SharePoint Online One Year On

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Introduction - Me• Been in the IT business for over 40 years• Started with MCMS 2001 and SharePoint 2003• Spent Time with a Number of Gold Partners Over the last 16 years• Concentrated on SharePoint since 2006• Been working with SharePoint Online For the past year• Now have own Company - NJPEnterprises

History• Office 365 started life as BPOS (Business Productivity Online Services)• Then became Office 365 (based on SP2010)• There was a service update which started about a year ago (and

people are STILL being upgraded) which upgraded the service from SP2010 to SP2013

What am I Going to talk about ?• The Good Points• The Bad Points• The Downright Ugly Points

All Based Upon my Personal Experience

Good Points - 1• Its Cheap• Many Plans – 31 of them

• You Don’t Have To Worry About The Infrastructure• No Data Centres• Don’t Need People to water and feed the computers• No CAPEX• Don’t have to worry about patches and upgrades• Availability 99.99% probably better than most on-premise data

centres

Good Points - 2• Easy to Administer• Can Easily Build Intranets and Extranets• Lots of OOTB Features• Lots of OOTB Web Parts and Apps (Lists)• External Users are FREE

Good Points - 3• New user interface (UI)• Drag and drop.• On-hover over documents• Office Web Apps

• Guest Links / External Sharing• Enterprise Search

Bad Points - 1• Everything is not the same as On-Premise SharePoint 2013

• Lots of subtle differences between On Premise and SharePoint Online.• Search – managed properties not surfaced in search results• No CSWP

• No ALM – ie everything you do is on the production system without testing first on dev and test systems.• Two workarounds – purchase extra tenancies or have dev and test on separate site

collections on the same tenancy as the production system.

• Branding of MySites -> V difficult in O365 Use App !

Bad Points - 2• Tenancies are not always the same – can be differences • Different features on different tenancies eg some have a Tokyo masterpage• Workflows which work on one tenancy may not work on another• Composed Looks – may work on one tenancy, may not work the same on

another.

• Cannot create site templates or Web Templates

Bad Points - 3• Patches and Upgrades• There is no notice of when they will be applied• You have no control over when they are applied• They may break your system

• No PowerShell within SharePoint Online (yet!)

Bad Points - 4• SharePoint 2013 has three different “places” for social collaboration

to happen: communities, team sites and the Newsfeed• So two people could use two different “places” to have social collaboration

Bad Points – Apps - 1• Office 365 ULS logs – It is extremely tricky to debug in Office 365, if this is

really the answer for the future…Microsoft need to think of a way of handling multi-tenant diagnostic logging as a platform.

• Permissions troubleshooting – a lot of the times your App will have to request permissions more than just Contribute and ask for Full Control for simple things which may deter Users from “Trusting” it and adding to their Site Collection.• No user controls – there is no People Picker, Site Picker, Document Uploader

controls that you can re-use if you go Auto-Hosted or Provider-Hosted.

Bad points – Apps - 2• Update Apps Individually - When you deploy a new version of the App

to the App Catalog or Store, each App instance requires you to update it individually. This causes all sorts of issues with Provider hosted Apps where you now have to cater for App Instances of different versions and your Provider Hosted code calling back up to the App Web and assuming a particular version instance.• SharePoint Designer – can’t connect to an App …maybe the sign this

thing is dieing for good.

Ugly - 1 Public Web Sites• Not a lot you can do with them other than be an advert for a coffee

shop• No Subsites• No Calendar• No Content Types• No Site Columns

• DO NOT delete your public web site – it will take require a service request to Microsoft to re-create it.

Ugly – 2 Leaving SharePoint Online• It only takes a day to join SharePoint online• It can take 365 days to leave it ! And you probably need PowerShell to

tidy things up