The New SharePoint is Here, The new SharePoint is here

 

As you may have heard …

The New SharePoint is here …

SharePoint 2013 is here … and you can get your hands on it today. I’m really excited about it and have already started to play, test and think about the possibilities. I commend Microsoft for getting this information out in the wild for a few reasons. One of the biggest reasons is to help battle SharePoint’s Biggest Risk … the one that may prevent global domination.

Getting Started

If you haven’t started reading up on SharePoint 2013 yet Jeff Teper’s blog is a great place to start your reading. For those that don’t know Jeff Teper he is the Father of SharePoint.

According to Jeff … SharePoint has always been cloudy …

“SharePoint was designed from the beginning with cloud principles of statelessness, load balancing and partitioning.”
~Jeff Teper in The New SharePoint

Quick Links:

Install and deploy SharePoint 2013 (IT pros)
Install SharePoint 2013 Preview
SharePoint 2013 new features and capabilities Nice and simple video (~1 minute) highlighting some of the new features

 

There is a lot of additional information available with this preview release. I give Microsoft lots of credit for making it easy to find information about SharePoint 2013 and especially for telling the big picture story too. Click on the picture to the right and scroll to the bottom to grab more details about the points mentioned.

Just the Beginning

This early preview is just the start. Partners, Community Leaders and Customers will start downloading, testing and building solutions on this early offering. Look for and expect great things. Since the downloads for SharePoint 2013 bits and the supporting PPT’s just came out this week I suspect momentum will start to build quickly. As for me I’m still chunking through them and in as usual trying to read between the lines for what’s not being said. So, for me this will not be the last post I write about SharePoint 13 and I look forward to reading the posts and seeing the solutions that the community creates.

Share What You Know

As SharePoint 2013 rolls out across the world I encourage you to share your experiences. Let people know how you are getting it done. The SharePoint community is one of the best communities I have ever been involved with – people from technical and business backgrounds can find common ground to share what they know. I suspect we will start to see SharePoint 2013 sessions start to crop up at SharePoint Saturday events and SharePoint TechCon events. While I’m sure these sessions will be interesting it will be equally interesting to see how the rate of adoption of SharePoint 2013 compares to the rate of adoption for SharePoint 2010. Which brings me to my point in the early part of this post … SharePoint’s biggest risk. If people don’t use it … it doesn’t matter how good the solutions are.

The Biggest Risk

The number one biggest challenge for SharePoint continues to be Adoption.

SharePoint 2013 is seeking to address a lot of the challenges that customers and partners have been requesting. The reality is that Microsoft will never be able to build everything that everyone wants to run their business. This is OK and it is the right way for Microsoft to go. This is goodness for customers and partners. The good news is … the market is still growing and evolving to meet the ever changing business and technical demands. The even better news is that the partner community is still engaged and building solutions that extend and enhance the SharePoint environment.

I applaud Microsoft and thank Jeff Teper and his team for creating the new and improved web sites with the updated SharePoint 2013 details and for getting the information out there for the masses to consume. I think these efforts and the continued effort to embrace the partner community will help drive adoption. And will help Microsoft achieve higher and higher levels of adoption. Which, again, is goodness for customers and partners.

What do you think?

• Is SharePoint 2013 a significant improvement from 2010?
• Will you make the jump from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013?
• What’s your prediction for Rate of Adoption of SharePoint 2013?

Drop me a line here. Feel free to post links to your articles or other information your have found. Together we can help the SharePoint community continue to grow and we can help drive SharePoint adoption on a global scale.

About The Author: I have spent the last 20 years working in various aspects of the ECM industry. I am currently with Kodakas a Director of Business Development. In my past I have spent time at Kofax, Microsoft, FileNet, K2, and at Captaris (which was acquired by Open Text). Prior to that I was a Unix VAR running my own company. Follow me on Twitter, check my blog, send email or find me on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Image Credit: The Jerk, Universal Pictures