The time has come for me to do, as I’ve done now for eight years (2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007 and 2006), my annual post to sum up the year. It is always fun to look back to what happened the past 12 months. This past year has been a somewhat “in-betweeners” year.

We (me, my clients, colleagues etc.) are standing on the edge of something big and the bridge over to the other side is really, really long. Some hesitate to pass the bridge, thinks it is to steep down, some people are running across it in fear, some take it just easy and some pass it half-ways and then stalls there not knowing which direction to go. Microsoft has already passed the bridge to the other side, they ran as fast as they could. But, they dropped so many things on the way over, things that I and others need to pick up and fix and very often even remind Microsoft that they dropped it at all!

Confusing – yes, stressing – hell yea, annoying – yup, new opportunities – oh YEA, wanting to go back – nope!

Writing

I think I hit an all-time low in blog postings this year. Not that it has been so little to write, rather that I’ve been having to little time. I have a bunch of posts in the works, that never has been published, due to various reasons.

According to my telemetry this is what you peeps liked this year:

I’m really glad that the last two of those posts ended up that high. Really liked working those scenarios out.

Speaking

I’ve been fortunate to be invited to a number of conferences the past year as well. The highlight of course is the SharePoint Conference 2014, where I had a total of three sessions. The most awesome experience from that conference was when the room after one of my sessions were empty and people stayed for an hour and a half just asking questions!

See you in May at the new Microsoft Ignite conference. You can keep up to date on my past and future presentations on this page.

MVP

For the fifth time I was awarded the Microsoft MVP Award for my community contributions. Always an honor and passing the five year mark was a bit special.

Predictions

Each year I try to predict what is going to happen to us and our business in the future. Last year I talked a lot about SharePoint being a service (six years after the SharePoint Services announcement at PDC08), Azure dominating the cloud space and Microsoft focusing everything on Services. SharePoint may not yet be dead, this product has more lives than a cat. Azure is still growing faster than I can keep up with and I like it! And the Services piece – I think this is the most important of all my predictions last year. Microsoft is focusing on owning the services and the data – the device, product etc. is not the top prio. Take a look at the Microsoft Band – an awesome device but the service behind it is what makes the big difference, no other vendor is even close to competing in that space.

So, 2015, what will happen? I think I stick to my Services, services, services prediction. 2015 is all about the services! I’ll leave it to that. If you don’t understand how the services will change our business you better look for a career change.

What’s next?

I have to admit that 2014 was not one of my favorite years, due to multiple reasons. I’ve been pretty tired of this whole “SharePoint & Office 365” situation and it has taken me some deep reflections and analysis to get my inspiration back. But 2015 will be a really interesting year. Too keep you on the hook a little bit more, head back to this blog on Friday!

Happy New Year!

I whish all of you a Happy New Year and I hope that your 2015 will be an awesome ride!