Skip navigation
3 Things IT Pros Are Thinking as the Countdown to SharePoint 2016 Begins

3 Things IT Pros Are Thinking as the Countdown to SharePoint 2016 Begins

Three things popped out at me as I spoke with people at SharePoint Fest Seattle and sat in on as many of the sessions as I could humanly get to.

I'm here in Seattle, for SharePoint Fest. It's a great event where stakeholders from all walks of SharePoint get together to share ideas, gain insight, solve problems and commiserate about the day-to-day issues they (and their users) experience with SharePoint. This is a really exciting time for SharePoint, as the Preview version of 2016 is set to come out before the end of the month. But three things popped out at me as I spoke with people at the event and sat in on as many of the sessions as I could humanly get to.

1. While everyone is very excited about SharePoint 2016 and changes that are happening with SharePoint online and Office 365, a lot of organizations are not even on SharePoint 2013. During a couple of the sessions I attended, the presenters did a roll call, asking, with a show of hands from the audience, which version of SharePoint their organizations were on. Many were on SharePoint 2010, and a handful were on SharePoint 2007. It reminded me how important it is not to forget about the IT pros who are guiding their companies though what may be a multi-staged process, fraught with--from what lots of people were telling me--lots of cultural baggage.

2. Speaking of cultural baggage, that was also a big issue as I spoke with people at the conference. While there is lots of amazing technology to talk about, SharePoint is a people platform, and people are often change-averse. New features available in SharePoint 2016 and Office 265, such as Delve personalization powered by Office Graph, are awesome and powerful and have a ton of promise for increasing productivity in the workplace. But many of the SharePoint administrators I spoke with noted that these kinds of features will be "scary" to many users, requiring purposeful training and a careful thinking about when and how the new technology is rolled out. "New technology = end user training" is not a new concept, but I think organizations sometimes forget to build in enough time for training--and for dealing with issues when things don't go exactly as planned. Which brings me to observation No. 3 ...

3. During the sessions I attended and in conversations I had with folks at the conference, many people expressed the importance of extremely careful rollout with new SharePoint (and Office 365) features. One IT pro called for a kind of "new feature escrow"--or, building in time during any upgrade to deal with the things that will inevitably go wrong. Again, not a new concept, but, if I was reading the rooms right, too many projects are planned without this kind of escrow--with IT pros left to band-aiding issues as they arise. This is a concern with any new platform, but with SharePoint being so people-centric--and with people being so, well, human--it can be difficult to guess what might go right and what might go wrong, and how much time to dedicate to dealing with the latter and leveraging the former.

 

 

 

Hide comments

Comments

  • Allowed HTML tags: <em> <strong> <blockquote> <br> <p>

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Publish