A roundup of the announcements at SharePoint Conference 2014

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There have been quite a few announcements at the SharePoint Conference 2014 this week – here’s a quick digest:

One Drive for Business (the product formerly known as SkyDrive Pro): There’s a new standalone OneDrive for business subscription plan that includes Office Online, and SharePoint 2013 in Service Pack 1 (SP1) enhancements enable on-premises SharePoint users to configure OneDrive for Business with just a few clicks.  There are also simple controls and new search capabilities. Read more here.

SharePoint Server 2013 Service Pack 1 now available: This service pack includes performance, reliability, and security fixes. It also helps IT address some of the most common scenarios faced when moving to the cloud, helping them deploy cloud-based workloads in their organization faster and with less complexity, while providing them with the control they demand. You can read more here, but updates include:

• Seamless hybrid connection to OneDrive for Business in Office 365.
• Support for Yammer as the chosen social network, making it easier to replace the default Newsfeed.
• Support for JSON Light in OData v3 requests.

Introducing Office Graph: By leveraging insights from Office 365 and mapping the relationships between people, groups, files and conversations through machine learning, you can intelligently connect and surface the most relevant content using the Office Graph. This is the power of social, cloud, big data, and machine learning coming together. Office Graph will power many new personalized and contextual experiences for people using Office 365. One of the first experiences to leverage the Office Graph is code-named Oslo, which serves up in a single user interface personalized insights based on meetings, people, conversations, documents and more. You can learn more about Office Graph and Oslo here.

Groups: Building on the loved concept of Groups in Yammer, Groups will apply to all Office 365 applications. Groups will unify people, email, conversations, calendars and files together across Office 365 services in a common construct to ensure that people can collaborate similarly in the experience they love most. This makes the overall experience of Office 365 social and connected. You can read more about Groups here.

Office 365 for developers: There are already more than 3.4 million developers—nearly half of whom are SharePoint developers—building on the Office platform and Office 365, Microsoft’s fastest-growing product in history. There are two objectives in the Office 365 development platform. First, to enable companies to adapt our products to specific business needs and second, to bring partners a great opportunity to grow their business. Partners ranging from GoDaddy to DocuSign have recently built solutions and services around Office 365 that will help them grow. You can find more information about today’s announcements for developers here.

Office 365 Trust Centre: Beyond base reliability, we know security, privacy, and compliance are paramount. We’re securing this through a massive investment in physical data centers and application-level security, lights-out operations, architecting for zero customer data access, intelligent monitoring, and more. We’ve published our processes and met industry standards and regulations such as ISO, EU Model Clauses, HIPAA, FISMA, and CJIS for the largest and most demanding customers, such as the states of California and Texas. Find out more about the Office 365 Trust Center.

FastTrack deployment approach: Not everyone is ready to move their investments to the cloud all at once. New server releases of SharePoint and Exchange will happen in 2015.  Hybrid deployments spanning both cloud and on premises technologies will continue to be supported, including expanded search and line-of business access.

Enterprise social vision and road map: Introducing an integrated set of social, collaboration, and communication technologies that enable companies to work like a network—using the concepts that have changed our personal lives to transform the way we work:

• In the spring 2014 release of Microsoft Dynamics CRM, we’ll further enhance our customer-facing enterprise social capabilities by delivering a comprehensive set of new social listening, marketing, and service desk capabilities.
• This spring, Yammer Enterprise will also be included with the Office 365 Academic and Office 365 Midsize Business plans.
• This summer, we’ll surface the Office 365 navigation bar in Yammer, enabling unified navigation across Office 365.

You can read more detail on the announcements around Office Graph, Groups and Creating Inline Social Experiences.