment. We and other ECM software and consulting companies have been in this space since before SharePoint existed so we have a good feel for what is required to do transactional content management. I personally love what SharePoint has been able to do for organization’s ECM needs and hope that with Microsoft’s support we can continue to deliver the full range of ECM features to our customers using SharePoint.
Thanks again,
Bill
Really appreciate you responding. I think Bill is already aware of some of these because I posted them on Yammer. Thank you also for your suggestion. We are competing with companies who have been doing nothing but ECM for 25+ years. Downloading forms and emailing them in just doesn’t stack up to what these guys offer. So while it might technically work, it is not a solution that will hold up in a competitive environment. We and other ECM software and consulting companies have been in this space since before SharePoint existed so we have a good feel for what is required to do transactional content management. I personally love what SharePoint has been able to do for organization’s ECM needs and hope that with Microsoft’s support we can continue to deliver the full range of ECM features to our customers using SharePoint.
Thanks again,
Bill
Bill, these are great examples — and I’ll certainly point Bill Baer to your comment. Of course, you could argue for a couple of your examples that forms hosted on SharePoint 2013 or Office 365 could be simplified (stripped of proprietary details) and made accessible to external users who could then fill them out and send by email, but that would not be the answer to all of what you’ve outlined. Some guidance on external user licenses at https://products.office.com/en-us/sharepoint/sharepoint-licensing-overview
I believe there are valid reasons for different entry points into any technology, and from a cost perspective, Microsoft will continue to offer different programs to diff segments, like edu and non-profits.
I have already posted extensively on this in the Sharepoint IT Pro Yammer group but I definitely want to offer those same opinions in this forum so that those not a part of the Yammer group can weigh in.
We use SharePoint for Enterprise Content Management and specifically transactional content management. This means our customers store hundreds of thousands or millions of documents in SharePoint. Things such as Student Records, Human Resources Records, and Accounting transactions. These customers to a fault have all told us there is no way, in the near future, they will even consider the liability of moving sensitive records like this wholesale to the cloud. They would certainly like to take advantage of cloud features for selected content and we are excited about employing hybrid environments to help them do so.
Probably half of these customers are on SharePoint Foundation because they were not running SharePoint at all when we started helping them with their ECM needs. One of the things that helped them make the decision to use SharePoint was that they already owned it because they had paid for Windows Server licenses and SQL server licenses. In some cases these were companies that had already move to Google Docs and GMail and were actively looking for ways to move MS out of the data center. In these cases SharePoint Foundation has kept Microsoft in use at these customers and given it a very positive light.
Many of these customers would have easily been able to add an additional $2,500 or even $5,000 per SharePoint server to their initial cost and paid for user CALs for the employees in the actual AP, HR, or Student Services departments. The problem comes in when you realize that in order to have hundreds or thousands of infrequent users of SharePoint that these companies could be looking at shelling out $50,000 or even $100,000 or more. At these price points, they will just simply choose another solution for their ECM needs or do nothing in the mid size organizations like many of the school districts we work with. The best way I have seen traditional ECM vendors handle this is with a concurrent user pricing model. An organization can buy 10 concurrent licenses and cover hundreds or even thousands of very casual or infrequent users.
Some examples of infrequent ECM use cases.
Vendor Invoice Approval – I have 500 employees who all need to an approve a vendor invoice maybe a few times a year on average. I have to buy 500 CALs to allow this.
Travel Request Form – I have 1000 employees that on average submit a travel expense request form once or twice a year. I have to buy 1000 CALs to let these users do this.
Teachers Accessing Student Records – I have 2000 teachers across my large school district that need to access student documents like old report cards maybe once or twice a month on average. You know the story by now – I have to buy 2000 CALs to give these teachers the rights to do this.
I have confidence that Microsoft will address these ECM related business cases in the new release of MS SharePoint. If not, I think they will certainly lose consultants, ISVs, and businesses that are currently using SharePoint as a true Enterprise Content Management system.
These are my thoughts on this topic. I hope that others will offer theirs and point out anything I have said that is not correct or that there is a solution for that I am not thinking of. Ultimately, I just want to deliver cost effective solutions to my customers.
Thanks,
Bill
I agree really. Foundation has had its day, the hardware requirements get ever more extreme and I see no reason why Microsoft should give stuff away for free.
SharePoint has moved beyond that point where it needed to give it away. Its been a good ride while it lasted.