Here are the ten Microsoft cloud conferences we’re most looking forward to this year:

1. Global Azure Bootcamp (April 22, 2017) National - Azure community conference.
2. Microsoft Build (May 10-12, 2017) Seattle, WA - Developer conference.
3. SharePoint Virtual Summit (May 16, 2017) Online - SharePoint pro conference.
4. DEVintersection Spring (May 21-24, 2017) Lake Buena Vista, FL - .NET developer conference.
5. Microsoft Inspire (July 9-13, 2017) Washington, DC - Microsoft partner conference.
6. Visual Studio Live (September 18-21, 2017) Chicago, IL - Developer conference.
7. Microsoft Ignite (September 25 - 29, 2017) Orlando, FL - IT professional conference.
8. SPTechCon (November 12-15, 2017) Washington, DC - SharePoint technology conference.
9. Office and SharePoint Live (November 12-17, 2017) Orlando, FL - SharePoint pro conference.
10. Collab365 Global Conference (TBD, Q4 2017) Online - Online Office 365 conference.

Digital Asset Management is becoming increasingly important for every business. Marketing materials, training resources, sales collateral, and other assets are frequently distributed across and locked within disconnected systems.

Employees don’t know where to look (hurting productivity and morale) and when they do find an asset, they often duplicate it to a new system and lose version history (leading to inconsistency and waste).

About Digital Asset Management (DAM)

Digital Asset Management (DAM) consists of organizing, storing, distributing, and managing the lifecycle of an organization’s assets. These can be digital or physical, structured or unstructured. Most often, digital assets are thought of as multimedia files like images and videos.

Microsoft has continued its hectic pace of feature development and releases throughout this year. Since we last checked in on the Office 365 Roadmap in May 2016, more than a hundred updates have been released.

Below is a summary of significant changes from Microsoft’s Office 365 Roadmap between June 2016 and December 2016. Updates are divided into categories of “Launched”, “Rolling Out” (to early release members), “In Development”, “Cancelled” and “Previously Released”.

Most enterprises use third-party analytics tools for tracking SharePoint and Office 365 usage. Marketing teams often use tools like Google Analytics, WebTrends, and Piwik for public analytics, so those become the de facto standards for internal analytics as well.

Each is a great option, but web analytics platforms don’t really understand the intricacies of SharePoint and Office 365. For instance, there’s absolutely no way to filter by specific sites, site collections, or lists by default.

Although SharePoint natively tracks some useful data such as daily hits per site, the built-in interfaces for extracting that data have always been very limited. This has been especially true since SharePoint 2013 re-engineered the analytics engine and hid most reports.

When it comes to SharePoint and Office 365 sites, there are common questions you’re likely to ask:

1. Which of my sites are most active? Are there dormant sites we should retire?
2. Which users are most engaged? Are there users completely avoiding the intranet?
3. Besides pages, which content is most popular?

Fortunately, it’s possible to answer each of those questions through a one-time configuration that will reap long-term rewards.

At this month’s Future of SharePoint event, Jeff Teper announced several exciting changes to the SharePoint roadmap. This is all welcome news for a platform whose public momentum has slowed in recent years.

End-User Announcements

First and foremost, SharePoint will soon have a first-class app on iOS, Android, and Windows phone devices. Mobile SharePoint has usually been a frustrating experience due to unfriendly default interfaces, poorly-designed customizations, and frustrating authentication. Microsoft is eliminating many of those barriers by making lists, libraries, users, search, and Delve features available from a single-click on any device. I’m looking forward to testing it in the next month.

SharePoint is also getting a new homepage in Office 365. The new look closely aligns with Delve, showing your most frequently-accessed team sites in a clean tile-based interface. This might not be a welcome change for highly-branded intranets, but it will be an intuitive default for new users.

There are also new templates for team sites and document libraries, which have been controversial. Overall, the new team site design looks modern, flexible, and responsive for mobile devices. This was one of many templates sorely in need of a refresh, so it’s nice to see Microsoft revisiting user experience around the core SharePoint building blocks.

While each of those updates is great news for end-users, developers will be most excited about the new development model named “SharePoint Framework”.

Microsoft continues to evolve its Office 365 platform with remarkable speed and transparency. One of my favorite aspects of the platform is that they listen to customer feedback and provide an honest look of what’s changed, what’s planned, and what’s cancelled.

