SharePoint going online is, I think a great idea. There are cost savings of course, and it makes capacity planning easier, and working out licencing, but there is also the fact that more companies need to access their SharePoint from all over the world, and distributed architectures can be complex and costly. Latency can mess up the user experience and make updating the search index slow. But with a web-based model, those issues shrink because everything is on the internet.

The problem with SharePoint Online is what do you do if you want more than the plain vanilla SharePoint? If someone else owns the hardware and software, they do not want to give you permission to install your own code on their machines. So what is the middle ground? I think the potential of client-side scripting is the answer. jQuery is a javascript platform that allows for a range of cool things to be done that are easy to add, update, version control, test and deploy. Here is some more detail: http://www.sharepointjoel.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=178

So in the future, SharePoint will be out-of-the-box, but companies will be able to change the look and functionality completely without ever making a change on the server, and this will make a world where all our software is "in the cloud" one step closer.

Labels: jQuery