By Kurt Mackie, October 21, 2015, from Redmond Channel Partner Magazine -
Future SharePoint developments will focus on enabling organizations to deploy "hybrid" SharePoint
According to Mark Kashman, a Microsoft senior product manager on the SharePoint team, Microsoft is building SharePoint with end user productivity, as enabled via Office 365 services, in mind. Kashman gave the keynote at the SPTechCon Boston 2015 event this past August (a video is now available on demand here).
Such hybrid SharePoint architectures, per Microsoft's definition, consist of SharePoint Server 2013 Service Pack 1 or the forthcoming SharePoint Server 2016 product running in an organization's datacenter. The server gets integrated with Office 365 services, which are run by Microsoft from its own "cloud" datacenters. This hybrid approach will support the new end user productivity technologies being envisioned by Microsoft.
In an earlier talk at the SPBiz Conference, Kashman had explained how past SharePoint Server products always had some cloud roots. Microsoft's current development strategy coming from CEO Satya Nadella is "mobile first, cloud first." Per that approach, Microsoft is using learnings from its massively scaled Office 365 cloud services to improve SharePoint Online first, as well as its forthcoming SharePoint Server 2016 product. Specifically, Microsoft is integrating new Office 365 services, such as Delve, Clutter and Groups, into both the SharePoint Online service, as well as SharePoint Server 2016. The integration effort is closing the gap between the on-premises and online products, providing for a more consistent code base, Kashman explained back then.