I published my first article on the rise of instant messaging back in the late 1990's, and have been tracking the development of social collaboration technologies ever since. When I started investigating SharePoint back in early 2004, one of my primary criticisms was the lack of social capabilities within the platform. At the first European SharePoint Conference held in Berlin, for example, I presented a scorecard around SharePoint 2010's social functionality, comparing it with the other leading platforms.
SharePoint has come a long way, baby. While the roadmap as of late may be confusing to some folks, much of what Microsoft has been doing, in my opinion, has been directionally correct: focus on providing connections to the Office Graph, providing end-to-end experiences through NextGen Portals, and integrating Yammer through inline social conversation. However, I've always felt that Microsoft has missed the mark around the on prem social experience, focusing on its Yammer pure-cloud experience. While there may be long-term architectural reasoning behind this decision, the result has been confusion and disillusionment with many customers.
Enter the partner opportunity. My feeling is that this space has real room to grow, and no single firm has yet to step up and take a dominating position in the SharePoint space….but Beezy (www.Beezy.net) is primed to take that position. You could say that I am a real fan -- while NewsGator went on to acquire Sitrion, switch its name to the latter, and turn its focus to SAP, Beezy has been winning deals against Jive, IBM Connections, and Sitrion -- wins not only for Beezy, but for Microsoft, as many of these customers would otherwise be lost to SharePoint and Office 365. And with Microsoft Ignite just around the corner, Beezy is finally looking to make some noise in the community and get noticed.
I recently reached out to Beezy founder and CEO Jordi Plana (@joplana), who spends time between Silicon Valley and his development team in Barcelona, Spain, to talk about the opportunities he sees for social in the SharePoint space:
[CB] Jordi, what is your background in the SharePoint space? Can you tell me a little bit about your experience in the social collaboration community, how Beezy came about, and your life before your current role?
[JP] After several developer and software architect roles, I funded a Microsoft consulting boutique in 2001 in Barcelona. We focused on .NET (ASP+ back then) and SharePoint Team Services, which I believe was the first ever version of SharePoint…so I guess we can say we’ve been working on the platform since the very beginning.
We soon became a well-known SharePoint specialist, mainly in Europe, and our several MVPs executed many large and challenging projects for Microsoft. We also built many Contoso demos for Microsoft keynotes at large events like TechReady, MGX, WPC, etc. and we even built solution offerings for some Industry teams in Redmond. It felt great being awarded as the 2009 Global Partner of the Year for Public Sector!
Then, in late 2010, two of our biggest customers started asking for a ‘Facebook for SharePoint’. IT was under heavy pressure from Business to provide users with modern collaboration tools with a much better user interface. We did some research and found that large companies wanting to implement an ESN had to choose between innovative and unreliable start-ups and the slow with a poor UX –but trustable– large vendors. So we thought “Why choose if you can have the best of both worlds?” and in 2011 built Beezy in a way that satisfied both IT and Business.
Then in 2013 we moved the company to California and here we are.
[CB] For those who don’t know your company, Beezy, what is your elevator pitch? What should people know about Beezy?
[JP] Beezy is an Enterprise Social Collaboration solution natively built on SharePoint. We help organizations improve the way their employees´ collaborate and communicate through the platform they already have: SharePoint.
Of course SharePoint is a great collaboration platform, however it falls short when it comes to user experience and it is way too complex to use for the average non-IT user. As a consequence it is not being adopted broadly. Moreover SharePoint also lacks some (basic) enterprise social networking features.
If you want to convert SharePoint from a platform into a collaboration solution that your employees finally use, you will have to spend big money in consulting services…at least once.
Also, with Beezy there’s no need for large SharePoint organizations to have a separate system (like Jive or IBM Connections for which we provide migration tools) for social collaboration. Beezy has the same broad feature set these other vendors offer but natively integrated into SharePoint, with obvious benefits not only from the user experience perspective but also from the IT Governance one.
In short : Beezy brings easy to deploy Enterprise Social Collaboration to SharePoint. Business people love the UX and IT people like it because it is non-intrusive SharePoint.
[CB] My first question is sort of the elephant in the room: with Microsoft’s focus on Yammer, and its concentration on the cloud for all social innovation, why do you continue to focus on social within the on prem environment?
[JP] First of all Beezy focuses on cloud as well. We are announcing our Office 365 version release very soon, which is currently being broadly deployed at a Fortune Global 100 company.
Having said that: you are right that most of our customers still prefer SharePoint on-premises (or hybrid) over Online. And they also demand innovation and user friendly social collaboration solutions. Of course they will eventually move to the cloud, but at their own pace and in a seamless way. There is still a lot of business to be made on-premises, and we cannot leave our customers behind.
Obviously we are heavily investing in Office 365, but we are making sure that both our on-premises and cloud offerings have the same feature set and superior user experience.
[CB] With such a strong need for social capabilities on prem, and Microsoft focusing their innovation in the cloud around Yammer, why turn your focus to the cloud now?
[JP] Well, there are a number of reasons…integration, customization, simplicity.
- Customers don´t want to waste money on SharePoint integration efforts. As Beezy is built for SharePoint, integration comes naturally.
- “One size fits all” solution doesn’t work for large organizations. That´s why Beezy offers a high degree of customization and extensibility capabilities.
- End users are fed up with SharePoint's complexity. They want a simple and intuitive consumer-like interface.
