SharePoint Trends and Predictions for 2012

Microsoft SharePoint has seen tremendous changes in its appearance, functionalities and ease of accessibility over the last year. Following this, we have listed out some expert predictions and general trends that SharePoint users can expect over the year 2012.

Social Networking with SharePoint may not take off

When it comes to social networking, the universal adoption of this feature embedded within SharePoint does not seem to be in the cards, according to the industry watchdogs. The reason is, as many experts express, the lack of maturity in the SharePoint application, which otherwise exists in Twitter and Facebook. Also, the more advanced social tools within the market possess features such as hash tagging and targeting which give them a clear upper hand.

Personalization will drive SharePoint adoption

The ability to personalize the content through SharePoint will be welcomed so that the users can add personal content to wide range of channels and sites, the SharePoint experts say. More number of users will adopt Personal Content Management (PCM) in order to classify and aggregate their personal information.

Awareness about Cloud solutions will increase

According to the SharePoint watchdogs, Microsoft has discussed a lot about the SharePoint solution over the last year thus increasing the awareness about the cloud services. This may not lead to complete replacement of customized on-premise SharePoint solutions with cloud solutions. But companies may try to adopt the cloud services through Microsoft 365 or other third party tools, experts predict.

Authentication will be a challenge for SharePoint administrators

Administrators will need to be more proficient when it comes to security and authentication skills in SharePoint, as per the specialists. No longer will the traditional Active Directory with LDAP for outside users suffice since extranets and client hybrids have increased in number.

SharePoint Governance will remain a key focus area

The how and why of SharePoint management is what governance is all about. In order to sustain and grow, governance of SharePoint needs to be adopted widely, as per the industry experts. The number of users of SharePoint is growing and so they need to be guided and channeled.

Custom Solutions around SharePoint will increase

Application developers will need to work on developing applications that integrate solutions to improve manageability, portability and governance that are the most common challenges in custom solutions.

Data handling capability of SharePoint will be tested

The SharePoint experts say that as SharePoint 2010 has proven that it can handle extremely large content pools and terabytes of data, users can be expected to move away from ECM platforms and open platforms towards SharePoint, which is scalable and provides better cost of ownership. Further, users will test SharePoint capabilities on the mobile and tablet platform.

To summarize, SharePoint analysts are predicting more adoption of SharePoint and are quite positive about its prospects in 2012.

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