The Demise of the IT Pro — What you need to know.

How cloud is transforming the role of the SharePoint IT Pro.

Even Whales are moving…

Now, most of my friends and colleagues in the consulting services space have been playing the role of the Business Consultant for the better part of 10 years. THIS POST IS NOT FOR YOU. This article is directed at the traditional IT Pro, the person that has to worry about what we either built or suggested be built on top of SharePoint Server.

I’ve been working with SharePoint since the early days of Tahoe. Although, my background to SharePoint is a bit different; I started in the knowledge management space and then “ported” across to the concept of portals. Having quite a strong IT history, (AD, Exchange, Firewalls, System Center, etc) moving to things like document management, scanning, workflow and search did not come super easy. Before SharePoint though, there were and still are products like OpenText Content Server, Documentum, HP Trim, FileNet, IBM Content Manager and so forth so on, which traditionalised Enterprise Content Management patterns and practices.

Let’s skip past all the mundane history and shoot straight onto the IT Pro. Let me make it clear and simple:

You need to ramp up… FAST

The industry no longer needs you to:

1. Administer SharePoint
2. Handle hardware
3. Do backups
4. Create service applications
5. Care about the user profile service
6. Manage IIS controls
7. Perform any database functions
8. Configure Load Balancing, Kerberos, etc
9. And a lot, lot more…

What the industry wants you to worry about is: (Well excluding Exchange and CRM)

Thanks Matt Wade for creating this!

With Office 365 you no longer have to worry about hardware. That’s a definite relief. Never having to care if the User Profile Service is up and running, double bonus. Load balancing and Kerberos, there is a God!!

But where does that leave you? Well look at the periodic table. Lot’s of things to look after. Lets break it down: (I’m going to skip over the applications that we as IT Pro’s don’t really touch)

1. Stream — Like the name says, its a video service that allows organisations to upload video’s to channels so that users can view them. Think YouTube.
2. SharePoint Online — What you know and love, albeit somewhat different to what you are used to. Think “Modern Experience”.
3. OneDrive — As much as we want to compare this to MySites, its quite different. Yes, it provides users with a storage area for personal content, but it has syncing capabilities as well as sharing capabilities which adds quite a bit more.
4. Delve — The hidden gem of Office 365. This is where all the cool stuff happens. Its 1 part machine learning and 1 part artificial intelligence. Here you will find content that is relevant to how you interact with Office 365. Also, information about you and what you do with your time (E5 only). Give it a whirl.
5. Teams — Arguably the biggest thing to come out of Microsoft in some time, for the SharePoint people. Its the disruptor app. Turning Information Management on its head. Taking traditional Enterprise Content Management, rolling it up into a paper ball, and drop kicking it out the window. Chat based information management is where its at. Attaching information assets to where the conversation is. Not the other way round. This is going to impact how we do things in the content management world.
6. Yammer — Well, I’ve talked about Yammer before. Its an Enterprise Social Network for “Working Out Loud”. Microsoft has described it as the “Outer Loop” for collaboration.
7. Bookings — For booking meetings. Not available on all plans. Its targeted for Small to Medium organisations.
8. Staffhub — Like Bookings, meant for Small to Medium orgs. Its aimed at temp workers. Think clock cards.
9. Planner — A better graphical UI for handling task management in projects. Recently, Microsoft announced Planner integration with Project Online.
10. To-Do — Microsoft purchased Wunderlist a few years ago and we have seen their investment realised through To-Do. Think of it as a personal to do list.
11. PowerApps and Flow — Microsoft’s answer to users wanting to know about the future of InfoPath and SharePoint Designer. Also, Microsoft had to compete with the likes of IFTTT which is where the journey for Flow would have started. We are seeing tighter integration for both PowerApps and Flow with Office 365, SharePoint Online and on-prem. However, its not Enterprise grade yet…
12. Forms — The old Excel Surveys got an overhaul. Still very much the same, but prettier. Create rudimentary forms using questions.
13. Office Online — Another competitive edge here, taking a stab at Google with their docs suite of products. I personally like PowerPoint online.
14. Last but not least, PowerBI — Arguably my favourite of the tools. Soo much power built into it. [Pun intended]. It was Microsoft’s first foray into the App space hence it being as mature as it is. The richness of the dashboards that can be built is, in my opinion, unrivaled. (waits to see who bashes me for that comment…)

So what does this all mean for the IT Pro? You need to cross skill. No longer do you have to worry about the old, you have to start ushering in the new. Think of yourself as a Productivity Pro.

Where do you find information on skilling up? I’d work through the following areas:

• Microsoft Learning — They have courses for partners as well as customers. There are also learning paths you can go on (Most of it is free)
• Pluralsight — The paid for side of learning. They have a great collection of courses that you can take. My favourite IT Pro author is Vlad Catrinescu
• Lynda.com — LinkedIn’s learning platform. They have been around longer than Pluralsight hence the depth and breadth that they have
• YouTube — Being the second largest search engine in the world, you are guaranteed to find information there
• Follow bloggers — They give you deep insight into products.

In closing, the world is changing, and so should you. Don’t be afraid that you will become obsolete. If you are hellbent on remaining an IT Pro, head over to The Microsoft Cloud Society and move across to Azure.

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Be cool my ninjas.