Microsoft recently published a blog detailing some SharePoint, Yammer, Office 365 roadmap disclosures. I won’t repost the entire link, you can read it for yourself, but wanted to highlight a few key items that are important.
Enhancement Schedule
As we move into 2014, we’ll continue updating Office 365 with new social enhancements roughly every 90 days. We’ll start by simply deepening the connections between Yammer and Office 365 services, but over time these incremental enhancements will combine social, collaboration, email, instant messaging, voice, video, and line of business applications in innovative new ways.
Another reason why cloud services are perfect for delivering constant innovation to your organization
Newsfeed or Yammer? Which should we use?
This summer, Office 365 customers will be able to replace the SharePoint Newsfeed with Yammer if they choose. Is that the right choice? In my opinion, yes…Yammer all the way. Because Yammer is a service, it gives Microsoft an easy way to innovate quicker. Also, Microsoft is making huge investments to integrate Yammer in as many products as possible. SharePoint, Office 365, Dynamics, etc. Yammer’s cross-platform mobile apps and external communities make it prime for instant social collaboration.
What about on-premises deployments? “When it comes to the cloud, we’re “all in,” but we’re also realistic. We have a large on-premises installed base that’s important to us, and we’re committed to future releases of the server.”
However, on-prem deployments will be subject to similar historical release schedules (every 3 years) with some service pack updates along the way. For organizations that need to provide modern capabilities as markets (and employees) demand, cloud services are still the best way to go.