Riffing on the theme – Sharepoint 2014 Keynote

The Sharepoint 2014 Keynote happened yesterday, which you can now stream.

Normally, this isn’t something I would have been particularly interested in, but I got a tip that it was worth a watch.

I’m glad I did. Recently, I pointed out two key areas from the Lync 2014 Keynote: more tools and support for developers, and more machine-learning to create better user experiences.

The theme throughout the Sharepoint Keynote was very similar. I want to pull out some announcements from it  to highlight the similarities here.

Developer Tools

Arpan Shah (Senior Developer) announced some big new tools for Sharepoint Developers.

• New web-based REST-like APIs for accessing People and Calendar data.
• Updates to Sharepoint API for list management, item approval, even full-on site provisioning!
• New Android SDK for Office 365 Sharepoint – open on GitHub
• The APIs are in Preview, and can be checked out now
• Integration from within Outlook – I don’t think this is new, but the new APIs really make for some interesting new app possibilities

Also, Access is coming to Office365. This is going (apparently) to be a huge focus for Microsoft going forward.

The proliferation of new APIs to enable new, connected, applications is something that was driven strongly in the Lync Conference. Seeing it here as well really drives home the focus for Microsoft: giving developers the tools they need to create these deeply interactive applications.

Better User Experiences

Jeff Teper is the Corporate Vice President of Office Service and Servers group. During the Keynote he highlighted that a key concept for Microsoft with Sharepoint is transforming Office with Big Data and Machine Learning. This is really similar to what Gurdeep said in the Lync Keynote.

Julia White (General Manager) then gave some pretty impressive demos. Some key announcements:

Yammer Integration

Office365 is being integrated with Yammer. Yammer groups and conversations will be shown in Outlook. Groups will also have their own Calendars. These changes will make Yammer much more usable for business processes.

Office Graph and Oslo

Office Graph, with the Oslo application running on top. Office Graph is a mix of big data and machine-learning – taking all the information within Exchange, Sharepoint, Yammer etc and combining it. It seems to be an evolution of the Enterprise Graph which Yammer introduced, showing the relationships between people. Oslo is a Modern Windows (Metro) app which brings this to life.

Oslo is beautiful. Imagine Flipboard for your documents:

There’s load of natural search options:

The documents come from Skydrive, Sharepoint etc – but are presented in the context of the user. This also works on mobile.

There’s also natural search options showing relationships between people:

 

I can’t wait for some of this stuff to arrive – it looks fantastic.

There’s a new Office365 Video Portal – one place to put all your corporate videos:

Julia also showed the recently released PowerBI PowerMap for Excel – which does ridiculously cool things with your Excel data:

Summary

These are just a few of the announcements that were made during the Sharepoint 2014 Keynote. I highly recommend you watch it – even if you aren’t a Sharepoint developer. This, combined with the Lync conference, signifies a major shift in Office to enable much greater collaboration, much better ways of working. I would also suggest you read Jeff’s recent blog post: Technology is enabling new ways of working.