Some more initial feedback regarding SharePoint 2013:
Folks working in the field report they’re still not seeing big uptake in SharePoint 2013 as of yet. Corporate customers, who have had access to the software since last fall, are running pilots but are not yet doing anything serious with it yet.
Here are some key points about the release, as culled from conversations with various people working with SharePoint in organizations large and small:
• The feature most talked about in SharePoint 2013 is the cloud, yet most large organizations are not willing to put their confidential and proprietary data outside their firewalls.
• Organizations have made a great number of customizations to their older SharePoint implementations, and they worry about the amount of work it might take to retain all the new capabilities in a migration to 2013.
• People are not building SharePoint apps because they are too complicated to do.
• On the IT side, true fault tolerance is difficult to achieve unless you dedicate 10 servers to SharePoint. This is because Office Web Apps can’t run on SharePoint, so you need OWApp servers. And, one consultant recommended that you don’t run workflows on SharePoint servers, so you need additional servers for that.
• Finally, a reliance on JavaScript has created a knowledge gap for Microsoft developers and IT pros.
So, there are some big hurdles for customers—and Microsoft—to clear before a wide uptake of the new SharePoint is seen. Security, programming, administration, these are all big nuts to crack.
This is the last call for folks to attend SPTechCon San Francisco, which begins Sunday with a full day of tutorial sessions. There’s still time to register for the full conference, as well as to get a pass to visit the exhibit hall, where more than 50 third-party software providers will be showing what they’ve been working on to extend, enhance and ease SharePoint functionality. I’ll be filing the next newsletter live from the conference, including live-blogging the Microsoft keynote (Richard Riley) and the others (Mark Miller, and AvePoint’s Jeremy Thake and Randy Williams). Plenty of news will be coming out of the exhibit hall as well, and I’ll be reporting on all of it and more. Follow us on twitter (@drubinstein, or @sptechcon) for all the up-to-the-minute coverage.