Is ‘SharePoint Online’ becoming ‘Office 365 Sites’?

There’s been a bit of chatter for some time now about the future of SharePoint.
An article over a year ago portrayed SharePoint as a technology Stack, much like .net

I couldn’t help but notice in my office 365 site, that SharePoint “Sites” aren’t actually branded “SharePoint” in the panel now:
Office365Portal_Dec_12_2014

See that?
Every other branded product has its brand name.
We see “Excel Online” not “Spreadsheet”
OneDrive is there.
So is Delve

And both PowerPoint Online and and OneNote Online use two lines to describe what those do.
In fact, there are exactly the same number of characters in the word “PowerPoint” as there are in “SharePoint”

Lets look at one more thing…
See that tile with the “V” – that’s not Visio, it’s Video, you know, Office 365 Video:

Office365VideoTitle

Now, if “Video” by itself means “Office 365 Video”, does it follow suit that “Sites” by itself means “Office 365 Sites”?

Lets look at a few more things in the o365 interface.
When I clicked on “Sites” the first time, I got this screen:
Office365Sites_screen1
Now here we can relax, Microsoft hasn’t rolled Sites into OneDrive. If you note the url, you’ll see it’s going to a mysite location. It’s the first time I’ve used this tenant, and mysites have never been setup for the user that I’m using.

After the mysite was setup, I went back to the first screenshot, and again clicked on the “Sites” link.
This time I came here:
Office365Sites_screen2
Now lets take a moment and examine that screen shall we?

  • There’s no mention of SharePoint…
  • Those familiar with the SharePoint 2013 branding might recognize the “S>” logo.
  • Those familiar with SharePoint infrastructure might notice that the URL is a SharePoint MySite.

If that’s a mysite, maybe the “team site” is different?

Curious, I had to create a standard old “team site” and see what it looked like – I did this in the SharePoint online admin panel (yes that’s still there, under the hood) Note, that I did this before the above screenshot was taken, which is why you see “Public Site” and “Team Site” in the screenshot.

Ok so what does a “Team Site” look like?
Office365Sites_TeamSite

See the word SharePoint anywhere on that screenshot?
I didn’t think so.
I even brought down the settings menu to see if there was any mention of it. (no)

Times they are a changing. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that the SharePoint Brand Name is on it’s way out.
Is it time to rethink the “SharePointJack” brand as well?

3 thoughts on “Is ‘SharePoint Online’ becoming ‘Office 365 Sites’?

  1. Yes, I think that the SharePoint brand is being subsumed into the O365 brand. We have heard of the same thing happening with Yammer. And we see it with Ignite swallowing up the SPC. So I think it would be a good time to rethink and reinvent your brand.

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