Having managed an enterprise collaboration space for coming up to 10yrs now and taking the SharePoint journey for a lot of that I want to discuss one big change that I believe is happening over the next 2-3yrs.
Throughout the time I have managed collaboration we were always on premise. We evaluated BPOS which became O365 yearly and for multiple reasons it didn’t work for us. It fell down on functionality, reliability, cost and in the early days security concerns. The magic with large enterprise is the economies of scale plays out well so the cost can be driven down quite well on premise.
Slowly but surely O365 has been closing the functionality gap and although its not closed completely there are now some functional components that make it to O365 first. ie. Oslo/Delve/OfficeGraph.
Reviewing all the material from Ignite and the commentary across the blogosphere we truly believe that SharePoint 2016 will be the last on premise version. When we were planning our SharePoint 2013 upgrade we talked about this at length internally and came to the conclusion as well.
Hybrid offerings means that those companies that are still concerned about certain data can keep that on premise and have the general collaboration and social elements in O365. It looks like one experience to the user.
Hybrid Search now works and can take advantage of the power of Azure and Password Hash, etc. has resolved the authentication and security concerns of the past.
So should you install SharePoint 2016 next year when it is released. In my opinion No. Or at least not at any scale. Instead start your business case now for a pilot in year 2016 of O365 (Exchange, Office, Yammer and SharePoint). With a plan to move full scale in late 2016 or early 2017 to O365 for the majority including social, people profiles and search.
Use the remaining 2015 and 2016 to…
1) evaluate your content with content owners and Information Security to work out what content should be on premise and what can go to the cloud – include legal obviously !
2) Get the other functions, Exchange(Mail), Office Desktop and Social (Yammer) on board. This is a change for all and will create an hollistic collaboration environment and done right and together will accelerate your return on investment,