There’s been a lot of talk, recently and not so recently, about SharePoint in the cloud, especially with the release of Office 365. Hell, there’s been a lot of talk about cloudification, period (though perhaps not using that particular term). Cloud computing provider CloudShare just finalized a$10 million round of vc funding, Apple is letting users store and stream backups of their iTunes downloads in the iCloud, Google Docs now has pivot tables…From financial and ease-of-use standpoints, it’s easy to see why moving data to the cloud is such an appealing proposition. From a security standpoint, as we witnessed with the Amazon/Playstation hack this year, it’s rather less appealing. And then there’s the current lack of feature paritybetween SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Online, and the fact that the latter doesn’t support farm-scoped solutions, full-trust solutions or WebApplication-scoped features.
Suffice it to say, the decision to switch from self-hosted to cloud-based SharePoint is one fraught with smog, if not peril. Having a group discussion about it is something some of us have been kicking around for a while, but now we’ve decided to make it official, and IRL. And by we, I mean the inestimable Sadie Van Buren (b | t ), myself, and my colleague (and future SPSTC speaker) Ben Jones.
The party’s happening at this Thursday, 6pm at American Craft in Brookline (200 beers on tap, oh my!). On the discussion docket are:
- Hosted SharePoint in the cloud – benefits and limitations
- Keeping data secure in the cloud
- Office 365 and what it means for SharePoint 2010
- Interacting with other cloud based services with SharePoint
Along with anything else you want to throw at us, or each other. If you’re in the area and interested, please rsvp here. Thanks, and see you there!
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