Penelope Coventry - Exploring Microsoft® SharePoint® 2013: New Features & Functions

• DRM-free ebooksuse your ebooks across devices without restrictions or limitations

• Multiple formatsuse on your laptop, tablet, or phone

• Lifetime access, with free updates

• Dropbox syncingyour files, anywhere

• Share . You can share when talking about your content and information, spreading it socially, spreading it online, spreading it easily across multiple places and devices where you might need to interconnect, whether it is on-premises, mobile, on a tablet in a cloud, or at a client site.

• Organize . This is how you structure and categorize the information, whether it is a project, team, or information held in documents using SharePoint Office 2013 applications, such as Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Project, and syncing your content in SharePoint to your desktop with Microsoft SkyDrive Pro.

• Discover . This concept includes connecting people across your organization, the discovery of insights and answers through the use of Business Intelligence, and finding what youre looking for by using enterprise search. In this version of SharePoint, Microsoft has invested a great deal of effort into the integration of enterprise search.

• Build . SharePoint 2013 has undergone major changes to the application model for how to build applications that are hosted on systems that are maintained by organizations on-premises, or when the systems are maintained outside of the control of an organization, in the cloud; how to publish these applications internally through a corporate catalog; and publishing them outside an organization as well as sharing them across on-premises farms and cloud-based farms through a public store. The new application mode also makes it possible for applications to be shared within office applications by using the new Windows 8 interface-based computers, laptops, ultrabooks, tablets, and Windows Phone. These are now introduced to the Microsoft Office 2013 applications.

• Manage . SharePoint 2013 provides better support for managing SharePoint as a platform. It can be run in the cloud with Microsoft Office 365. It contains new archiving, eDiscovery, and case management capabilities that include SharePoint 2013, Microsoft Exchange Server 2013, and Microsoft Lync 2013.

You can find more details about Office 365 at office365.microsoft.com .

Microsofts aim is still for SharePoint to be a self-service product; that is, providing users with the ability to complete their tasks using no-code solutions by using the browser and Microsoft Office applications.

SharePoint 2013 consists of two products: SharePoint Foundation 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013. The exposure of two sets of functionality still exists in SharePoint Server, but is implemented using standard and enterprise client access licenses with a new licensing model. There is no longer a separate Microsoft FAST Search Server for SharePoint. You will find much of the functionality that was included in that product now incorporated as part of SharePoint 2013. Another change is that Microsoft Office Web Apps is a separate product and should be installed on servers on which SharePoint is not installed. Also, if your organization is a heavy user of SharePoint to automate business processes, there are changes with which you can distribute the workflow business logic onto servers where SharePoint is not installed.

As usual, the user interface has changed, but only slightly, as detailed in the following list (see also ):

Hopefully, you will consider that these changes are minor, and as you pilot your upgrade to SharePoint 2013, the user feedback will confirm that it will not be necessary to formally retrain your users when you do upgrade.

Figure 1. Comparing the SharePoint 2010 user interface to the new SharePoint 2013 user interface.