Microsoft faces increasing competition from rivals like Dropbox, Slack, and Box, but the company is responding with improvements to its own SharePoint software today. SharePoint has been used by businesses for 15 years to organize documents, build intranet sites, and manage content. While it's used by 190 million users, it hasn't fully adapted to the mobile era. Microsoft is overhauling SharePoint today, and introducing iOS, Android, and Windows 10 Mobile apps.
The iOS SharePoint app will arrive by the end of June, with the Android and Windows 10 Mobile versions due for release later this year. All of the mobile apps are designed to make SharePoint more accessible on the go, allowing users to access things like corporate intranet sites and content. Alongside the new apps, Microsoft is also providing access to SharePoint Online document libraries in OneDrive mobile apps, and the ability to copy from OneDrive to SharePoint.
These improvements should make using SharePoint on the go a lot more useful. Microsoft plans to synchronize SharePoint Online document libraries with the new OneDrive sync client by the end of the year, and integrate SharePoint sites with Office 365 Groups. Microsoft's new Flow service, which lets you automate tasks, will also be integrated into SharePoint by the end of the year.
Microsoft is also planning to release a OneDrive Universal Windows app by the end of June. Early beta versions do not include the popular placeholders feature that Microsoft removed in Windows 10, and it's not clear if the final or future versions will bring back this experience. Dropbox revealed last week that it's planning to use placeholders so users can save hard drive space when syncing cloud content with the service.
Comments
I thought Lync/Skype for Business was already their version of Slack? But tbh I haven’t used Slack that much so I’m mainly going off of what I’ve read about Slack on places like here.
By WhiteNiteLite on 05.04.16 5:25am
We will see at the event today, but I think it’s a matter of streamlining the mobile experience so it’s more get-in, get-it-done, get-out. Ideally, participating in a SharePoint group could, at its simplest, feel like posting a message in a Facebook group chat.
By ghdavid on 05.04.16 6:54am
I also haven’t used Slack, from what I’ve read it’s kind of like a skinned mIRC with extra features. I would love to use it. We use O365, and recently I wanted to create a group chat for my department. I was bummed to find out that Skype for Business in O365 don’t support persistent group chat, so it wont work. I don’t understand how the weird Outlook Groups function could be a good alternative. I think MS still has some way to go with regards to cooperation tools.
By Aleksander Eide on 05.04.16 7:00am
Well here is your answer for collaboration. Read the above article. SharePoint is actually a part of your O365 business plan.
By jayamazin on 05.04.16 7:40am
It seems like this new functionality will bring it all together.
Behind the scenes Office Groups are really just SharePoint sub-sites. You get shared chat, document storage, notebook, calendar etc
Groups can be open or private. You can search for groups in your company to join. You can use Delve as your own private overview of the different groups you are a part of.
When they enable OneDrive→Sharepoint syncing you’ll be able to sync documents from each group you’re in back to your PC.
Microsoft probably have the strongest collaboration offering available, except for one crucial point… their mobile offering of non-existent.
Obviously this is supposed to remedy that
I still have a few unanswered questions, like when will they integrate Wunderlist into groups, what happens to Yammer, and where does Skype for Business fit in.
By ahlam99 on 05.04.16 8:57am
SKype for Business Online (and Groups) is a really really great service, but I agree, not having P-chat is confusing.
By frankwick on 05.04.16 12:15pm
Just create an Office365 Group… chat in the group?
By SEB.M-H. on 05.04.16 2:33pm
My company implemented Slack a little over a year ago.
It’s whatever.
By harkening on 05.10.16 3:24pm
Not really sure why they said this was an answer to Slack. Slack is meant for communication while SharePoint is meant for documentation and storage of sorts. Yammer and Skype are MS competition to Slack.
By PixelPusher15 on 05.04.16 8:41am
Slack is about collaboration.
Office 365 Groups is Microsoft’s collaboration tool.
I think (I’m really not 100% sure!) that Skype turns into a tool that can be accessed via a Group (just like the documents, shared calendar, group chat session, notebook etc).
The Group is the glue that pulls all the other collaboration tools together.
Yammer… I think it gets put out to pasture.
By ahlam99 on 05.04.16 9:12am
I’ve worked in two organizations that used Yammer to great success. It seems that Microsoft spent a lot of money on a tool that they had no idea how to fold into their strategy. The overlap between Skype for Business, O365 Groups in Outlook, Sharepoint and Yammer for collaboration and communication is crazy.
