Two Experts on the Future of SharePoint: Internet of Things

Geoff Evelyn discusses the touchpoints between SharePoint and IoT in his article “SharePoint and the Internet of Things.”

You might be saying, “What touchpoints? How does SharePoint come into play? It can’t talk to my car/refrigerator/factory/solar panels/whatever.” True, SharePoint doesn’t monitor or create data, but it’s a platform that can be used for displaying the resulting data via dashboards, storing and surfacing data, or connecting data sources to human eyeballs.

Geoff Evelyn offers the situation in a nutshell: “In reality, SharePoint as a platform is naturally not directly affected by the IOT. From a software perspective, there is minor impact to how the system operates. However, there is a significant impact on the service delivery of solutions to SharePoint. Issues like support, ownership, change management come into play.”

Just because IoT is being hyped doesn’t mean you have to buy into the hype, he says. He advises starting out small with IoT projects. And organizations should stick to the best practices they already use when deploying any new solution – planning, testing and piloting it first.

He also raises some important points to consider when looking into IoT and SharePoint. For example, it’s important to know where the data feeds are coming from, to get your support picture figured out with levels and responsibilities of support, and to set up monitoring of SharePoint performance and the performance of the data feeds.

Read his piece at Microsoft TechNet blogs for more advice as well as additional pieces of the puzzle that your organization needs to consider.

Another interesting piece to read is “SharePoint, Office 365, Azure and the Internet of Things: A Prediction” by Pete Skelly at Three Will.

Skelly starts out talking about a podcast where they asked experts to discuss what they think the future of SharePoint will be. In particular, one expert made an important point about services and how they will need to stand alone.

Skelly says “This is a VERY important point.  With Microsoft’s Mobile-first, Cloud-first strategy – and specifically the abundance of Azure capabilities – SharePoint and Office ‘services’ are poised to dramatically transform many of the most common business problems and solution patterns.”