Although it’s well-understood by seasoned SharePoint professionals and people who follows SharePoint and Office 365 recent announcements, it’s worth to note that many folks in the industry may not aware of where SharePoint is going and what are it’s alternative features. For a while SharePoint has been Swiss-army knife of various business workloads and known as jack of all trades and master of none.

In my most recent project assignment, I had a opportunity to perform an exercise to show where Microsoft is going with recent announcements and what are possible replacements or alternatives for SharePoint.

As of Nov 2014, if I have to summarize where we are going with SharePoint, it would be – “SharePoint is being decentralized as individual Office 365 services”, here is why and list of high level workloads:

What’s mapped to Office 365 and other Decentralized Services?

• Collaboration – SharePoint Team Sites -> Office 365 Groups (not Yammer Groups)
• Digital Asset Management – SharePoint Asset Libraries -> Azure based Office 365 Video Portal
• Personal Data Storage – SharePoint My Sites -> OneDrive for Business
• Proactive Search – SharePoint Search -> Delve/Oslo (not SharePoint Search)
• Enterprise Social Networking – SharePoint Social, Newsfeed, Community Portal -> Yammer
• Business Process Automations – SharePoint Workflow -> Azure Workflow Manager
• Web version of Office – Office Web Apps -> Office Online
• Customizations – Full Trust, Sandbox -> SharePoint Apps
• Self-Service Business Intelligence – PerformancePoint, SSRS, Excel Services -> Power BI and Excel Services
• Extranet – Traditional SharePoint Extranets -> External Sharing
• Electronics Forms – InfoPath -> Access, Word, and Excel
• User Identities – Active Directory -> Azure Active Directory

What stays in SharePoint Online or SharePoint 2013?

• Document Management – Document Libraries
• Portals – Intranet and Extranet
• Collaboration – SharePoint specific Team and Project Sites
• Traditional Reactive Search – SharePoint Enterprise Search
• Web Content Management – Publishing Sites and SharePoint WCM features
• Corporate Taxonomies & folksonomies – Managed Metadata
• User Profiles, Expertise Search, and People Directory

Let me know if I have missed anything.