Check out the Microsoft Office 365 Roadmap.

They divide updates into categories of “Launched”, “Rolling Out” (to early release members), “In Development”, “Cancelled” and “Previously Released”. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights in May 2016.

Microsoft is intent on making application development accessible for non-programmers. It’s a daunting and usually thankless challenge, but they continue to fight the good fight.

Microsoft’s goal is to allow any business user to connect to the data they care about, add business rules, and spin up a usable application in hours instead of weeks. This sounds ideal – it eliminates the slow and expensive process of product development. By empowering users to scratch their own itches, Microsoft seeks to democratize computing and enable truly rapid, agile development.

Microsoft released SharePoint 2016 to manufacturing yesterday.

Whereas recent SharePoint releases have been “revolutionary”, this is more of an “evolutionary” release, with subtle improvements to the user experience and underlying architecture.

Improvements

You can check out a list of new and enhanced features here on TechNet.

Highlights include:

The enterprise search market has changed dramatically this decade. With Google’s recent announcement that their Search Appliance has reached end-of-life, they’ve joined a distinguished list of vendors that have ceded the market. I’m sure they’ll be back with a cloud-first business search solution soon, but they’ve left a void that many vendors are trying fill.

Compared to just six years ago, the enterprise search market is virtually unrecognizable. Back in 2010, search was tightly bound to Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), leaving only a handful of software giants able to seriously compete. In 2016, organizations are less reliant on single-vendor “walled garden deployments”, allowing more variety and competition.

At the heart of your Digital Workplace is the intranet.

In 2016, the vast majority of intranets are built on SharePoint, or its cloud equivalent in Office 365. Microsoft has been recognized as a leader in Enterprise Content Management (ECM), search, business intelligence, workflow, and social collaboration tools, which are common components of the digital workplace.  With 15 years of momentum, more than 125 million on-prem SharePoint Server users, and accelerating adoption of Office 365, Microsoft has become synonymous with "intranet".

Yet, it's always worth evaluating the market.

SharePoint / Office 365 Alternatives

While Microsoft's offerings tend to dominate internal communication portals, intranets are sometimes rooted in other platforms. These fall into three common categories:

This is an excerpt from Designing Modern Intranets Using Office 365.

A Brief History of Knowledge Work

Every industry has been transformed since the information revolution of the 1990s. Thanks to the Internet, ubiquitous computing, and globalization, virtually every company is now reliant on technology and information to compete.

The term “knowledge worker” was first coined by Peter Drucker in 1957 to describe employees whose primary capital is knowledge. Knowledge workers were considered specialized. They spent most of their time researching, problem solving, and creatively thinking.

Today, virtually every office job relies heavily on knowledge work. A 2006 study estimated that 80% of all North American workers are knowledge workers and that number rises each year. We now live in an “information economy”, where the success of organizations is dependent on their ability to generate and apply knowledge.

Introducing the Digital Workplace

The world is digital, and there’s no going back.

This is an excerpt from Designing Modern Intranets Using Office 365

Introduction

Over the past two decades, we’ve witnessed the emergence, evolution, and democratization of intranets. Some have been welcomed as successes, others have been abandoned as failures. Most intranets linger somewhere in between, with vocal supporters and detractors.

The best intranets measurably improve employee productivity and morale. They consolidate knowledge, streamline processes, and promote collaboration among teams. Successful intranets enable business transformation, allowing employees to make better, faster, and more autonomous decisions.

Many intranets suffer from problems such as poor usability, confusing content design, technical issues, lack of adoption, and/or unclear governance. While some of these are temporary growing pains, underperforming intranets often lead to dissatisfaction, confusion, and inefficiency.

Fortunately, a combination of factors now makes it easier, faster, lower risk, and more affordable to reap the benefits of a successful intranet than ever. Design philosophies have matured, tools are more capable, employees are savvier, and more turn-key solutions exist.

Whether building from scratch, iterating on an existing platform, or buying a pre-built accelerator, “Designing Modern Intranets Using Office 365” will guide you through the decisions required to provide your team with a Modern Intranet in 2016.

Primer: What Are Intranets?

Before we proceed, let’s set a baseline of what we’re referring to when we talk about “intranets”.