Oh O365, Where (and What) Art Thou?

A customer's CIO asked a question today about the difference between SharePoint On-Premise and SharePoint Online in O365; and more importantly "Whether  his organization's workload is ready to be moved to cloud". While I was answering these questions, the obvious question (that I was waiting for) raised it's ugly head: "Is Cloud ready for my organization?".
I have seen this exact conversation play out many a times in last few months. As organizations are introduced to the cloud, one or more of the following three questions invariably gets asked:

1. What's the difference/value, and does it matter for me?
2. Is my organization ready for the cloud? 
3. Is cloud ready for my organization?          

I try to answer these questions in this post by taking SharePoint as an example. 

Lets start with some simple definitions:

• Cloud: Generic term for SaaS, PaaS, IaaS. 
• IaaS: 
• Stands for "Infrastructure as a service." 
• You are renting an infrastructure piece from a vendor.
• Example: Virtual Machines, Hard Drives, High Performance Nodes, Bandwidth, Network Cables, etc.  
• Vendors: Microsoft (Azure), Google, Amazon, Rackspace, etc   
• PaaS: 
• Stands for "Platform as a service." 
• You are subscribing to a platform, that you use to build your own applications. This is analogous to writing code using .Net framework, except the platform is hosted by a vendor. 
• Example: Azure, Google Apps Engine, Amazon EC2. 
• SaaS: 
• Stands for "Software as a service." 
• You are renting a software access.
• Example: Hotmail, Gmail, O365, Salesforce.com, CRM Online, etc.

• SharePoint On Premise: Self- hosted version of SharePoint. This is the traditional mode of deploying SharePoint on your own hardware and (typically) in your own data center.  

• SharePoint Online: Microsoft hosted version of SharePoint. Essentially, you will buy a subscription from Microsoft, that will allow you to log into the SharePoint UI. All the typical IT functions (installation, patches, backup, keeping the lights on, etc) are handled by Microsoft. 
• Refer: SharePoint Online Overview

Note: SharePoint Online is one of the SaaS offerings from Microsoft. You also have the option to rent VM (Virtual Machines) from Windows Azure (Microsoft's IaaS and PaaS offering) or any other vendor; and install your own SharePoint. The capability of such an install will be similar to the On-Premise installation. For the simplicity of this post, I will stick to the comparison between SharePoint On-Premise and O365.  

On-Premise Vs O365!! 

I present the difference based on multiple factors. Organizations may want to give more weightage/priority to some factors compared to others based on their unique needs:

• Procurement and Setup Cost:
• On-Premise: You incur the cost to get the space, buy hardware, license software, etc. 
• SP Online: You buy an Office 365 (or SharePoint Online) plan from Microsoft.

• Maintenance Cost:
• On-Premise: You hire an IT team to keep the lights on and apply patches, etc. 
• SP Online: Microsoft handles all maintenance headaches. 

• Business Continuity:
• On-Premise: You need to plan for backup, disaster recovery, etc.  
• SP Online: Handled by design. MS makes multiple copies of every data by default supported by well defined SLAs.   

• Features Availability:
• On-Premise: Support for Enterprise level features. 
• SP Online: Limited availability of features. Microsoft is continuously adding to the list of features available online. 
• Refer:
• SharePoint feature availability across Office 365 plans
• SharePoint feature availability across SharePoint Online standalone plans
• SharePoint feature availability across on-premises solutions.

• Customization Needs:
• On-Premise: It's your software and hardware. You have full control over how you want to customize it (server side as well as client side)    
• SP Online: Severe limitation for  server side customization (it's a multi-tenant environment after all). Full support for client side customization. You can use the new (and cool) Office Apps model with REST based API for App Store. 
• Refer: Overview of apps for SharePoint    

• Information Security:
• On-Premise:  You are responsible.  
• SP Online: Microsoft follows (and is certified) various industry standards for security. They take this very seriously!!   

• Compliance:
• On-Premise: You are responsible.
• SP Online: Microsoft ensures compliance with certain industry standards and is verified by third party auditors.  

• Size of data (and need to scale up and/or down ): 
• On-Premise: You need to build the extra capacity to scale up and down by buying expensive storage devices. 
• SP Online: Easier to scale up/down. Available storage (and limitations) is based upon the plan that you purchase.      

   Of course, you also have the option to build a hybrid environment that capitalizes on best of both worlds, but I have excluded it out of this analysis for the sake of simplicity. 

