SharePoint 2016, Microsoft Graph, Ingestion, and choosing a new smartphone

Being a creature of habit, I usually publish posts on Tuesday and Thursday. Yesterday brought the news about Microsoft Graph and the possibilities it opens to developers who want to build apps against the Office 365 platform, so I published my interview with Rob Lefferts, the GM of Office Extensibility (I still can’t get over that title). Which creates a vacuum today.

Thankfully, some other things happened that we can discuss. First, Microsoft announced SharePoint 2016 Beta 2, an important milestone on the way to shipping the final version sometime in early 2016. At one time, considerable doubt existed whether Microsoft would ship a new version of on-premises SharePoint, but Microsoft has since put a lot of effort into making a new commitment to on-premises SharePoint. Perhaps this is because it is relatively difficult to move workload to SharePoint Online, especially if you use any customizations.

Second, Microsoft announced the preview of archiving third party data for Office 365. I first covered this topic in July and it seems like the time in between has been dedicated to sorting out the specification of how third-party data from sources like Facebook, Twitter, and Bloomberg needs to be packaged up before it can be ingested by the Office 365 Import Service. Microsoft’s post says that if you’re interested in the new capability, you should contact one of their partners (ArchiveSocial, Daegis, GlobaNet Merge1, 17a-4 DataParser, Actiance, or Verba) for more information.

Two questions that come to mind are what kind of international coverage is offered and how much will the ingestion cost. As recently discussed here, Microsoft has set a price point of $2/GB for data ingested via drive shipping. It’s likely that the cost for these packages will be a tad higher because both Microsoft and the ISV have to be paid.

Microsoft must be getting close to making Office 365 Planner (previously codenamed “Highlander”), their lightweight project management tool as they published a post called “The future of planning—online project planning in the cloud”. Naturally you’ll feel that an Office 365-based service would be just the thing after reading this information.

Buried in the text, I found reference to an eBook called “Myths about Moving to the Cloud” that I had previously overlooked (the URL indicates it’s been out since 7 July). In any case, it’s a graphic-intense document that covers assertions such as “Keeping data on-premises is safer than in the cloud” and “cloud migration is too much for my business to handle”. You might find something interesting in the text. Then again, you might think it’s too much Kool-Aid to consume at one sitting.

This week I decided that I would give Windows Mobile 10 a try again, even though I had a bad experience with a build in September that forced me to restore Windows Phone 8.1 onto my Lumia 1020. Given that you can buy Windows Mobile 10 phones now it should come as no surprise that the O/S has reached RTM status. It’s possible to upgrade older devices with Windows Mobile 10, but I decided that I would try it on new hardware, so I bought a sim-free Lumia 950XL from Amazon (well, to be precise, because I am in Ireland, I bought it from Amazon.co.uk). I expect to get the phone a day or so after its U.K. release on December 12.

Interestingly, my Exchange MVP colleagues lean much more towards the Apple iPhone 6S. Perhaps they have been looking at videos of Satya Nadella demonstrating the iPhone Pro with all those Microsoft apps. All of the advice I received was that I should come over to the dark side but I resisted. The apps I use are available for Windows Mobile (I don’t use Snapchat and banking is something that I don’t do on a smartphone).

All of my collaborators for the “Office 365 for Exchange Professionals” project use iOS. I guess I’ll have to tolerate their natter about the wonders of the iPhone as we work on the third edition, due out in early 2016. By the way, we just updated the second edition to fix some minor flaws and add some clarifications. Updated books are now available from ExchangeServerPro.com or Amazon.

Follow Tony @12Knocksinna