I see a lot of you liked my first post on the iPad and SharePoint. Thanks for checking it out.
I want to spend a few paragraphs sharing a vision of what the next release of BPOS might mean to you – especially in the SharePoint space. My partner and I believe that the next release of BPOS will set off another huge wave of opportunity – similar to what we all went through with SharePoint 2007 – remember that? It is about to happen all over again…
Imagine that you could have virtually unlimited scalability, combined with the best experts running the servers and infrastructure behind your SharePoint environment. All of you guys and gals reading this are probably good SharePoint admins, but imagine if you had the bankroll to hire the very best and have them run your SharePoint farm in one of best data centers in the world – that concept is called an economy of SKILL. Now imagine it cost less for your organization to subscribe to SharePoint in the cloud rather than running it on premises. So let's see, costs less and has guaranteed service levels and virtually unlimited scalability. How long will it take to get your CFO to sign up for that?
"But wait," you say, "SharePoint 2007 online is hobbled, and just a toy for simple collaboration sites." This is where the next wave comes in with SharePoint 2010. I believe many of the changes that were added into SharePoint 2010 were put there to enable online applications to be built and supported in a multi-tenant environment: BPOS.
The huge change that is coming will be centered on applications that are built in SharePoint 2010 running in BPOS. These apps will combine all of the functionality of SharePoint 2010 in a cloud environment and will blow competing online platforms out of the water because of the capabilities of SharePoint and the low price point of BPOS.
Have you all checked out Hotmail, Office Web Apps or the SkyDrive lately? There are some big changes going on there if you have not looked recently. Check them out – you will be amazed. Now extend that kind of thinking to SharePoint…
Think about what this will mean to you, your organization, and your future. Look around and start getting ready to build and deploy SharePoint solutions in the cloud. I am sure that your organization will demand this from you within the next 12 months.
Don't worry, SharePoint admin jobs are not going away. Admins will still be needed but you are going to have to update your skills as an architect, developer, or admin and learn all you can about BPOS and how to build solutions that will work in a multi-tenant world.
I am betting everything on this idea. I am also "all in." My company is building apps today that will run in BPOS with SharePoint 2010 and start killing some traditional players out there in the online space. Start thinking about apps you can build that may be accessed by hundreds of thousands of users. We are right on the edge of this new reality.
This is going to be a disruptive time ahead. Are you getting ready and updating your skills and thinking? I know I am.
Til' next time…
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