SharePoint Doctor

There’s no doubt that the world, Microsoft included, is moving more toward the “cloud.” However, while cloud solutions offer a great number of advantages, they also have limitations and potential downfalls. Here are some of the advantages and disadvantages with Microsoft Office 365 and the cloud-based SharePoint Online.

Pros:

• ·         reduce your cost – you no longer have to run and maintain your service so could save a substantial amount each month
• ·         Microsoft keeps your privacy intact by allowing you to create group-facing intranet pages
• ·         there are several areas of improvement, especially when it comes to Silverlight visuals
• ·         employees can share and access group documents even more easily, from wherever they are

Cons:

• ·         you lose control – while you may be paying less for the maintenance of your servers, they’re also no longer your servers
• ·         you can’t implement farm-level solutions; absolutely everything has to be made in the sandbox
• ·         your entire staff will face a learning curve as they migrate to the new system
• ·         Microsoft’s servers aren’t completely free from errors

Do the pros outweigh the cons? That really depends on where you’re coming from. For many groups, the decreased cost is well worth sacrificing a bit of control and learning to use the sandbox for site customisation. For others, however, their current version of SharePoint resolves all their needs with ease and facing the new learning curve and potential problems is an unnecessary hassle.

If you’d like to discuss your options in more detail, just call igroup – All We Do Is SharePoint – we’re the experts you can trust to give you impartial advice.

As in on-premise SharePoint 2010, all the 6 primary capabilities are available in SharePoint Online: Sites, Communities, Content, Search, Insights and, Composites. You should note that not all the features in SharePoint 2010 are available in Office 365 SharePoint Online.

Office integration

SharePoint Online works with familiar Office applications. Office documents can easily be created and saved directly to SharePoint Online, or documents can be co-authored with Microsoft Office Web Apps. Access important documents offline or from mobile devices and set document-level permissions to help protect sensitive content. With one click you can communicate in real-time with colleagues, customers, and partners from within SharePoint sites.

Some highlights of the new functionality in Microsoft Office 2010 that interoperate with SharePoint Online include:

• ·    Backstage View: The Microsoft Office Backstage™ view allows users to manage their documents and related data – they can create, save, and send documents; inspect documents for hidden metadata or personal information; set options such as turning on or off AutoComplete suggestions; and more.
• ·    PowerPoint Broadcasting: Presenters can broadcast their slide shows to people in other locations, whether or not they have PowerPoint installed.
• ·    Document Co-Authoring: With new co-authoring capabilities, multiple users can edit the same document, at the same time, even if they are in different locations. Users can even communicate as they work, directly from within the desktop application.
• ·    Outlook Alerts: Users can sta

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Here’s a comparison of the feature availability between SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Online offerings from Microsoft Online Services: SharePoint Online and SharePoint Online Dedicated.

SharePoint 2010 can be considered one of the underestimated Microsoft products in the industry. There are different reasons for this, but the main reason is that everybody sees something specific in the product and there is no common opinion what SharePoint is and how it can help a business. It’s clear though from Microsoft reports that SharePoint is gaining more and more popularity. The product showed over 20% growth over the past year and its revenue is in the billions, so why has SharePoint become so popular?

Here is the short list of the reasons why you should choose SharePoint 2010:

• ·      Custom Application Integration
• ·      Workflows. Easier business process automation and simulation
• ·      Use of MS Visual Studio. Developers can use this tool for testing, compiling and debugging
  • ·      LINQ support. Develop the application faster on SharePoint
  • ·      MS Silverlight support. Deliver rich GUI with Silverlight platform
  • ·      Web Parts. Developers are able to add any new functionality to SharePoint sites
  • ·      Integration with Office 2010. Huge benefits for document life cycle management solutions
  • ·      Sandbox Solution technology. An opportunity to deploy your solution not only on premises, but also on cloud
  • ·      Ready components. Developers are able to develop custom business solutions using ready components which allow them to deliver the systems faster
    • ·      MS Visio support.
    • ·      Web Content Management engine. Easier to develop customised web sites
    • ·      Performance Point Services. Easily create business intelligence dashboards
    • ·      Developer Dashboard
    • ·      SharePoint Designer. Developers can create no-code solutions on the SharePoint platform SharePoint 2010 SDK with documentation and code samples

If you need more convincing, all we do is SharePoint, so call the igroup experts for help and advice. 

SharePoint Online delivers SharePoint as a cloud service. It helps businesses create sites to share documents and insights and enable collaboration between colleagues, partners, and customers. These capabilities can also be customised to address specific business needs. SharePoint Online allows users to share ideas and expertise and find the information they want, all without the need to set up SharePoint in an organisation’s data centre. Plus, SharePoint Online provides high availability, comprehensive security, and simplified management. Sites are provided to:

• manage and share important documents (My Sites)
• keep teams in sync and manage important projects (Team Sites)
• stay up-to-date with company information and news (Intranet Sites)
• ahare documents securely with partners and customers (Extranet Sites)
• market a business using a simple public-facing website (Internet Sites)

Features

This table shows some of the key features of SharePoint Online in Office 365:

Points to note on storage are:

• ·    the storage is aggregated/pooled among the users. For example, an organisation of 1,000 users has 500,000 MB (~500 GB) of storage
  • ·    users can purchase more SharePoint Online storage in GB increments charged monthly
• ·    The SharePoint Online service administrator can set the storage limits for site collections and sites created by users. The maximum storage available for any site collection is 50 GB
  • ·    The maximum SharePoint Online storage available to a single company is 1 terabyte