SPTechCon 2016: Top 3 Questions With KnowledgeLake

When the SharePoint Technology Conference (SPTechCon) returned last week in the San Francisco Bay Area, KnowledgeLake was there. The event offered more than 80 classes and panel sessions to help attendees improve their skills and knowledge around SharePoint collaboration and productivity. As we spoke to visitors who stopped by our booth, members of the KnowledgeLake team and I fielded quite a few questions. Here are the top three most often asked. 

1) On-Prem or Online?

A few years ago, folks were hesitant to move to “the cloud” because of reliability and security. Microsoft has spent a lot of time, money, and hard work improving its platform and educating the masses about its top-notch security. However, I still heard SPTechCon folks questioning if SharePoint Online was a “right fit” for them. For a technologist, like me, the idea of rapid releases delights and excites me. I can’t wait for the latest feature or bug fix.

However, more organizations are nervous about an enterprise application that pushes changes faster than they can adapt. I had a ton of fun talking with folks about how, when, where, and why they should consider SharePoint Online vs. SharePoint On-Premises vs. SharePoint Hybrid.

2) When should I use Groups, Email, Teams, or SharePoint?

The onslaught of new apps in Office365 has folks thrilled, but also confused. The “hyper collaboration age,” as I’ve come to call it, is awesome, but it begs the question, “Where should I collaborate?” With so many choices, even from a single company like Microsoft, the right choice is always clear. For me, I mentally combine Office365 Groups and Microsoft Teams into a single concept, where Microsoft Teams presents a single interface for dispersed applications across Office365.

SharePoint is part of the equation for Teams and Group as a file repository. In terms of “hyper collaboration”, a file repository makes sense but falls short when considering document management and enterprise content management. SPTechCon attendees were relieved to learn KnowledgeLake was using all these applications and had answers for how, where, when, who, and why to use each offering in Office365.

3) Is SharePoint still an ECM Platform?

As SharePoint revamps itself for increased usability and user experiences, the main question centered on if the benefits of SharePoint in the past will persist into the future. Microsoft has no end in sight for the robust capabilities around retention, metadata, content types, filtering, search, records management, document management, and eDiscovery.

While SPTechCon attendees were interested in the latest Microsoft offerings and features (aka SharePoint 2016), most are still tied to older versions of SharePoint. We were happy to assure them that KnowledgeLake’s services, paired with our solutions create meaningful results in sustainable automation, return on investment, productivity and collaboration — no matter which version of SharePoint they use.