Looking back at the growth and success of SharePoint, it is amazing at how this platform has truly changed the way that organizations collaborate and capture corporate knowledge. During the May 4th 'Future of SharePoint' event held in San Francisco and in a related blog post, corporate vp Jeff Teper shared some details about SharePoint’s continued growth and opportunity, highlighting the 200,000 organizations that use the platform, with more than 50,000 partners and more than 1 million developers supporting an incredible ecosystem. Teper also used the event to announce the general availability of SharePoint 2016, the latest on-premises version of the platform, as well as updates to the Office 365 online platform.

Now that much of the dust has settled from the announcement, and people are beginning to dig into the details and understand the impacts, I thought it would be appropriate to share the Beezy perspective on this news.

Simply stated, we applaud and praise Microsoft for this achievement, and for the continued growth and success of SharePoint. Beezy views SharePoint as the most fertile ground for collaboration, and the best platform upon which to build our enterprise solutions – and we’re excited to see a reinvigorated community and more well-deserved attention directed toward SharePoint, inside and outside of Microsoft.

At the 'Future of SharePoint' event, members of the SharePoint product team walked through some of the advances being made through customers and partners, and the general direction the platform will be heading in the coming months. As a Microsoft partner, we have been aware of much of what is coming due to our close relationship with the Microsoft product team, and are excited to finally be able to talk about it – especially about what we have been working on to leverage these new features and user experiences. Additionally, we were pleased to have our Chief Marketing Officer and MVP, Christian Buckley, in attendance at this event and representing the entire Beezy team.

Most of the UX improvements positively affect the building blocks that Beezy already leverages today, such as improvements to document libraries, an updated page authoring experience, Delve and Office Graph discovery, a new mobile application, and so forth. We are thrilled to see that the UX gap between our solution and the underlying platform will be shrinking, and are excited about many of the advances being made by Microsoft. Rest assured, we are continually working to align the Beezy solution with the latest platform innovations.

Customers around the world are beginning to recognize the importance of streamlining their internal communications, of supporting collaboration capabilities beyond simple document sharing, and of the business value created when social collaboration is implemented. Businesses are becoming increasingly complex, and the solutions we use to connect, share, and create should align with our unique organizational requirements. That’s where Beezy is best able to leverage the latest SharePoint capabilities and deliver an end-to-end collaboration solution that delivers on the promise of the modern digital workplace.

Stay tuned for more exciting product announcements about how Beezy will be leveraging the new capabilities shared by the Microsoft teams!

And if you want to better understand the Microsoft announcements, we invite you to join a joint webinar this week with Christian Buckley and fellow MVP Liam Cleary, Associate Director and Principle Consultant at Protiviti, where they’ll discuss their takeaways from the May 4th Microsoft event in San Francisco.

Click here to register for “Insights on the Future of SharePoint” on Thursday, May 19th at 10am PDT