Link to the Roundtable event page

I’m participating in a SharePoint in the Cloud roundtable event (#FocusRT21) later this week (Thursday, July 21, 11AM PT), that should be very informative.  There are some great experts on the roundtable, which will be available for the public to call into.  I do hope that you can join us.

SharePoint is having an impact in every direction where it stretches its legs.  Moving into the cloud is no different.  SharePoint has supported external applications for a few years now, with extensive Web service support.  With SharePoint 2010, SharePoint exposed native object models for .Net, JavaScript, and Silverlight, all designed to encourage more sophisticated remote clients for SharePoint – so that information and process stored in SharePoint could be leveraged in a distributed architecture.

SharePoint 2010 also introduced a service application infrastructure that enabled service applications to be subscribed to by different SharePoint farms, enabling different farms to stay in synch by accessing centralized resources.  This can be useful in a cloud environment – think of SharePoint farms at different plant facilities that are all leveraging a centralized product catalog, or business services.  SharePoint can be a client, in this way, as well as a server.  All that we have to do is to think about designing SharePoint applications from a broader perspective.

Office 365 is another example of SharePoint in the Cloud.  In this regard, Microsoft is offering SharePoint as a Service.  This is a little bit different than we have traditionally thought of SharePoint farms.  Office 365 will bring the collaboration and information sharing attributes of SharePoint to the world, but it won’t bring the application platform characteristics to the environment.  This will force SharePoint application developers to move to alternative ways of delivering their functionality.  It will be interesting to see if Microsoft decides that they do want to offer platform capabilities on Office 365 or if they will be satisfied simply adding functionality to their “SharePoint as a Service” offering.

Richard Harbridge (@rharbridge) has collected a good group of experts for the roundtable. I hope that you can join us on Thursday!

Link to the Roundtable event page

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