What About Hosted SharePoint Don't You Understand?

Me? Plenty.

But today, after talking to Joel Oleson, aka SharePoint Joel of blogosphere fame and Quest's number one SharePoint guru, I am comforted by one thing he said.

I'd asked him about hosted SharePoint/BPOS/cloud services, especially regarding Microsoft's big talk-up of the cloud at TechEd2010 recently and he said people he knew were talking about it, yes: "Having IT take on a different role--that's a scary thing. What does that mean for the team? Microsoft hasn't addressed it."

But, he added, even though no one really knows what will happen to IT if the cloud becomes big, in the SharePoint world, "It doesn't mean you should fire the team. A layer is outsourced, but IT might become more like consultants or analysts...you're not going to throw all your SharePoint online--some apps will still be on premises."

We also talked about a lot of other SharePoint stuff, which was terrific, and I'll tell more next week.