The Road Ahead: Driving SharePoint To New Levels Of Success

Editor's Notes

1. If we aren’t driving forward than we aren’t changing, and we certainly aren’t embracing change. The only way to continue to innovate, compete and be successful is if we change (it’s a good thing)!
2. In Australia over 19% of workers are classified as remote workforce.
3. There are lots of companies and employees that think that flexible working is already here. And in some cases this is true. In many cases, however, all people hear is “working from home”. While this is obviously a key component of what flexible working offers, this simplistic understanding actually misses the point and belittles the true potential of an authentically flexible approach.At its core, genuine flexible working just means being thoughtful about the tasks you have to achieve each day and choosing the most appropriate location from which to accomplish them. This is where the transformation happens, where work no longer is defined by a specific location, but instead is simply an activity, something you do.Flexible working is about being able to be effective regardless of your location; whether that’s at home, in the airport, on the train, in a café, or at a specially designed drop-in office. It’s also about being effective because of your location. It is about being liberated by the cloud services and devices now available, not being constrained by it. You might need to be closer to customers; or you might need space for deep thinking. Flexible working lets you accomplish either with minimal fuss. It is most definitely not an employee perk or HR arrangement made for individuals based on their personal preferences or situation.Organisations that adopt this strategic approach to flexible working will stand a greater chance of success not just because they have changed their culture and objectives to ones that unlock and reward the natural entrepreneurialism of their employees. They will also have addressed the key issue of trust. By focusing on the outcome for the organisation rather than the individual the entire trust dynamic changes, liberating employees and their creativity.
4. This is just as true for operating systems, browsers, office, and supporting technologies like Lync, Exchange, CRM and so on.
5. If it’s a MS workload and it’s not in this list http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2721672 – I wouldn’t do it in Azure. Challenges with SP dev/test on-premisesSlow infrastructure provisioning delays projectsLow utilization of dev/test infrastructureLimited hardware and software budgetsInfrastructure maintenance costly and complexCapacity constraints in on-prem data centersRealistic scale tests often challengingSP Dev/Test using Windows Azure20-30X faster infrastructure provisioning1~30% TCO savings1 (pay for what you use)Ability to scale up or down as neededShip tested in realistic scale scenariosUse existing development tools & languagesAccess on-premise resources if necessary1 A large US insurance company and the world’s largest accounting firm realized ~30% cost savings and 30X faster infrastructure provisioning times by moving SQL Server application testing to Windows AzureTelenor is a Norwegian telecommunications company, with several business units spread all over the globe. For a variety of reasons, Telenor decided that they wanted to migrate from SHarepoint Server 2007 to Sharepoint Server 2013.Now, Telenor has a huge SHarepoint deployment, with hundreds of custom features. Their SharePoint farms supports thousands of site collections, and hundreds of web applications and content databases. So, this migration effort posed significant challenges for them. Also they had 140+ of customizations made to SharePoint, of which most became obsolete with Microsofts next versions of SharePoint. They made the bold statement as part of the project to start from scratch on SharePoint 2013 and not allow any customizations anymore, unless approved by the board of directors of the company. They needed a lot of infrastructure for this migration! They estimated they needed almost 100 servers to do development and functional testing. In addition, they would need even more servers to do load and scale testing!Setting up those servers -- the dev and test environment takes time and costs money. The amount of time and money required was just too high. They quickly realized that this was not one they could do on-premises following a traditional approach -- that they needed a completely different approach for this projectThey were about to stop the SharePoint project. This was at the time when we announced Windows Azure Virtual Machines in preview.MCS deployed the required platform in less then two weeks time, which save the project and quickly resulted in Telenor looking down the path of going all the way to the cloud.For this they did have to take a few hurdles. There were objections from internal people, security people etc. Instead of looking at all the blockers they looked why they couldn’t move this workload to the cloud.Quickly the benefits became so big that there was no way back. The estimated cost from the 3rd party provider to host the dev/test environment only 30% of the cost the hosting provider proposed and it took 3 months.And the hosting provider couldn’t offer the flexibility to add another test environment for a short period of time, nor safe costs by turning machines off.Another key challenge was that they didn’t yet have a solution for the production environment.The solution is based on Windows Azure Virtual Machines for dev and testing. MCS build automatic scripts to deploy the full farm from scratch in a few hours.This allows Telenor to provision new environments based on the project needs, with very limited costs. In addition they can benefit from the