The 2012 SharePoint year in review

By Eric Riz

December 21, 2012 —  (Page 1 of 2)
As I sit down to write my final article of 2012, I realize that this has been a monumental year for Microsoft SharePoint, its partners and customers. My experiences this year have been from a number of levels. With Concatenate being an ISV and service integrator, I have had the opportunity to see the SharePoint ecosystem grow and expand to new heights never before seen in Microsoft circles.

As a speaker and author, I have addressed energetic audiences across North America and learned some of the incredible things that clients are doing with SharePoint. As a Business-Critical SharePoint Partner, I have worked hand-in-hand with customers that are aligning and amalgamating line-of-business systems into SharePoint, truly using the system as the collaborative environment it was designed to be. What a year!

Twelve months ago, the SharePoint conversation focused on what the 2013 product would look like from a user-interface as well as infrastructure perspective. SharePoint 2010 introduced the ribbon, a game-changer that allowed front-end users far more extendibility towards the Office suite. What would the “big bang” item be in this version?

Business end users were curious how the 2013 product incorporated feedback on previous versions, and make changes that would allow businesses to create stronger, better and faster applications. Admins wanted to know what the upgrade path would be and how welcome the product would be in the changing cloud landscape. How would they incorporate on- and off-premise environments into the equation, if at all? Questions also arose about any significant platform requirements, such as the SQL 2008 R2 upgrade, which came with 2010.

As soon as the calendar rolled to 2012, the rumor mill began to churn. February saw the increase in blog posts and conversations around details of the new version. At SPTechCon San Francisco, the excitement about the pending release was palpable. Depending on whom you were talking to, the variations were all over the map with potentially massive modifications all around the product.

Vendors and consultants were champing at the bit to find out any information possible on the release and its inclusions. There was particular excitement about the concept of the App Store, which wasn’t verified but was a known component coming to market. When the beta version was released in June, nerves were calmed and, from the conversations I had, in the end over 90% of the changes in 2013 are welcomed, with a few holdouts feeling that more could have been done to the UI.



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