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”.

Allcloud is proud that we were selected for the very first “wave” of the HoloLens developer program.

For the past month, we’ve been testing, developing for, and playing with the HoloLens Development Edition. Augmented Reality is amazing and we’re excited about the possibilities for both consumers and businesses.

Allcloud is hard at work on our first HoloLens app, which will streamline home and facilities maintenance. We’re also prototyping an immersive augmented reality app to teach music.

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.

We’re looking forward to Chicago Code Camp, the 8th annual Chicagoland technology conference for and by developers. The event takes place Saturday April 30, 2016 at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Bert Johnson will present Automating Private and Hybrid Cloud Deployments with Azure Stack. The session will outline DevOps strategies and tools for orchestrating infrastructure with Azure Stack.

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:

When demonstrating responsive design, sometimes resizing your desktop browser is enough to prove the concept. In other cases, it's best to have mobile devices with varying screen sizes and configurations handy.

For quick-and-dirty demos, wouldn't it be cool to check the site out at various resolutions all in the same browser?

Thanks to Felix Rilling's clever CodePen (which takes advantage of CSS transforms on IFRAMEs), that's both possible and a lot of fun.

Interact with the real-time mobile demo of https://apidae.com below:

It’s a great time to run your business on the public cloud. Costs continue to drop, performance continues to improve, the user experience is good, and tooling continue to get more sophisticated.

But the public cloud still isn’t an option for everyone. Healthcare, finance, energy, and other highly regulated industries still prefer and expect to manage their own infrastructure for the foreseeable future.

Thankfully, managing private clouds and hybrid environments is easier than ever, thanks to Azure Stack.

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.