global scale of Windows Azure by provisioning machines in close proximity of the users. User Acceptance Testing takes place in Norway, so the Western or Northern Europe datacenter or ideal.Development is mainly done in India, where they can leverage the Asia datacenters. The expected revenue for Windows Azure is $200k+ and for MCS more then 2M$ with more projects coming. The key benefits for Telenor:Faster infra provisioning, new environments in hours, fully elastic infrastrcutre.Support for a globally dispersed team. Loads of cost savingTelenor even started arguing that they wanted to deploy the production environment on Windows Azure. After loads of internal discussions with the Windows Azure PG, the SharePoint PG we ended up advising them against this. Mainly because of the big size of this platform (40.000 users) and the future SharePoint / Office 365 strategy. We landed on a multi year roadmap where the platform will eventually land in Office 365. Today that is not possible due to the global dispersion of Telenor and the complexity in their Active Directory domains.The next steps for Telenor are to look into all the other Dev/Test workloads and potentially offer this service to their customers!!The dev/test environment at Telenor for this project is complex. There are essentially 4 different parts to the entire infrastructure that was built out on Windows Azure as depicted in the diagram below. Dev box: Each developer on the project has a virtual machine with a complete single box SharePoint implementation on it.Two developer SharePoint Farms. These have a multi-server SharePoint configuration and both farms connect to the dev farm shared infrastructure that handles active directory, networking layers, Exchange and Lync. There are two farms, one is more dynamic and flattened daily, the other more static and more synchronized with the Test environment – that is used only by the test team. Test also has a full SharePoint 2007 environment so that the team can test migration work.Finally, the Pre-Prod environment is a fully scaled out environment that is used to host and test the implementation, do scale and load testing as well as co-existence with SP2007. The team have proven that this environment on Windows Azure will fully handle current and future needs. Telenor will actually be using one of their traditional hosting partners to host the production deployment using the pre-prod farm as the blue-print.  Now, the key to actually making all this work is of course automation. While it is possible to create and manage all these virtual machines from the Windows Azure portal, an implementation of this size and as dynamic as it is simply would not be possible without automation. In Windows Azure, this is achieved because everything that can be done in the portal can be done in script, using PowerShell. There are two aspects to the automation:Creating all the virtual machines ready for installation of SharePoint and related software.Installing and configuring SharePoint and other servers such as SQL Server within the created Virtual Machines.At Telenor, they have developed a number of scripts that completely build out the test/dev environments.
6. The advent of the internet, then the web and the ever faster evolution of services and devices have transformed the way people live their lives. We have come an awful long way in the last 40 years. People are connected and embracing technology in incredible ways; they are communicating with friends over Skype, they are playing games online, they are on Facebook, they are streaming movies and music and sharing photos.
7. But in the office people are often tearing their hair out. But over the past few years a nagging sense of doubt has entered many people’s minds about how true the utopian vision of technology as the ultimate liberator is. Some have started to wonder whether the very thing that was supposed to set us free might not have instead ensnared us without truly adding the value it so richly promised.
8. As we think about the last 30 years, Communication inside and outside of the workplace has evolved. First with the phone, then email, the Internet, instant messaging, smartphones/mobile computing devices, and now social apps. The evolution of communications still continues today for both consumers and professionals. We all went from using cell phones and pagers to using email, AOL IM or MSN messenger, and now social apps like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. With the consumerization of IT, consumers and professionals still have a strong desire to communicate however tools and applications that they communicate with has changed considerably. They simply want to connect, engage, and interact with their friends, co-workers, partners, customers, and family with the tools for which they are most familiar.
9. A social business is one that recognises that its greatest value is how its people are connected to each other and how in turn they are connected to the people they serve inside and outside the business. It’s one that truly recognises the value of simply bringing people together and giving them an outcome you want them to achieve. Social tools such as Yammer replicate the experience we have in our personal lives with social media and spreads it throughout work.For example, a hamburger chain in the US recently introduced social sharing within the company, empowering local store managers to create and share ideas on how to get customers to spend more at the bar to reverse flagging profits. Soon stores began to put experiments into place. Turnover noticeably improved. Even better, the stores that experimented also reported lower staff turnover. You ask your employees to help you solve a problem, you get them aligned – and it turns out they’re a lot more effective and engaged.
