SharePoint Conference Keynote with Bill Clinton
Writing to you today from the mid-front of the room at Microsoft's SharePoint Conference 2014, where Bill Clinton is about to deliver the keynote. As the clock ticks the embargoes are over and reports are starting to come in on the next wave of SharePoint and Office 365. As I add to this post I'll put the interesting technical bits and links at the top and leave the inspirational parts as the closer.
Start with Jeff Teper's blog post for the big picture.
See Arpan's post on what's new for developers: http://blogs.office.com/2014/03/03/create-apps-for-office-365/
Microsoft Graph and Oslo (ZDNet) are the next evolutions of search and social mining, providing personalized content targeting, social commenting right inside O365 docs (I am so over inline Word commenting),
O365 Groups are a quick way to fire up a team with a Yammer feed, connected inbox, calendar, document library and more essentials. Finally!
Security and Trust are also watchwords this year, with the majority of O365-avoiders citing these as core reasons not to move to cloud. I've talked to a few of the security watchdogs at Microsoft now and they want the world to know they're serious about secure, reliable, hands-off stewardship of your information.
Jeff Teper and Friends
See Jeff's blog post (link above) for the major news on investments.
Quick stats on SharePoint Online: 250,000 RPS, 400,000 cores in 20 data centres, and 400 petabytes of storage.
1 TB site collections are out there, with virtually infinite scale.
Watchwords: Security, Privacy, and Compliance. Your data is isolated and private. We don't analyse it to advertise to you, we don't allow access for any other purpose except to provide great service to you.
New Compliance Center provides one place to manage all compliance needs. Can discover with custom queries (which can be saved) all the places where a data type is used (e.g. US or UK passport #s), and then get a list of everyone who viewed those items across O365. Pretty cool when you think about it, that's a lot of power for a Compliance Officer to have without needing IT.
OneDrive for Business now available as a standalone product you can integrate with your on-prem solution. Get to your docs securely from any device! Grab SP1 to take advantage of this today.
Jared Spataro
- O365 continues double-digit growth, and has taken the crown from SharePoint as MSFT's fastest growing product ever.
- 500% growth, and adopted by 60% of Fortune 500 companies.
- "We're going to talk about transformation."
- "How will these changes affect you?"
- The Clinton Foundation has grown from 14 to 1400 staff.
President Bill Clinton
- "Microsoft has been a very important part of the Clinton Foundation."
- The list of projects they've been a part of is 36 pages long.
- Try to get the big things right.
- When he became President there were as many Internet sites as have been created since this talk began.
- The acceleration of technological change fuels the economy.
- Great examples of enabling the poorest people - in Haiti with a cellphone banking initiative of Scotiabank and a cellphone provider (banking was only accessible to 10% of people, while 80% had cell phones), and elsewhere in enabling fish mongers to learn pricing up and down the coast, leading to 30% better incomes and commensurate improvements in quality of life.
- The Gates Foundation has improved the lives of three times as many people with lower total cost than earlier initiatives, in large part because of great technology.
- We need all to use our voices to build on the positive aspects of technology and this social integration and to disrupt the negative. Be a part of that.
- "The burden of knowledge is a responsibility."
- "90% of the world's fishing stocks are now understocked."
- "We need to design a world where we constantly do more with less."
-"One of the reasons I'm optimistic about the future is that on balance, the technological revolution has sponsored more collaboration than conflict."
- "The great collaborating species are ants, termites, bees and people."
- What sets us apart is that "We have both consciousness, and conscience." - E.O. Wilson
- "Technology is liberating people, empowering them. But how we use it, depends in no small part on identity. And what we have in common is more important than our differences."
Great lessons here today - to bridge what we do into the reality of the world and to consider the world we leave to future generations. It isn't about how we make money, it's how we spend it. It isn't about the growth of SharePoint and market share, it's the power we have as professionals to transform lives for the better. It isn't about our differences, it's about how we can use technology to embrace our common humanity.
We have the voice and the skills to change the world for the better. Let's make it happen.