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When Microsoft officially launched Office 365 in June 2011 it was rightly seen as a landmark step for the company and a significant pivot to the cloud. Customers using the SharePoint platform need to build strategies to balance the benefits of on-premise flavours of SharePoint and the add-ons that build upon this platform with the standardisation benefits associated with Office 365 and the cloud.

STATE OF PLAY
Microsoft's launching of Office 365 saw the world's biggest desktop software firm moving to the cloud and competing directly with such cloud software services as Google Docs. But with the spread of the on-premise SharePoint platform simultaneously gaining traction across the enterprise, the shift raises a number of questions - and opportunities - about content, records management and governance work in a hybrid SharePoint world.

AIIM is occasionally accused of being both an attacker of SharePoint AND a SharePoint apologist. We are neither, but we must all acknowledge that SharePoint is a major player in the content management marketplace, with around 125 million licensed users worldwide, and users are wrestling with the fundamentals of their content management decisions as never before. Should we move to the cloud? Should we move everything to the cloud? If not, how do we manage governance in a hybrid environment?

These questions are never simple, even within a single vendor environment. Some organisations are users of the traditional, on-premise SharePoint. However even this is not a single platform given that AIIM surveys tell us that including SharePoint 2013, there are four generations of SharePoint in commercial use.

Other organisations are migrating to the SharePoint that comes with Office 365. Each and every deployment comes with its own particular challenges, as AIIM discovered in 2012 when we released our report, 'The SharePoint Puzzle - adding the missing pieces'.

This research sought to map the drivers, strategy choices and uptake of SharePoint add-ons for governance, ECM, BPM and collaboration and the findings revealed the extent of the complexity surrounding many deployments. At the time of our survey last year, almost half of those surveyed (44%) were using some form of ECM/DM alongside SharePoint and seven in ten were not using SharePoint as their primary, enterprise-wide ECM system. In the next few weeks AIIM will be launching its 2013 survey, and I believe we will see significant changes in these numbers.

In the survey there was a base level of satisfaction amongst users, with more than half (55%) saying it was the right decision to choose SharePoint. SharePoint has proven to be more complicated than anticipated for many organisations; 22% felt they have only achieved a basic deployment compared to their original ambitions. The main shortfalls in expectations were the difficulties that come with content migration and information governance, with more than half of respondents (54%) planning third party add-on products in order to enhance functionality. All of which means that SharePoint is a platform rather than an application - something Microsoft constantly points out and many business users forget - and that any platform requires development to make it work.

HEIGHTENED COMPLEXITY
Fast forward to Microsoft's and SharePoint's pivot to the cloud. The pivot means that most organisations - as they migrate to the cloud, think about migrating to the cloud or most likely proceed with a hybrid solution - are entering an era of unparalleled complexity in terms of their information, content and data and how that is stored, managed and utilised.

For small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs), Office 365 can act as a one-stop shop from a provider they know and for the most part trust. For any business currently relying on file-sharing, email and spreadsheets to run their business - in other words for most SMEs - cloud based solutions and getting out of the e-mail hosting business can be a significant step forward. For larger enterprises the issues of governance in particular become more complex as they enter a hybrid world that will likely include on-premise, private and public cloud solutions and a host of variations and combinations.

In its latest version, SharePoint has significantly improved its records management and e-discovery functionality. The FAST search functionality is more fully baked into the new offerings. There are significant enhancements in social functionality within the SharePoint platform itself. The Yammer integration will be extremely interesting to watch. Yammer has already been integrated into Dynamics CRM. Basic integration with Office 365 will occur this summer and allow customers to replace the SharePoint newsfeed with Yammer. Deeper Yammer integration is slated for autumn / winter.

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