10. the truth is that, according to many studies, around two thirds of the workforce aren’t engaged in what they do. That means that less than a third of workers feel happy and productive in what they do, day in day out. I would guess that if you work as part of the knowledge economy inside any organisation, small or large, you will know for yourself that there is some foundation for this claim.
11. There are lots of companies and employees that think that flexible working is already here. And in some cases this is true. In many cases, however, all people hear is “working from home”. While this is obviously a key component of what flexible working offers, this simplistic understanding actually misses the point and belittles the true potential of an authentically flexible approach.At its core, genuine flexible working just means being thoughtful about the tasks you have to achieve each day and choosing the most appropriate location from which to accomplish them. This is where the transformation happens, where work no longer is defined by a specific location, but instead is simply an activity, something you do.Flexible working is about being able to be effective regardless of your location; whether that’s at home, in the airport, on the train, in a café, or at a specially designed drop-in office. It’s also about being effective because of your location. It is about being liberated by the cloud services and devices now available, not being constrained by it. You might need to be closer to customers; or you might need space for deep thinking. Flexible working lets you accomplish either with minimal fuss. It is most definitely not an employee perk or HR arrangement made for individuals based on their personal preferences or situation.Organisations that adopt this strategic approach to flexible working will stand a greater chance of success not just because they have changed their culture and objectives to ones that unlock and reward the natural entrepreneurialism of their employees. They will also have addressed the key issue of trust. By focusing on the outcome for the organisation rather than the individual the entire trust dynamic changes, liberating employees and their creativity.
12. A social business is one that recognises that its greatest value is how its people are connected to each other and how in turn they are connected to the people they serve inside and outside the business. It’s one that truly recognises the value of simply bringing people together and giving them an outcome you want them to achieve. Social tools such as Yammer replicate the experience we have in our personal lives with social media and spreads it throughout work.For example, a hamburger chain in the US recently introduced social sharing within the company, empowering local store managers to create and share ideas on how to get customers to spend more at the bar to reverse flagging profits. Soon stores began to put experiments into place. Turnover noticeably improved. Even better, the stores that experimented also reported lower staff turnover. You ask your employees to help you solve a problem, you get them aligned – and it turns out they’re a lot more effective and engaged.
13. A social business is one that recognises that its greatest value is how its people are connected to each other and how in turn they are connected to the people they serve inside and outside the business. It’s one that truly recognises the value of simply bringing people together and giving them an outcome you want them to achieve. Social tools such as Yammer replicate the experience we have in our personal lives with social media and spreads it throughout work.For example, a hamburger chain in the US recently introduced social sharing within the company, empowering local store managers to create and share ideas on how to get customers to spend more at the bar to reverse flagging profits. Soon stores began to put experiments into place. Turnover noticeably improved. Even better, the stores that experimented also reported lower staff turnover. You ask your employees to help you solve a problem, you get them aligned – and it turns out they’re a lot more effective and engaged.
14. The document is only accessible for end-users with the corresponding SharePoint permissions! Not every Yammer user can open and view the document. Every user with access to the document can open and edit the document in the browser.This starts the collaboration with colleagues modifying the document and discussing the changes in Yammer. The document can be shared with other groups at any time.
15. A social business is one that recognises that its greatest value is how its people are connected to each other and how in turn they are connected to the people they serve inside and outside the business. It’s one that truly recognises the value of simply bringing people together and giving them an outcome you want them to achieve. Social tools such as Yammer replicate the experience we have in our personal lives with social media and spreads it throughout work.For example, a hamburger chain in the US recently introduced social sharing within the company, empowering local store managers to create and share ideas on how to get customers to spend more at the bar to reverse flagging profits. Soon stores began to put experiments into place. Turnover noticeably improved. Even better, the stores that experimented also reported lower staff turnover. You ask your employees to help you solve a problem, you get them aligned – and it turns out they’re a lot more effective and engaged.
16. Well Arnold, you are the only one who does so.
17. Well Arnold, you are the only one who does so.
18. To begin, we need to be a little more precise on what we mean by information. The science of information is called information theory, and in information theory the word information has a very specific meaning. The information contained in a message is a measure of its ability to reduce uncertainty. If you learn that it snowed in Alaska in January this message contains close to zero information, because this event is almost certain. If you learned it snowed in Los Angeles in July this message contains a great deal of information because this event is very unlikely.This relationship between information and uncertainty helps to quantify information.
