Several months ago I published a brief introduction to Microsoft Office 365. Office 365 is a suite of very popular Microsoft products hosted in the cloud which has several features you should be aware of; please refer to that brief introduction at the following here. This article will dig a bit deeper, specifically into the SharePoint Online features of Office 365.

SharePoint Online is essentially a hosted version of SharePoint.  At this time, it is the SharePoint 2010 version which has about (this is an estimate…caution!) 90% feature parity with the on-premise version of SharePoint 2010 Enterprise. Instead of installing, deploying and configuring your own SharePoint 2010 Server in your own computer room, you can now simply subscribe to SharePoint Online and create sites to store and share documents and information with colleagues and customers as an intranet, an extranet, or a hybrid – you can choose and be up and running in only a few minutes!

I was careful to state that “at this time…” SharePoint is the 2010 version because Microsoft will be upgrading SharePoint as we move into the future.  I think it is safe to assume that the hosted version of SharePoint in SharePoint Online will be upgraded soon after the next version of SharePoint is released and available (and prudent!)  Either way, the hosted SharePoint is fully patched, maintained and backed up by Microsoft professionals saving you the time, energy, and the expense of doing it yourself.

But don’t be fooled, moving to SharePoint Online provides a solid platform for business collaboration.  Not only can you customize both the look and the functionality of your intranet by configuring it with the tools offered and delivered in your favorite web browser as you’d expect, but you can also develop your own specific functions using Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 (a free tool) or Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 for the die-hard developer. These are exactly the same tools and techniques that enterprises or large corporations use for their on-premise SharePoint implementations.  The environment hosted at Microsoft is robust enough for you to develop and deploy your own customizations that can run in a “sandbox” which means you can’t hurt other customers hosted in that environment and, more importantly to you, they can’t negatively impact you!

The feature list of SharePoint Online is very much the same as the features you may have heard about with SharePoint itself because it is actually SharePoint 2010 today!  If you are not familiar with SharePoint, the feature list is long.  Many times I describe SharePoint as a huge toolbox which you only need to understand how to leverage and combine the tools within the toolbox to solve your everyday problems.   SharePoint Online is a powerful set of tools delivered to end users in a web browser.  There is nothing local to end-users machine to install.  The SharePoint Online tools can be grouped as follows:

