Collaboration Spaces and Likely Future Investment

Many Microsoft technologies offer persistent discussions and document sharing, but not all will receive continued Microsoft investment. The technologies listed here all provide text discussions and document sharing to persistent groups. The “Future Microsoft Investment” column summarizes Directions on Microsoft’s forecast of future Microsoft development effort and other investment in each technology. The chart also summarizes three of the factors considered in our forecast:

Office 365 Groups. Is this offering based on Office 365 Groups technology? Investment in Groups-based offerings suggests that Microsoft is adopting it broadly as its collaboration platform.

Recent Microsoft investment. How much investment has the technology received since Exchange Server 2013, SharePoint Server 2013, and Lync Server 2013 were released and incorporated into Office 365? Heavy recent investment suggests that Microsoft has a longer-term plan for a technology.

Installed base. How many customers are there to fund future investment, and who would be affected by retirement of the technology? Microsoft does not typically publish usage figures for technologies, but history and software version requirements provide a rough estimate.