19. MIT Economist, David Autor - Quarterly Journal of Economics, November 2003 Since 1980, the percentage of abstract job tasks in the US has increased steadily. In terms of education level, those with college degrees or more are employed to a greater degree in higher paying jobs that emphasize abstract tasks.
20. What is Power BI?Power BI for Office 365, a self-service business intelligence (BI) solution delivered through Excel and Office 365 which provides information workers with data analysis and visualization capabilities to identify deeper business insights either on-premise or within a trusted cloud environment. With Power BI for Office 365, customers can connect to data in the cloud or extend their existing on premise data sources and systems to quickly build and deploy self-service BI solutions hosted in Microsoft’s enterprise cloud.Power BI for Office 365 enables customers to do more with their data:- Analyze and present insights from data in compelling visual formats either on premises or in the cloud from Excel.- Share reports and data sets online with data that is always kept up to date.- Ask questions of your data using natural language search and get immediate answers through interactive tables, charts and graphs.- Access and stay connected to data and reports from your mobile devices wherever you are.Power BI addresses several fundamental business needs:Enableself-service BI solutions foreveryday business users with the ease of use and familiarity of a tool they already use – Excel. Excel is the most widely-used analytical tool by information workers. Enable collaboration, connectivity, scale and governance by offering BI in the cloud through Office 365. Users can easily share their data and analysis with colleagues and access reports wherever they go – on their desktop at work, over the Web at home, and on their mobile device. Manage important data for the team and track usage to see who’s accessing the data and what data sets are most often used. Enable organizations to extend their existing investments for on-premise data warehouses and operational systems as well as cloud-based data sources and Hadoop clusters to create secure and easy-to-use self-service BI solutions that can also monitor employee access and usage. Customers can sign up to preview Power BI for Office 365 at www.office.com/powerbi.
21. What is Power BI?Power BI for Office 365, a self-service business intelligence (BI) solution delivered through Excel and Office 365 which provides information workers with data analysis and visualization capabilities to identify deeper business insights either on-premise or within a trusted cloud environment. With Power BI for Office 365, customers can connect to data in the cloud or extend their existing on premise data sources and systems to quickly build and deploy self-service BI solutions hosted in Microsoft’s enterprise cloud.Power BI for Office 365 enables customers to do more with their data:- Analyze and present insights from data in compelling visual formats either on premises or in the cloud from Excel.- Share reports and data sets online with data that is always kept up to date.- Ask questions of your data using natural language search and get immediate answers through interactive tables, charts and graphs.- Access and stay connected to data and reports from your mobile devices wherever you are.Power BI addresses several fundamental business needs:Enableself-service BI solutions foreveryday business users with the ease of use and familiarity of a tool they already use – Excel. Excel is the most widely-used analytical tool by information workers. Enable collaboration, connectivity, scale and governance by offering BI in the cloud through Office 365. Users can easily share their data and analysis with colleagues and access reports wherever they go – on their desktop at work, over the Web at home, and on their mobile device. Manage important data for the team and track usage to see who’s accessing the data and what data sets are most often used. Enable organizations to extend their existing investments for on-premise data warehouses and operational systems as well as cloud-based data sources and Hadoop clusters to create secure and easy-to-use self-service BI solutions that can also monitor employee access and usage. Customers can sign up to preview Power BI for Office 365 at www.office.com/powerbi.
22. Think of this as self-service ETLExplorer: Data Explorer provides a familiar and intuitive experience for finding and connect to data from within Excel. Easily combine and transform data so that it can be analyzed and visualized for deeper insight. Power Query supports a wide variety of data sources including relational, structured and semi-structured, OData, from the Web, Hadoop, as well as Data Search capabilities that provide users with a search experience for data, returning relevant data sets from across the enterprise and from external sources.
23. In market for a while and gaining traction. What is it? We’ve taken an enterprise grade in-memory database engine and we’ve built it into Excel. Then we build an intuitive, user friendly modeling interface on top of it, so that users can build relationships, create custom measures, hierarchies and KPI’s in the familiar environment of Excel. To do this we introduced DAX, which is an excel like formula language.Power Pivot: Power Pivot brings the power of in-memory database technology and flexible modeling to Excel. Create powerful analytical models in a familiar and flexible environment for fast manipulation and processing of large data sets. Define relationships, create custom measures, hierarchies and KPIs.
