OK, now that my \u201cbiblical\u201d title has caught your attention I\u2019ll explain myself \u2026<\/p>\n
2014 has seen big <\/em><\/strong>changes in Office 365.\u00a0 Microsoft has been rolling out change after change after change.\u00a0 Delve, Clutter, Sway, Office Mix as well as many backend changes and upgrades have made Office 365 a whole bunch better at the end <\/em>of 2014 than it was going into<\/em> 2014.\u00a0 But the change roll also includes deletions <\/em>of which the single biggest has to be the deprecation and removal of the \u201cpublic website\u201d component of Office 365.<\/p>\n To be honest, I never got all warm and fuzzy about the public website feature of Office 365.\u00a0 It was an attempt by Microsoft to counter things like WordPress but they built it on top of SharePoint technologies that really didn\u2019t lend themselves to public facing sites.\u00a0 Don\u2019t get me wrong, SharePoint is awesome <\/em>and an incredible tool to do many, many things (there is a reason why itgroove is heavily<\/em> involved in SharePoint and it\u2019s the Swiss-army knife nature of SharePoint).\u00a0 But it really didn\u2019t provide a great platform for public sites.\u00a0 And the third-party ecosystem never really attached itself to Office 365 public websites, certainly not in the way that it has to WordPress.\u00a0 This made it very hard for organizations to build a public site in Office 365 that had the polish and sparkle you see in so many WordPress sites because the building blocks just weren\u2019t there.\u00a0 This meant that the actual uptake in Office 365 of public sites (tenancies actually using <\/em>public sites) was miniscule.<\/p>\n I have made reference elsewhere on this blog to the ruthlessly Darwinian nature of the Internet and Microsoft is no exception to this Darwinism.\u00a0 They have become pretty ruthless about the \u201ccruft\u201d in their products and there is a definite trend of them now turfing the bits of a product, in this case Office 365, that simply aren\u2019t being utilized by the great majority of their users.\u00a0 Bits and pieces of SharePoint Online within Office 365 disappeared earlier in the year and then public websites hit the chopping block in mid-December.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure we\u2019ll see a continuation of this \u201cpruning\u201d in 2015 as we will also see more functionality being rolled into Office 365.<\/p>\n Office 365 is rapidly becoming Microsoft\u2019s premier<\/em> product (my emphasis); it is certainly their main focus for driving Cloud uptake (sorry, Azure).\u00a0 Those of us that were at the November MVP conference were shown some very interesting stats about Office 365 growth and to be blunt, Microsoft has never seen a product grow like this puppy.\u00a0 The stats are mind boggling and Microsoft is clearly committed to keeping this train rolling straight and true.\u00a0 So the deletions, adds and fine tuning will continue.<\/p>\n Don\u2019t despair if you are <\/em>an Office 365 public website user as Microsoft isn\u2019t throwing the OFF switch on running <\/em>public websites just yet.\u00a0 The plan is to leave them in place for up to 2 years but they won\u2019t allow new instances to spin up going forward.\u00a0 This gives current users more than enough time to evaluate alternatives and then make the switch in a controlled manner.\u00a0 Microsoft has not shed any light on what they might suggest as a replacement (there is all sorts of rampant speculation and rumour about them partnering with other vendors such as GoDaddy but that is only<\/em> speculation at this point).\u00a0 My guess is that many users will head on over to WordPress or something similar.\u00a0 But you never know what might be just around the corner.\u00a0 Microsoft has sprung some things on us this year that we didn\u2019t see coming (Sway, anyone?) so there *might* be something up their corporate sleeve that is going to blow us all away.<\/p>\n