SharePoint 2013 vs. 2010 – Part 7 – Composite

SharePoint 2013 and Office 15 considerably improve the capabilities for Composite solution development and further empower power users to solve many of their business problems on their own. Here are some of the new and enhance features: New features Enhanced features  

  1. Access Apps: robust way to create and combine a Composite solution and a SharePoint app without code and without even using Visual Studio. By contrast, Access 15 uses SQL Server to store data. This significantly improves the manageability and scalability of Access applications.
  2. Workflow: The new SharePoint 2013 workflow features enable more advanced, robust no-code solutions and include the following:

    1. A redesigned Workflow architecture that supports legacy workflows.
    2. Workflow Stages that enable more complex logic.
    3. Authoring workflows in SharePoint15 declaratively or visually.
    4. Integration of data from SOAP Web Services into workflows.
  3. Business Connectivity Services: Changes in Business Connectivity Services for the SharePoint 2013 expose more of Business Connectivity Services to the power user, and include the following:

    1. Enhancements to external lists
    2. Ability to export to Excel
    3. Workflows and subscriptions
    4. Support for OData sources

 

SharePoint 2013 vs. 2010 – Part 6 – Mobile Support

​The experiences from SharePoint Server 2010 have been improved to make end users more productive on devices that have a smaller display. Additionally, some new features have been included. Here are some of the new and enhance features: New features Enhanced features

  1. Optimized mobile browser experience: SharePoint 2013 offers improvements to the mobile browser experience. Depending on the mobile browser, end users have one of the following experiences:

    1. Classic view. This view renders in HTML format, or similar markup languages (CHTML, WML and so on), and provides backward compatibility for mobile browsers that cannot render in the new contemporary view.
    2. Contemporary view. This view offers an optimized mobile browser experience to end users. The view renders in HTML5. This view is available to Mobile Internet Explorer® version 9.0 or higher for Windows Phone 7.5, and for Safari version 4.0 or higher for iPhone 4.0.
  2. Office Mobile Web Apps: In SharePoint 2013, Office Web Apps provides browser-based companions to Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft OneNote. When Office Web Apps is installed on SharePoint Server 2010, Office Mobile Web Apps is also installed on the server. Office Mobile Web Apps enables users to open documents in the mobile web application by using a mobile browser.

With SharePoint 2013, Office Web Apps is no longer a companion product installed on a SharePoint Server. Instead, Office Web Apps Server is a new stand-alone server product that delivers Office Web Apps functionality on your private network. Although these are now separate products, Office Web Apps Server continues to enable Office Mobile Web Apps, making them available to mobile users who access SharePoint sites.

  1. Mobile browser redirection: To access a site using the optimized mobile browser experience, a new feature called Automatic Mobile Browser Redirection must be activated on the site. When activated and a mobile browser is accessing the site, this feature checks the mobile browser to determine if it is capable of handling HTML5 or not. If the mobile browser supports HTML5, the contemporary view is rendered; otherwise, the classic view is rendered.
  2. Push notifications: SharePoint 2013 supports applications on mobile devices (such as smartphones, tablets, and so on) that should receive notifications from a SharePoint site. Notifications can include events that happen in the site, such as when a user adds an item to a list or updates an item. For mobile devices to receive such notifications, device applications must register with a SharePoint site. Once the device is registered, you can write event handler code to interact with Microsoft Push Notification Service or notification services of other mobile device platforms. Notifications are sent from the server where the application is hosted to the registered mobile device application.

SharePoint 2013 vs. 2010 – Part 4 – Social Computing

SharePoint 2013 provides several key enhancements and additions to the My Site environment. The new user interface simplifies navigation among different parts of the site, and provides features that should be intuitive and familiar, especially to those who’ve used social networking sites.

Here are some of the new and enhance features:

New features

Enhanced features

 

  1. New Simple user interface: The new My Site user interface provides a unified design that makes it easier to move around the different pages of the site. A Quick Launch column lets you move among My Site pages quickly. My Site Quick Launch improvements include:
    1. “What’s New” link takes you to your newsfeed.
    2. “Documents” link takes you to your personal document library. You can also display a list of documents that you’re following, or the list of documents other people have shared with you.
    3. View a list of tasks, people and sites that you’re following, or click “About Me” to update your user profile.
    4. “Blog” link takes you to a list of your existing blogs. If you have no existing blogs, this link takes you to a page where you can start a new blog.
    5. “Edit Links” is a new customizable area of the Quick Launch in which you can add links to other lists from your My Site or to lists from other SharePoint sites.
  2. Microblogging feature: This features allows you to engage in a threaded conversation from the MySite (similar to Facebook and twitter). You can start a public conversation, where everyone in your organization can view and respond to your posts, or start a conversation with people you exclusively invite to participate.

