What’s NEW in SharePoint 15

    Microsoft is, not surprisingly, not commenting. Anyone who is a member of the Technical Preview is, as Hough points out, under non-disclosure. So the answer is: wait and see.

Hough’s post included a thankfully short chunk of standard language: “Office 15 will help people work, collaborate, and communicate smarter and faster than ever before.”

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to recognize the trends in the market, some of which Hough indicates in his post, including mobile devices, and the blurring of public and private cloud services and on-premise servers and clients.

Social and search are clearly hot, and Microsoft has demonstrated its commitment to investing in these spaces over the years.

Microsoft always works to improve scalability and manageability, and the features of SQL Server 2012 and Windows 8 Server certainly point to significant improvements in those areas, as well as redundancy and recoverability.

You’ve got to assume these features will feed up the “stack” into SharePoint’s capabilities.
There are also rough spots and gaps in functionality in the current versions of the product, and Microsoft has proven over the years that it does recognize many of those and fills them as the products evolve.

So there’s a lot of incredible opportunity for Microsoft to hit it out of the park with Office 15. My hope is that, for the enterprise, the impact of Office 15 could be as significant and valuable as what we’re seeing with the potential of Windows 8 in the client and consumer space.
It’s going to be a very interesting ride, and I look forward to reporting developments to you as Microsoft releases information.