• Sites – sites and sub-sites are simple website organizations which allow you to construct an infrastructure and navigation that is logical to your end users.  These sites allow you to share lists of information and documents in ways far more useful than by simply showing a directory listing of documents.  Security is also of prime importance to the success of the sites workload so that only the content that is appropriate to the end user is presented and available to them.  This group of tools also supports providing this same content to mobile devices and allows you to work with some of this content in an offline mode.
• Social Collaboration – Social collaboration is about building a Community within your own company.  Think of improving interactivity and cooperation between your employees using tools similar to Facebook, Linked In, and Wikipedia to name a few.  SharePoint Online provides a single management platform to deliver various collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis and people search.  Communities provide your users with opportunities to share ideas, find colleagues, create social content, tag content, and rate content all of which encourage a sense of community among your users but also contribute to improving the quality and relevance of search (which comes next…).
• Search – I think Search is the most powerful and useful feature of SharePoint because it provides a “Google-like” or “Bing-like” experience to searching documents within your company.  SharePoint Search provides a search page where you enter your search arguments and submit your request similar to the major search engines that you are already familiar with, although this is specifically configured to your content.  Any and all documents, list entries, announcements, calendar entries and people that might meet your search criteria are returned to you VERY quickly.  Overwhelmingly, Search is the feature that sells SharePoint and convinces end users to use SharePoint because information becomes easy to find.
• Content Management – SharePoint provides powerful features to organize your content.  Features like document types, retention policies, and tight integration with Microsoft Office make organizing and managing your content more useful.  Easy-to-use, branded sites can be created so that your intranet is not only useful but also professional looking.  Features such as page layouts can add variety to your SharePoint deployment but that can also meet compliance requirements with strict document retention capabilities.
• Composites – This is a fancy term for the ability to build and deploy business processes with little-to-no technical knowledge.  Users do so by selecting and assembling solutions from a list of existing features.  As a word of warning, these are IT-type solutions so the quality and robustness of them do seem to be directly proportional to the level of technical knowledge that is brought to the table – however, they do not require programmers!  There are many end-user familiar tools that can be used to construct a composite application such as Microsoft Excel, Visio, and PowerPoint as well as a free tool called SharePoint Designer.  Microsoft InfoPath also allows a non-technical user to construct powerful, easy-to-use form for capturing and storing data.  Several of these tools can also be used to build process workflows to automate and track tasks in processes that you might do manually today.  There are literally hundreds of thousands of possible problems that can be solved or improved by automating manual processes.
• Business Insight – A friendlier term for what is generally known as Business Intelligence.  One example of Business Insights provides users access to data that is stored in business applications through dashboards and scorecards, allowing them to make business decisions based on that data. Excel Services, which is a sample of these tools, allows you to provide a view to data and/or charts stored within Microsoft Excel workbooks but display these directly onto a web page within SharePoint Online without the need to have Microsoft Excel actually running on your PC!  SharePoint has several other tools built in to allow you to display Key Performance Indicators on a web page or dashboard which can dynamically present the status of some process or activity.  This type of approach is incredibly useful for displaying departmental results to your line managers.  For example, a red/yellow/green indicator can be used to highlight the overall progress or status of a project plan or production facility which can be displayed for quick and efficient determination and decide as to whether any corrective action must be taken. 

SharePoint Online offers a comprehensive set of functionalities spread across the different workloads, such as sites, social collaboration, search, content management, composites, and business insight. By using SharePoint Online, your users can be productive very quickly. The image below reflects a sample page which can incorporate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), Calendars, documents and a progress bar chart.

As I said earlier, SharePoint online has about 90% feature parity with the on-premise SharePoint offering.  Why?  Some of the features of SharePoint were not originally developed or tested to run in a hosted environment where multiple companies may be running on the same environment (referred to as multi-tenancy).  Microsoft needs to be very careful from a privacy and security standpoint so those features that are not ready for a shared, hosted environment are currently unavailable.  The most noticeable feature missing from SharePoint Online is Performance Point Services which is Microsoft’s high-end Business Intelligence solution.  I’ve been assured it is coming but it will take time.  An example of Microsoft’s desire to reach 100% feature parity is the recent feature release of Business Connectivity Services which was unavailable when Office 365 was first released and became available to all hosted tenants in October 2011.

We at Skyline Technologies have been working with SharePoint for over 6 years and love the feature set that is available because it solves, or assists in solving, so many business problems.  SharePoint itself is fantastic whether you choose on-premise or a hosted SharePoint Online Solution. A few reasons you should consider SharePoint Online as part of Office 365 include:

• SharePoint Online makes it easy to set up the service; it can be purchased and provisioned in as little as 5 minutes! 
• SharePoint Online is flexible and scalable.  If you are fortunate enough to be considering an acquisition, this model can quickly, easily and inexpensively scale to your needs. Of course, the reverse is true where you can scale back and have the ability to save money rather than have a sunk cost in infrastructure
• A SharePoint Online approach provides you the ability to spend your resources focusing on solving your business needs and  making customizations rather than spending time worrying about hardware and how to maintain your backend server room
• Out of the box, Office 365 and SharePoint Online are accessible to you from anywhere you have an internet connection, 24x7.  It’s a secure environment and is backed up by professionals who know the software better than anyone
• You immediately have the capability to invite external users to collaborate with you because it is an out-of-the-box feature.  You can extend the ability to your business partners (marketing company, accounting firm, or whomever) or even your customers to collaborate on documents.