I hope Yammer doesn’t die, for groups collaborating across time zones when persistent chat isn’t an option I’m yet to find a much better tool. Its simple and required very little training for people to understand how to use it. With better integration with OneDrive or Sharepoint sites for file sharing it would be a killer app for O365.
By mobiledivide on 05.04.16 11:37am
Office 365 Groups is SharePoint. Like… literally. When you create a group its creates a SharePoint sub-site.
Groups are just a far more accessible way for normal people to use SharePoint.
Skype for Business isn’t really the same as Groups either. You can’t have a persistent shared workspace in Skype to share a OneNote notebook, calendar or collection of documents.
I couldn’t actually see Skype being merged into Groups as a feature rather than the other way around.
Yammer is… Yammer
Microsoft had to choose between SharePoint and Yammer, and I think they have chosen SharePoint.
Yammer will still exist, but I’m not sure we’ll ever see it integrated like SharePoint/OneDrive etc
By ahlam99 on 05.04.16 11:57am
I am confused about what share-point is or does and what aspects of it are duplicated by oneDrive and other cloud based filesystems/sharing systems
By Ian Hoover on 05.04.16 11:32am
SharePoint is a large beast and was conceived before we had cloud file sharing services. Yes, it provides Document Libraries for companies (on prem and cloud) but it also is a development platform. You can create any type of crazy workflow you can think of with approvers/reviews/etc.. It is a web publishing platform for blogs/wikis/etc.. The document control features are very important for companies who either want to retain and classify documents or expire them if they aren’t considered vital. Since it’s all part of Office, all of this integrates with Outlook/Skype. For example, in a SP doc library, when you see an author’s name, it will be lit up with that person’s SKype presence.
By frankwick on 05.04.16 12:19pm
and the original OneDrive for Business was simply a re-brand of SharePoint. This wasn’t very reliable so they have thankfully built the new Biz client on top of the very reliable consumer OneDrive client. Actually, it’s now just a single client and you pick how you want to log in.
By frankwick on 05.04.16 12:20pm
Thanks for the summary. This is complicated.Having worked a bit on MS’s Intune product, I can imagine the complexity of the code base they are trying to modernize here. I wish them luck.
By Ian Hoover on 05.04.16 1:35pm
Oh man, that’s a big one
SharePoint started out as an Intranet portal. Like somewhere you would put your org chart or HR procedures.
It became very customisable. Like, let’s say Jenny from accounting started loaning out work laptops. She could create a spreadsheet/database on the accounting groups SharePoint subsite, then create different permissions and views of that data for the different people in accounting. This all hooks into the existing active directory permissions (so no one needs to create an account or log in to access Jenny’s new database)
It became so customisable that some companies run serious business-critical applications off it, and there are developers whose fulltime job is to customise SharePoint.
At some point Microsoft integrated Office, so users could upload documents to a shared document library, create shared calendars or a shared OneNote notebook.
The document libraries were focused around collaboration and sharing. E.g. you can check documents in/out, comment and version them, be notified of updates etc.
By default, in SharePoint there is an overall company site with a company document library, and also every user has their own sub-site with their own document library. You can think of them as little collaboration hubs.
Microsoft then created SkyDrive Pro so users could sync these document libraries to their computers (later renamed OneDrive for Business).
Whilst this was happening, on the consumer side Live Folders became Windows Live SkyDrive, which became SkyDrive and eventually OneDrive. This service started out as basically a hard drive in the cloud rather than part of a collaboration hub like SharePoint libraries.
OneDrive expanded to enable more collaboration and sharing until it made sense to bring everything together.
That’s what is happening now.
On SharePoint, document libraries look and behave like OneDrive. Each users document library on their personal SharePoint subside is now effectively OneDrive, and you can sync consumer OneDrive and personal SharePoint document libraries using the same sync client.
The default SharePoint site with its shared document library are still using the other method. They are bringing this across to the OneDrive platform by the end of this year (which means one sync client for everything)
By ahlam99 on 05.04.16 12:29pm
Wow, thanks for the in depth reply. A complex product with history to be sure.
By Ian Hoover on 05.04.16 1:36pm
Microsoft – always behind the competition. Their lucky PC OS monopoly still keeping them alive.
By zqxwcevr on 05.04.16 3:55pm
SharePoint/O365 suite is about sites, file sharing, and lists [and the silly list architecture is pretty dated.]
Slack is used for near synchronous and asynchronous conversations, app integrations, bots.
Slack and HipChat are in the same category.
SharePoint and Confluence are in the same category.
But SharePoint and Slack are not (yet) in the same category.
By Dr0idAttack on 05.04.16 6:08pm