24. Power View: Discover and sharenew insights through interactive data exploration and visualization experiences with Power View in Excel. Power View lets you compile data, charts, and graphs into a single view to bring your data to life.Power Map: Power Map is a 3D data visualization tool for Excel that provides a powerful method for people to look at information in new ways enabling discoveries in data that might never be seen in traditional 2D tables and charts. “GeoFlow" combines 3D visual exploration with the ability to make direct comparisons of values and identify outliers by seeing data displayed in 2D charts at the same time. "GeoFlow" is the best way to visualize geographic data in Excel 2013 workbooks, with new 3D columns or heat maps. Then play the visualizations over time and share insights captured within your organization through interactive tours.
25. BI Sites: Quickly create collaborative BI optimized workspaces in Office 365 to share BI worksheets with colleagues, collaborate over insights and results, and quickly find the data you’re looking for quickly. BI Sites make it easier to find report, refresh data, Get answers quickly with natural language query
26. Data Stewardship: Manage and share your own data views and definitions with others, certify that the data is correct, and gain valuable insights on who and how the data is being used.
27. Mobile BI: Enable users to stay connected to live reports through the browser with HTML5 or through a mobile BI app designed for their device, providing touch optimized live mobile access to critical business information and reports stored in Office 365. HTML 5 support enables interactive browser based report access from any device. In addition, the BI mobile app provides an optimized experience for your device, enabling you to view all your favorite reports in integrated mobile experience, wherever and whenever they need it. Mobile access to reports will be supported by the BI offering for O365 due to preview later this year. The mobile app offer a consumptionexperience for the reports that you save to Office 365. Features of the mobile app include:Discover– Find published Excel and Power View content.Navigate and find documents.Save favorites.Present– Show and interact with content.View content, keep context.Sort, highlight, filter, play axis.Zoom, pan, swipe.Share– Collaborate with others by taking a snapshot and sending an email.
28. New capabilities that allow you to extend your existing systems into this user experience:We introduce a new Data Management Gateway, which allows you to build connections to on premise data sources so that reports that are published to BI Sites in Office 365 can refresh the data either on demand or scheduled so that users are looking at the latest view of the data. We’re providing an enterprise data search engine. This is the same engine that we have available publically and we’re using to index the worlds data with sources such as from Wikipedia and Data.gov, as well as with partners such as Dunn & Bradstreet. We’re providing a private version of this to the enterprise so that you can index your own data sources and sets so that users …Also, we’re builting into this search engine a number of useful different diagnostic tools so that you can see which users are accessing the data and which data sources they’re using, giving you more information to decide which data sources are sitting idle and can be decommissioned.
29. New capabilities that allow you to extend your existing systems into this user experience:We introduce a new Data Management Gateway, which allows you to build connections to on premise data sources so that reports that are published to BI Sites in Office 365 can refresh the data either on demand or scheduled so that users are looking at the latest view of the data. We’re providing an enterprise data search engine. This is the same engine that we have available publically and we’re using to index the worlds data with sources such as from Wikipedia and Data.gov, as well as with partners such as Dunn & Bradstreet. We’re providing a private version of this to the enterprise so that you can index your own data sources and sets so that users …Also, we’re builting into this search engine a number of useful different diagnostic tools so that you can see which users are accessing the data and which data sources they’re using, giving you more information to decide which data sources are sitting idle and can be decommissioned.
30. New capabilities that allow you to extend your existing systems into this user experience:We introduce a new Data Management Gateway, which allows you to build connections to on premise data sources so that reports that are published to BI Sites in Office 365 can refresh the data either on demand or scheduled so that users are looking at the latest view of the data. We’re providing an enterprise data search engine. This is the same engine that we have available publically and we’re using to index the worlds data with sources such as from Wikipedia and Data.gov, as well as with partners such as Dunn & Bradstreet. We’re providing a private version of this to the enterprise so that you can index your own data sources and sets so that users …Also, we’re builting into this search engine a number of useful different diagnostic tools so that you can see which users are accessing the data and which data sources they’re using, giving you more information to decide which data sources are sitting idle and can be decommissioned.
31. A lot of this can seem daunting and I know one of the hardest things is figuring out how to do some of the things I have shown today. If you are interested in further training or assistance please let me know. Based on the number of people who are interested and the areas of interest we can schedule further training sessions to help everyone better use the SharePoint portal.It's our commitment to you that we will continue to hear your feedback and identify the issues. I encourage you to give us feedback during the coming months, and we will continue to deliver more and more functionality, more and more guidance to help you be successful with your application of SharePoint.Thank You for Reading/Listening