As we look toward the release of the next Office 365, (see WinBeta's post about the mysterious orange web page), let's take a second out of the hypefulness for a Debbie-Downer moment and recall that bringing in the new often means breaking the old.
SharePoint Online has been affected by Office 365 updates, the cloud computing blog at InfoWorld reported recently. "Microsoft acknowledged that it has been making changes recently to the SharePoint Online back end in Office 365," the post says and cites a Microsoft knowledge base article of known issues being worked on.
And in the Office 365 blog on January 16 "Preparing for the Next SharePoint Online Service Update," the Office 365 team posted "Microsoft is preparing to roll out the new SharePoint Online as a part of Office 365. As a result of this initial phase of the SharePoint Online service update, you may be affected by some of the design changes." The post goes on to point out the need to install a new version of SharePoint Designer 2013 as well as apply two hotfixes.
So--are you ready for the next Office 365? do you care?
Several major SharePoint product vendors have told me that the numbers of customers they see moving to Office 365 are growing. Hybrid implementations, where companies have both mission-critical SharePoint sites on-premises and new or test sites in Office 365, are increasing, too.
We should all check back in a year and see where Office 365 growth is. I think it will continue, but maybe at a slower pace than Microsoft would like. (Lame-conclusion self-check: Then again, wouldn't ANY pace be slower than Microsoft would like?)
Caroline Marwitz edits and manages web content for SharePoint Pro and writes on SharePoint, Active Directory, security, and virtualization. Follow her on Twitter at SharePoint_Pro and carawitz.