Today, at 12:30 PM my local time, Microsoft is doing a big reveal at an event they call, “The Future of SharePoint.” It’s apparently going to be something big, because the SharePoint Social Media Universe has been able to talk of nothing else for weeks now.

I’ll be anxiously watching this event today, but before I do, I thought about the things that I’d like to see in the future of SharePoint.

Crystal Ball on Ice Crystal Ball on Ice, courtesy of https://www.flickr.com/photos/punktoad/4302556980, (CC BY 2.0)

Now these are not prognostications. I know an MVP or two, but they’ve remained faithful to their NDA’s. This is just what I would like to see happen with SharePoint.

  1. A Master Page that’s responsive and compatible with modern web design sensibilities. Microsoft has warned us against modifying it, lest we pay the “modification tax,” but our clients keep saying, “Responsive, responsive, responsive.” You’ve got to meet us half-way.
  2. Office Dev PnP Tooling (or something like it) baked in to Visual Studio just as well as the Feature Framework tooling was baked in to VS 2012/2013. And while we’re on the subject, can we please have some less roundabout ways to get things done? As much as I love Vesa Juvonen and the work he and his team have done, this needs to have some real Microsoft institutional oomph behind it.
  3. And while we’re at it, let’s have a better story for client-side, non-App/Add-in-oriented development. SharePoint 2013 is approaching the sunset and 2016 is being born, and I’ve still yet to actually write an app for a client. They don’t want to set up that infrastructure, and if they have no intention of adding untrusted stuff from the internet they shouldn’t have to.
  4. Okay, this isn’t SharePoint so much, but what’s the deal with javascript Intellisense in an Angular app in Visual Studio? Eh, it won’t be much of an issue for me in the future, since after recently completing a moderately large javascript project, I now solemnly swear to use Typescript forever and ever, amen.
  5. Either integrate Yammer like you promised or get rid of the damn thing. I was at the SharePoint Conference in Vegas where they announced the acquisition, and the two products seem no better integrated today than they were then. SharePoint 2013 could have been the launchpad from which real Office Social Networking took off, but instead Microsoft strangled it with a garrote from the back seat of a late 70’s model sedan.
  6. Some kind of way forward for InfoPath! Surely when it comes to something as basic to human business life as forms, there must be some happy medium between “let’s use an end-of-life’d technology that no one at Microsoft will touch with a ten foot pole” and “time to write another fat check to that javascript developer!” Sure I’m usually the javascript developer they write that fat check to, but I do have some sympathy for my clients.
  7. A device that sends an electric shock to any person who attempts to use SharePoint as a relational database back-end for a super-customized, nowhere-near-the-box, not-at-all-like-SharePoint front-end. Yes, this device would probably kill me, but my smoking corpse could serve as a warning to others…