Microsoft officially demonstrated the new SharePoint yesterday, claiming a huge investment in social, cloud and mobile capabilities.

Speaking at the SharePoint Conference 2012, the software giant showed the new product enhancements during the release, claiming the SharePoint program to be one of their most popular business products ever.

The company also revealed the program has grown to more than US$2 billion, adjusted, in annual revenue.

“This growth underscores the power and passion of the SharePoint community of customers, partners and developers,” said Jeff Teper, corporate vice president, Microsoft.

“The new SharePoint is a pivotal release that not only delivers an amazing amount of innovation today, it lays the foundation for exciting new innovations in the future.”

Key features:

• A new and simplified user experience. Share documents inside or outside your organisation with a single click, drag and drop content into document libraries, edit lists inline, and create new sites in seconds.

• Document store and sync. Use SkyDrive Pro to store and sync your documents across all your devices.

• Task management. Organise your work with task lists and project timelines. Consolidate task management across SharePoint, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Project.

• Smarter search. Find what you’re looking for with the new and improved FAST Search. Customize and narrow your search for more relevant results and discover related people and documents with recommendations.

• Core services. Manage risk with eDiscovery across SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Lync and file shares. Create dynamic websites with cross-site publishing and enhanced Web content management. Improve scalability and performance with a new cloud architecture.

Social: Changing the way we work

Microsoft also unveiled the company’s vision for the future of enterprise social.

“We envision a world in which social is woven into the apps you use every day — where people work together using new experiences that combine the power of social with collaboration, email and unified communications,” Teper said.

The company shared a road map for SharePoint and Yammer integration, with customers now able to connect two systems with Yammer Web parts and the new Yammer Open Graph capabilities.

As a next step, Microsoft is investing in unified identity, integrated document management and feed aggregation.

Changes to Yammer packaging and pricing were also revealed, consolidating Yammer’s paid services into a single offering, Yammer Enterprise, and reducing the price of the service from $15 to $3 per user per month.

For Enterprise Agreement customers, Microsoft says it plans to ship Yammer Enterprise with Microsoft SharePoint Online and the Office 365 Enterprise plans with no change in price for existing customers.

“This means customers get the best cloud productivity service and the best enterprise social service together — Office 365 plus Yammer,” said David Sacks, corporate vice president, Microsoft.

“These packaging changes are just a first step into a future where Yammer will power new social experiences across your business applications.”

New cloud app model

Microsoft also revealed a new cloud app model for over 700,000 developers building on SharePoint.

The software maker says the new app model and a new Office Store make it easier for developers to "build, buy, deploy and manage applications using existing Web development skills."

Mobile apps for anywhere access

"Helping people work from anywhere and across any device", Microsoft introduced new native SharePoint mobile apps to give people access to SharePoint news feeds and documents on Windows 8, Windows Phone, iOS and Android devices.

Microsoft says all apps will work with both SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online.

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