  

Hope this helps!! 

Cheers. 

Piyush

SharePoint 2013 Issue - Webpart Tools Pane (and Edit Webpart) doesn't appear

I ran into this issue today when I upgraded one of my machines to Windows 8.1. As part of the upgrade, my Internet explorer also got upgraded to Version 11.

Issue: 
The issue is that the Tools Pane doesn't show up when you try to edit/configure a webpart on page. Instead of the usual menu (or checkbox) that brings up the Tools Pane, my browser just shows up an image similar to expand/collapse icon, shown when you access SharePoint from a unsupported browser or sometimes mobile client. On clicking the icon, I am able to either expand or collapse a webpart, but not able to edit/configure it.

 Solution:    
  The simple solution to access the SharePoint site in a backward compatibility mode, already built into Internet Explorer 11 (I am assuming that you don't want to go back to an older version of IE).
  To enable this mode, follow these steps in IE while accessing your site:
     - Press ALT+ T (this will bring up the browser's Tools menu)
     - Press the menu item "Compatibility View Settings"
     - This will open up a dialog box with the url of your site already pre-populated. If not, go ahead and type the root url of your SharePoint site.
     - Press "Close", and refresh the page.
     - Browser should now display the same page in the backward compatibility modem, and you will be able to configure/edit a webpart.

Disclaimer:
   There could be a more elegant solution to this issue that will enable a broader browser support for SharePoint 2013. For example, by writing CSS/JS to ensure that Edit Pane always shows up irrespective of the browser (similar to this article - http://kyleschaeffer.com/sharepoint/sharepoint-2013-web-part-tool-pane/  .  
Given that my SharePoint site doesn't need to be officially supported on IE 11, and it's just a matter of time before Microsoft will officially start supporting SharePoint on IE 11, I found this quickfix to resolve this issue. Feel free to point to a better solution, if you come across one.  
   

Addendum:
  I also noticed that some of the SharePoint pages also would not go into Edit mode when using IE 11. This issue also got resolved by configuring my browser to always access this particular site in compatibility mode.

Cheers!!

SharePoint 2013 Licensing Overview

For people who have been around SharePoint for a long time, one of the dreaded area to have an conversation with your upper management has been about SharePoint Licensing. I can say that IT managers will have few pleasant surprises in store when they try to get their heads around SharePoint 2013 Licensing model.

For starters, here are few key changes in SharePoint 2013 licensing model that will bring smiles on IT Managers faces:
   - No need to buy SharePoint Internet Licenses: You heard it right. The license to host SharePoint for anonymous users and public facing websites that used to cost 40-50k per server is not needed anymore. So, basically if you have the core Server license you can host a public facing website without needing to pay anything extra.  

  - No need to buy CALs for external users: One of the big confusion with extranet scenarios has been whether you need to buy separate CALs for your external users such as vendors, contractors, suppliers, etc who are not typically your employees but may need to access little bit of information or  forms on your SharePoint extranet. Here's the exact words defining who external users are from one of the deck I found from Microsoft on this topic.
       External users means users that are not either your or your affiliates’ employees, or your or your affiliates’ onsite contractors or onsite agents.   

  - Search Consolidation into Core SharePoint License: One of the big change is with respect to Search capabilities. All the search capabilities have been merged into the core SharePoint Server Licenses (Enterprise and Standard), and you don't need to buy a separate FAST license. This, i believe,  has also helped in streamlining the end user's experience with respect to search and data discovery.

I wanted to cover these three main changes with respect to SharePoint 2013 on-premise licensing in this post, but there are other changes being introduced with respect to features and SKUs in SharePoint 2013 on-premise as well as O365 licensing.

Here's an image of the key components in SharePoint 2013 on-premise as well O365 followed by another diagram illustrating the key changes from 2010.



Figure: SharePoint 2013 Licensing Options

      Please note the absence of other add-on licenses such as Internet Site, Search Server, FAST Server, etc.                                        



Figure: SharePoint 2013 Licensing - Key Changes

My goal for this post is to provide an overview of the key changes that I see in SharePoint licensing model, and help people who are trying to get a high level overview of the same. It's purely based on my personal understanding and does not reflect Microsoft's intended vision or my employer's view.  As always, any decision with respect to Licensing should be validated with your Microsoft representative, and is heavily dependent upon your unique requirements. You are responsible for any decision that you make based on above information.   

Let me know if you have any feedback and/or find a flaw with my understanding.
Cheers!!