But most importantly, we want to be very clear upfront in that we are not competing with Yammer in the cloud environment. Our product goes well beyond Groups, Newsfeeds, Comments and Likes. We offer a full blown collaboration suite that includes wikis, blogs, idea elevation, advanced social Q&A, gamification, endorsements and more. Our cloud solution can be quickly deployed in a self-service mode where business users do not need IT to operate the network (which is today impossible with O365 and Yammer in large organizations). We are presenting this at Ignite and if you pass by our booth you’ll see how Beezy is taking social collaboration to the next level.
[CB] If you go back 4 or 5 years, social collaboration was a hot commodity. SharePoint 2010 delivered a poor social experience, and the competitive landscape was heating up. As a result, SharePoint 2013 had a strong social focus. And then the Yammer acquisition happened. What is your perspective on Microsoft’s social reset with Yammer?
[JP] I think it was a much needed move, probably a bit too late though, more from a positioning and messaging perspective rather than from a product fit. It was a clear message to the market that Microsoft was betting big on enterprise social, they earned serious share and some coolness, and also learnings on agile SaaS software delivery dynamics…
We are super glad Microsoft acquired Yammer. They are doing a great job at evangelizing the ecosystem on the huge benefits of enterprise social for organizations all sizes, and as a result there’s no discussion on this topic anymore. Microsoft invested lots of money in marketing and generating demand for Yammer/enterprise social, and of course we are riding that same wave.
Yammer is a great standalone product. Over the last 3 years we have seen Microsoft spending a lot of effort integrating Yammer with SharePoint/O365, and it’s not fully there yet in the way customers expect. As a result, innovation at Yammer has been slow for a while. And enterprise social is not only about newsfeeds, comments and likes anymore.
[CB] How important is ‘curated community’ today? By this I mean that most early social endeavors were about building a community site. In some ways, we were seeing the replacement of the intranet with a flatter, more social community site with less structured collaboration, less focus on documents and metadata as with formal document and content management systems. Do you see a continuing trend toward social, or has the marketplace moved past the novelty of new social features toward a more balanced platform?
[JP] In the early days of enterprise social there was a lot of hype, some organizations were deploying social tools just for the sake of it, because it was cool and trendy.
We believe enterprise social has to be spread across your Intranet, your business processes, your daily flow of work…where it really makes business sense. Social with a purpose. And for that we need to apply more structure.
With our Knowledge Centers we are addressing this need…we combine the formality of well-structured content of old and boring knowledge management systems with the informality, engagement and massive adoption of enterprise social networks.
Finally, our most mature customers are asking us for ways to capitalize the gigantic amount of organizational knowledge hidden in their social communities. For that, I can anticipate that we are also making big investments in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing to understand what conversations are about and who are the subject matter experts…We are working on an auto generated Questions & Answers solution that is fed from enterprise social communities. Of course this will be leveraging Office Graph and interacting with Delve.
This might very well fall into a new category of enterprise software : social knowledge management.
[CB] As Yammer becomes more of an integrated experience within the Office 365 platform, it feels as if the platform is going in a different direction than outside vendors. As Microsoft matures their social capabilities, what have been the gaps, and what are you doing differently?
[JP] Let me first go back in time a bit. When Microsoft bought Yammer everyone expected it to be integrated into SharePoint/Office 365 almost immediately. 3 years later, reality is that after the WebParts got deprecated recently, all we have is an iFrame and an API not ready for prime time.
If we had followed everyone’s advice, we would have probably given up and left the space, like other vendors did. Fortunately we predicted it would take a bit longer and kept investing in Beezy, and today we have a stronger than ever offering.
Now, Christian, let me disagree a bit with your statement…
We see Yammer being diluted into the platform and becoming a “comments and likes” platform commodity. Someone in your last #CollabTalks suggested that Yammer should operate like Disquss (i.e. a comment/like plug-in). We believe enterprise social collaboration is a lot more than that.
SharePoint has had workflow capabilities for some time now, and there’s still the need for third party vendors if you are serious about business process management. We believe the same will happen with enterprise social collaboration.
[CB] What are the use cases that you see most often with your customers? Are there persistent themes? Do companies have a clear idea of what they want, or does social fall into the “it depends” category of SharePoint solutions?
[JP] Organizations that approach us can be divided into 2 categories. The first set has a clear theme. It is mostly a business department (Internal Comms, HR, Employee Collaboration, ) who want to increase transparency or improve internal collaboration & communication. The other category consist of the IT department who wants to actively offer an ESN because they anticipate a business need for it.
[CB] Looking forward at the SharePoint roadmap, what are your hopes and expectations for the year, and beyond?
[JP] I would like Microsoft to avoid confusion as much as possible…future releases of SharePoint on-premises yes/no, then suddenly realizing they needed to consider the hybrid approach, etc… you know what I am referring to. All the uncertainty they created in the past just put the market on stand-by…
Also, as part of my wish list, I would like Microsoft to keep investing in O365 as a development platform with a predictable and reliable roadmap. I think Chris Johnson and his team are doing a great job in that direction, but the ecosystems expects more.
We need robust and trustable APIs to better complement Yammer/O365.
Please invest in platform and don’t pretend the platform to be a solution. Leave it up to the ecosystem.
Undoubtedly, we're going to see much more innovation coming out of this segment at Ignite, and throughout this year. While the term "social collaboration" has been a bit overplayed, the needs for organizations to better connect and share knowledge in a social manner have not decreased. As such, we'll continue to see innovation from Microsoft and vendors like Beezy to help us improve our employee, partner, and customer interactions.
Thanks again to Jordi for taking the time to answer my questions. I'm looking forward to seeing more from the Beezy team at Ignite next week! See you there.
by Christian Buckley via Everyone's Blog Posts - SharePoint Community
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