prePress: Exploring Microsoft SharePoint 2013: New Features & Functions

We’re very pleased to announce the prePress eBook version of Penelope Coventry’s book, Exploring Microsoft SharePoint 2013: New Features & Functions is available!

With Microsoft prePress, you can order this ebook version and receive advance chapters now in just-written, not fully polished form. (Also applies to the ebook you get with the combined "Print & Ebook" option.) You'll be notified as new installments become available, and you'll get the complete and final ebook when released. It's a great way to get a headstart on a new topic or technology.

Discover what’s new and what’s changed in SharePoint 2013—and get a head start using these cutting-edge capabilities to improve organizational collaboration and effectiveness. Led by a Microsoft MVP for SharePoint, you'll learn how to take advantage of important new features and functionality, including app development, collaborative social enterprise tools, enhanced versioning, themes, improved search, and an extended client object model.

Get an expert look at how to develop SharePoint apps using collaborative social enterprise tools, use the new Minimal Download Strategy (MDS) smart technology to consume less bandwidth, version documents, list items, and entire parts of SharePoint with improved control, use colors and styles to get a themed version of your CSS with a simple line of code, and extend the client object model with enhanced search capabilities..

The final version Penny’s book will be available via online retailers the end of February. In the meantime, here’s more information about the book.

Contents at a Glance

Chapter 1: Architectural Enhancements

Chapter 2: Introducing the New Search Architecture

Chapter 3: Enterprise Content Management

Chapter 4: Social Computing

Chapter 5: Building Composite Solutions

Chapter 6: Business Intelligence

Introduction

The purpose of this book is to point out both the new and improved capabilities of SharePoint 2013. As with previous versions of SharePoint, SharePoint 2013 contains many features with which you will be familiar, some features might not have changed at all, others will have changed but at a high level will provide similar functionality that will not be new to you, and then there will be components that you will need time to fully understand before you can decide how they will benefit you and your organization.

With this version of SharePoint, Microsoft focuses on what a user can do, and therefore the focus of the improvements with SharePoint 2013 place users at the center of the SharePoint installation. In the coming months, as you learn more about SharePoint 2013, no longer will Microsoft talk about what SharePoint can do using the six-segment SharePoint 2010 circle that consisted of the Sites, Communities, Content, Search, Insights, and Composites. You will hear that SharePoint 2013 provides a new way to work together and is the new collaboration platform. It will talk about how users can Share, Organize, Discover, Build, and Manage ideas and content in a SharePoint environment. Following is a description of each of these concepts:

· 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 tablet in a cloud, or at a client site.

· Organize This is how you structure and categorize the information, whether it is 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 you’re 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 using the new Windows 8 interfaces computers, laptops, ultabooks, tablets, and Windows Phone. These are now introduced to the 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.

Microsoft’s 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 by 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 the illustration that follows):

· The ribbon is still there but not automatically visible when the Browse tab is active.

· Some of the components have moved. For example, the Site Actions tab has been replaced by a Setting icon that is now in the upper-right corner of the page.

· Some components are no longer displayed. For example, the components, such as the navigation up icon, and the portal connection link are still placed on the master page, but the default CSS rules prevent them from being shown.

About the Author

Penelope Coventry. MCITP, MCDST, MCTS, MCSA, MCSE, is a Microsoft MVP for SharePoint Server and an independent consultant based in the UK, with more than 30 years of industry experience. She has authored and coauthored several books on SharePoint, including Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2010 Step by Step, Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Inside Out and Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Business Connectivity Services. Penny has worked with SharePoint since 2001, and when not writing she works on large SharePoint deployments.