Wednesday, November 28, 2012

SharePoint 2013 - Hunting for the business case

I had a good time yesterday at a briefing on SharePoint 2013 hosted at Microsoft' UK campus. The presentation concentrated on the following new features:
  • Social - (My site), including the giving of points to build "reputation" awarded for comments and contributions.
  • Search speed improvements - Continuous crawling
  • Document management - Drag and drop files from PC desktop into a library, across browsers (not just IE). And sync docs with SharePoint using cloud-based SkyDrive Pro.
  • Web content management - Design manager gives a branded veneer over SharePoint and there's Channel support for mobile and other devices (though it took the partner company presenting 6-8 weeks to implement for PC, phone, iPad, tablet!)
  • Apps - There's another Microsoft App Store, for plugins to SharePoint. This'll prove useful especially for larger organisations with in house development teams.
  • Shredded storage minimises disk demands
So those were the "major" new points I noted: nothing big regarding workflow, Lists, business intelligence reporting...

Given the half hour sales pitch from a company offering 2003/2007/2010 to 2013 migration services, I was left wondering where the business case for the upgrade lies? How do I sell the cost of doing this to a finance or senior business manager?

There's got to be something of more substance than merely declaring this to be the "latest and greatest" ad one of the PowerPoint slides did.

I'm going hunting for that business case...