Puzzlepart was founded on the bet of the concept of Apps arriving in the enterprise space, and that it will be a complete game changer. When we started our quest in 2008 the concept of apps was just arriving in the consumer space. Today we have app-store ready native SharePoint Apps that delivers immediate business value impact.

In 2010 we were happy to see Gartner backing us up saying that ” By 2015, SharePoint will be as popular a platform for content applications as the iPhone, with 20,000 applications available.”, and right now we see that this prediction is getting more and more likely to come through with indications on a push on Apps in the SharePoint platform.

In this article series we will share our analysis on why we think Microsoft will do for the business what Apple has done for the consumer. We will outline what we think are the most important preconditions for a successful App Marketplace for the enterprise, and finally we will share our vision on how corporate IT will be fundamentally changed through a new generation of business software in the form of business Apps.

Part I: SharePoint Apps – Microsoft’s Knock-out blow to Google?

Part II: SharePoint – The ultimate Apps Platform for the Enterprise

Part III: Revolutionizing Business Apps for SharePoint

Part IV: The barriers facing a SharePoint App Marketplace

Part V: Envisioning a perfect App Marketplace in SharePoint

Part VI: Our speculations on SharePoint 2013 and a Marketplace (COMING SOON)

Part VI: How SharePoint Apps will transform Enterprise IT (COMING SOON)

We hope to engage you all in a discussion on how Apps will transform enterprise software. Talk to us on facebook or twitter, or simply follow @puzzlepart   to get updates on the articles and related stuff in the time to come.

About the Authors
We live and breathe (and breed) apps in Puzzlepart, and this article series are based on the discussions in our team over the past years.

Mads & Mikael work on Puzzlepart’s Apps 24-7 as CTO and App Developer Lead – nothing excites them more than the notion of a marketplace.

Puzzleparts SharePoint Search MVP Mikael Svenson who just published his book “Working with Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint” has made valuable author support.

Senior Solution Architect and reknown SharePoint Governance blogger KjellSJ has done a lot of the research for this series.

Founder of the Norwegian .NET User Group and former TANDBERG executive Andreas Eide has shared his experience with the long term trends of Microsoft, and provided his Puzzlepart CEO perspective.

Also thanks to the rest of the team for our valuable discussions and your constructive comments!

Friendly Disclaimers
This article series is based on our perception of the market situation, and the recent *publicly* released documentation from Microsoft on SharePoint 15. The author has had no access to any NDA regulated material from Microsoft, so this is all to be considered our qualified guesses and predictions.

Puzzlepart is a Microsoft shop. We have made a huge bet on this technology. We are as subjective as we can be. BUT. We are very thorough, and we’re not gamblers. We got decades of experience in this field, and we truly believe in what we do, because we have done our homework. We want to make enterprise software better, and we think our best chance of reaching as many users as possible is on the Microsoft platform.

Puzzlepart are Gold Sponsors for the European SharePoint Conference 2013. Why not join them? Contact aoife@sharepointeurope.com  or call + 353 91 514 501 for more information.

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