Apps4Rent Reviews SharePoint 2013

The much awaited Microsoft SharePoint 2013 is here. That too with a set of cool features that every SharePoint users were looking for. SharePoint 2013 will be available to you with many improvements which would yield instant benefits to your organization once implemented. Apps4Rent will offer SharePoint 2013 hosting solutions when a final version is released. Meanwhile, let us glance through the features of SharePoint 2013.

SharePoint Server 2013 Features

Enterprise Content Management (ECM): Enterprise Content Management System will be one of the main highlights of SharePoint 2013. Social integration, usability, and search features get strong enhancements which will allow users to share and seek data in a familiar and contemporary way. Some interesting ECM highlights include the following:

• FAST Search is now unified with SharePoint Server Search.
• You can drag and drop a document upload.
• You can share documents and files in your news feed.
• You can build usable and attractive navigation with managed metadata keywords or terms.
• You can perform mass edit of document metadata.

Enterprise Search: The Search feature in SharePoint 2013 has been restored entirely for huge scalability, a comprehensible search result experience, enterprise wide indexing, and more that demands precision. Some improvements to the Enterprise Search feature include the following:

• You can group similar search results together using result blocks.
• With the help of query suggestions, users can find what they searched for before.
• With the help of HTML editor, site collection administrators can build display templates in order to customize the search result appearance.
• You can find documents easily with the help of Microsoft Office file type icons.
• Ranking models helps improve intranet search, people search, and search on internet sites.
• Analytics is now put up straight into the SharePoint Search architecture.
• Query rules allow admins to align result blocks and promoted results.
• Constant crawling sorts new items almost quickly accessible in search results.
• You can now hover over preview panel for search results.

Enterprise Collaboration and Social Networking: Highly influenced by popular social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and others, Microsoft has put in lot of interesting features in its social networking platform. Some powerful features include the following:

• News feeds similar to that you see in Facebook with a like button and support for hyperlinks and pictures.
• SharePoint Workspace replaced with Skydrive Pro for offline content sync with a profound Microsoft Office 2013 integration.
• Threaded discussion boards that allow you to post replies to particular people in your network using the (at) name format feature as you see in Twitter.
• Follow feature similar to that in Twitter that allows you to follow specific people and documents to get appropriate updates.
• Hashtags to tag content for quick accessibility to people talking on the same topic.

Enterprise Workflow: SharePoint 2013 Workflow is rebuilt on Windows Workflow Foundation 4. This extends workflow processing outside the realm of SharePoint Server.  Some new Workflow features include the following:

• You will find visual and text based workflow design features in SharePoint Designer 2013.
• Now you can have workflows loop till a definite condition is met.

Enterprise Web Content Management (WCM): Microsoft has been planning major enhancements on this part of SharePoint 2013. The complete WCM platform has been restructured and enhanced for the up-to-date web standards, compatibility with mobile devices, quick content publishing and reuse, multi-language sites, and brand packaging and deployment. Other prominent enhancements include:

• Availability of familiar tools including Adobe Dreamweaver to design a brand or a site.
• Design manager to customize, preview, and package your site in the internet browser.
• Reusable content that can be viewed by different devices via device channels.
• Mark-up has be architected for modest CSS and HTML5.
• The new Content Search Webpart enables you to rollup content across site collections for suggested or related content.
• The new Machine translation service can spontaneously decode your content into diverse languages.
• You can create an ecommerce sites without any need for coding or out-of-the-box configuration.

Administration is made easy in SharePoint 2013!

Central Administration: SharePoint 2013 centralized administration offers advanced administrative functionality such as application management, system settings, monitoring via Health Analyzer, Timer Jobs, farm backup, granular backup, and restore, general and user security, and more.

Quick Management using PowerShell: Similar to other Microsoft server products, SharePoint 2013 can also be managed using PowerShell. However, it has more choices and automation possibilities. PowerShell ISE and PowerShell 3.0 in Windows Server 2012 offer you a more comprehensible script editing environment for creating SharePoint PowerShell scripts.

Easy Identity Management: SharePoint 2013 provides farm administrators various options to manage user accounts and how they validate to SharePoint. Some SharePoint 2013 authentication management features include ASP.NET form authentication, claims-based authentication and identity, IIS and Windows authentication.

Easy and Centralized App Management: The new SharePoint App infrastructure and framework allows administrators to install isolated App functionality to their farms and manage the related licensing all in a central place.

SharePoint 2013 Designer for code-less development of SharePoint applications: The new SharePoint 2013 includes new SharePoint Designer 2013 features such as CSS and HTML 5 support, refurbished graphical workflow designer interface, support to loops and workflow stages.

Improved Scalability and Performance: SharePoint 2013 boasts significant enhancements in performance and scalability. You get huge database I/O improvements with shredded storage and quicker load times all thanks to better caching and IIS compression.

End-User can be more than happy with SharePoint 2013

Optimized Mobile Experience: SharePoint 2013 offers the new Microsoft metro user interface for both desktop and mobile users. The push notification feature allows you to send device updates to a Windows phone. The new release also supports geolocation which is used for mobile application development. Some mobile devices can also view business intelligence data such as SQL Reporting Services reports, , Excel Services reports, and PerformancePoint Web Parts and. You can also view Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents in mobile browsers with additional functionality.

SharePoint 2013 for Developers

Client Object Model: Use Client Object Model to build applications that operate outside SharePoint Server. The Client Object Model communicates with SharePoint through web service call. There are three kinds of client object models, i.e., one for Silverlight applications, one for .Net applications, and one for mobile applications. There is also a JavaScript object model and new OData/REST endpoints which enables you to build various applications using your platform of choice and language.

SharePoint Apps: In SharePoint 2013, sandboxed solutions have been swapped with SharePoint Apps. SharePoint Apps have more dominant capabilities which include the ability to make use of cross site collection data, single locked down permissions, and ability to build applications with familiar languages and IDEs.

Business Connectivity Services: SharePoint 2013 has prolonged the business connectivity service to include  OData as a supported data source, new Eventing (event handler) framework, , support for SharePoint Apps, a new client side object model (CSOM) API, and External list performance improvements.