Hi Everyone. A significant number of my customers have reached out to me over the last several months about my Chatter for SharePoint solution and getting a version for SharePoint Online. I have been reluctant in the past to do a complete rewrite of the solution to make it compatible with SharePoint Online for several reasons – including performance, capabilities, cost and the sheer effort of converting all of this code to the client-side object model that Microsoft enforces on the multi-tenant platform. However – things change.

With Salesforce discontinuing their SharePoint products and ThreeWill (the only other vendor besides myself in this space) cancelling their SharePoint Online compatible product I’ve sort of been left ‘holding the bag’, so to speak, for this niche market. And a quick thank you again to Salesforce and ThreeWill for voluntarily recommending my products and services – I appreciate that very much.

It’s clear that the future of SharePoint is in the cloud; and it has reached a certain maturity and awareness that it’s time to start playing in this space. So I am happy to announce that Chatter for SharePoint Online is officially under active development and, unless something unexpected happens, should be ready for release in Q4 of 2017.

Here are some initial details so as to set expectations properly:

• This version is based on the feature set of the on-prem version of Chatter for SharePoint 2.6 (the latest release as of this time)
• The on-prem product will continue to be developed and, where practical, features in one will be present in the other
• The solution will be a provider-hosted App; this allows me to reuse much of the existing code and the server-side performance gains – like caching (in this scenario – I am the provider; you will not need any infrastructure to run this app)
• The initial release will include the feed web part functionality only; no User Profile Service integration or things that were typically in the Enterprise feature set. Some features can’t be reproduced; others will be added later. I will expand on this as development progresses further.
• This solution will be offered as a subscription model – based on a user count. Subscriptions will include multiple environments (Sandbox, Production), support, maintenance and scheduled upgrades
• This will be compatible with all Chatter licenses – including Chatter Free
• Pricing and other details are in the works

I will be posting additional details of the development progress and the product’s capabilities in the coming weeks. If you have any questions please feel free to leave a comment or contact me directly at marcdavis@sharepointadept.com. Thank you!