Microsoft Aims to Wrangle Data for Office Teams With SharePoint Revamp
May 04 2016 - 12:30AM
Dow Jones News
By Jay Greene
REDMOND, Wash. -- Startups such as Slack Technologies Inc. and
Box Inc. get much of the buzz in the business of simplifying
workplace collaboration.
Microsoft Corp. is eager to win some of that luster for its own
SharePoint software, and it is betting that a new version of the
15-year-old program, to be introduced Wednesday, will stand out by
tapping an information source its rivals lack.
The software giant's special sauce: data gleaned from its widely
used Office suite of email, spreadsheet and presentation tools.
Unlike Slack, which focuses on messaging, or Box, which
concentrates on file-sharing, SharePoint offers a variety of
collaboration functions. It includes tools for sharing files,
finding information, and building websites or internal network
pages to manage projects. Companies can use SharePoint to create
intranet sites.
Microsoft says it wants SharePoint to help workers wade through
the thicket of workplace communications and files to quickly find
information that is relevant to their work. To do that, it aims to
weave in insights drawn from the ways they use Office: lists of
meeting attendees, frequent email correspondents, collaborators on
documents, and so on. SharePoint will analyze such factors -- a
body of data Microsoft calls the Office Graph -- for patterns to
discover news, initiatives, reports and other information relevant
to individual users.
Infusing SharePoint with the Office Graph represents an
aggressive challenge to startups encroaching on the
workplace-software market that Microsoft long has dominated.
The goal is to reduce the "idle chatter" that overwhelms some
corporate collaboration services, said Jeff Teper, corporate vice
president of OneDrive & SharePoint at Microsoft.
"We've solved the forest-through-the-trees problem that Slack
doesn't solve," Mr. Teper said in an interview at Microsoft's
headquarters here.
Microsoft isn't alone in trying to mine corporate documents and
data to make workers more efficient. In January, Slack hired former
Foursquare Inc. executive Noah Weiss to lead its machine-learning
and artificial-intelligence efforts. Salesforce.com Inc. recently
debuted SalesforceIQ Inbox for Outlook, a program that runs
alongside Microsoft's email software and connects sales data with
customer correspondence.
More than 200,000 organizations use SharePoint, including Sanofi
SA, Royal Dutch Shell PLC and the Cambridgeshire Constabulary in
the U.K., according to Microsoft. In total, SharePoint reaches more
than 190 million users. Microsoft said SharePoint generated more
than $3 billion in 2015.
The new version of Sharepoint's server software lets customers
run the program in their own data center while working alongside
programs such as Office 365 that are delivered on-demand over the
Web. Later this quarter, Microsoft says it plans to offer mobile
versions of SharePoint that will run on Apple Inc.'s iOS and
Alphabet Inc.'s Android operating systems, as well as on mobile
devices that run its own Windows 10.
Microsoft first offered analytical insights drawn from the
Office Graph in Delve, a part of its Office 365 online service, in
2014. Delve purports to anticipate office-worker needs by
delivering relevant data proactively. In two years, Delve amassed
more than 1 million users, a large number for some companies but
paltry compared with the masses who use SharePoint.
But customers may not be ready for the type of insight that
Office Graph can provide, said Gartner Inc. analyst Jim Murphy.
Some Gartner clients, whom Murphy declined to name, turned off
Delve shortly after it rolled out because it exposed corporate data
that was intended for a more limited audience.
"There's going to be some trepidation among companies because
they don't know what it's going to surface," Mr. Murphy said.
A Microsoft spokesman said that Delve follows rules set by
customers regarding access to specific information, so that it
should display only information that workers can already see. Less
than 1% of customers opt out of Delve after they start using it,
the spokesman said.
Mr. Murphy described the Office Graph as a "work in progress"
and said the biggest concerns may come from industries where
privacy is paramount, such as financial services and pharmaceutical
companies.
Write to Jay Greene at Jay.Greene@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 04, 2016 00:15 ET (04:15 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2016 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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