<p>Microsoft this month is releasing SharePoint 2013 to volume licensees, a move that sets the stage for partners to accelerate their customers' shift to the cloud.</p><p>SharePoint 2013, combined with Office 2013, will test the limits of how far organizations are willing to go to phase out their premises-based software in favor of shifting everyday work to a services-based model.</p><p>That's not to suggest that your customers will or should scrap their SharePoint deployments in favor of Office 365 or some other instantiation of the Microsoft collaboration platform that's subscription-based or hosted elsewhere. It's not an either-or proposition. But make no mistake: Microsoft wants your customers to gravitate to the SharePoint Online component of its Office 365 service.</p><p>"We really recommend moving to the cloud for the best experience overall," said John Teper, the Microsoft corporate vice president known as the "father of SharePoint," speaking in his opening keynote at the annual SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas last month. "We understand not everyone is there yet. This will take time. People who want to run their own servers, that's great. We have the best server release we've ever done in SharePoint 2013. The thing you should take away from our cloud focus is all we've learned about optimizing the system and deployment and monitoring, we've put into the server product and put into the deployment guidance."</p><p><a href="http://rcpmag.com/articles/2012/12/01/sharepoint-2013.aspx">Keep reading...</a></p>