    1. Use @mention to comment on other people’s activities and bring attention to their ideas. In turn, people learn about you and your ideas when you get @mentioned.
    2. Apply hashtags to conversation items. You can click hashtags in your newsfeed to show a search results page that has all conversations that include that hashtag.
    3. Share entire conversations using “Copy link to thread.” For example, suppose you have a conversation in your newsfeed you think a colleague would find especially interesting. You can send that person a link and enable them to view the entire conversation.
    4. “Like” posts in your newsfeed. People following you see posts you found interesting in their newsfeeds. You can view your “Likes” later and find these posts again.
    5. Include pictures and links in your conversations.
  3. Local Sync (SharePoint Workspace): You can now synchronize files in your documents library to a local Windows folder, giving you direct access to your My Site documents from your file system. Syncing to a local folder also gives you access to your documents when you’re offline; updates automatically sync to the server whenever you go back online.
  4. Simplified feature to store and share documents: SharePoint Online 15 Technical Preview simplifies the procedures for storing and sharing documents:

    1. You can now store all documents in a single library. This takes the place of sorting documents into either a “Shared Documents” or “Private Documents” folder. Most importantly, in the new document library, all documents are initially private until you decide to share them. Add a document to your library, and then invite people to share the document. You simultaneously provide or deny editing rights to the document as you invite people.
    2. People you invite to share a document receive an email with a link to the document (unless you choose to not send an email with the invitation). People who are sharing the document can optionally follow it and then receive updates in their newsfeed whenever the document gets updated.
    3. You can now move documents to any other SharePoint library where you have permission to add documents. For example, you might decide to move a document you added to your My Site library to a team site library.
    4. You can view a callout by clicking an icon next to the document name. From the callout, you can start a variety of activities, such as copy document URLs, share the document with specific contacts, and move the document to another location.
    5. The library comes with a standard set of columns, such as Type, Modified, Modified By, Shared, and Name, each with a set of filtering options. For example, the Type column lets you filter documents by file type. The Shared column lets you filter documents by people with whom you’re currently sharing documents. Users can still create new views as needed.

SharePoint 2013 vs. 2010 – Part 2 – ECM

Enterprise Content Management in 2013 My second has to be about Enterprise Content Management in SharePoint 2013. The records management and compliance features in SharePoint 2013 provide improved ways to help you to protect the business. The records archive and in-place record retention from previous versions of SharePoint Server are still supported. SharePoint 2013 adds:

New features

Enhanced features

  1. Site Retention: Retention policies that are applied at the level of a site.
  2. eDiscovery: A site collection from which you can perform eDiscovery queries across multiple SharePoint farms and Exchange servers and preserve items.
  3. Mail as a record: In-place preservation of Exchange mailboxes and SharePoint sites — including list items and pages — while still allowing users to work with site content.
  4. File shares: Support for searching and exporting content from file shares.
  5. Export: A tool to export discovered content from Exchange and SharePoint.

Site-based compliance Compliance features of SharePoint 2013 have been extended to sites. You can create and manage retention policies in SharePoint 2013, and the policies will apply to SharePoint sites and any Exchange team mailboxes that are associated with the sites. Compliance officers create policies, which define:

  • The retention policy for the entire site and the team mailbox, if one is associated with the site.
  • What causes a project to be closed
  • When a project should expire.

When a project begins, the project owner creates a SharePoint site and an Exchange team mailbox. The project owner selects the appropriate policy template, and invites team members to join the project. As the team adds documents to the site, sends email messages, and creates other artifacts such as lists, these items automatically receive the correct retention policies. When the work has been completed, the project owner closes the project, which removes the project's folders from the team members' user interface in Microsoft Outlook®. After a certain period of time, as specified by the policy, the project expires, and the artifacts associated with the project are deleted. Discovery Center SharePoint 2013 introduces a new site for managing discovery cases and holds. The Discovery Center site template creates a portal through which you can access discovery cases to conduct searches, place content on hold, and export content. For each case, you create a new site that uses the Discovery Case site template. Each case is a collaboration site that includes a document library which you can use to store documents related to the management of the case. In addition, you can associate the following things with each case:

  • Sources: Exchange mailboxes, SharePoint sites, or file shares from which content can be discovered.
  • Queries: The search criteria, such as author, date range, and free-text terms, as well as the scope of the search. Queries are used to identify content to export.
  • Discovery sets: Combinations of sources, queries, and whether or not to preserve content. Discovery sets are used to identify and preserve content.
  • Exports: A list of all of the exports that have been produced relating to the case.

When there is a new need for discovery — for example, a legal case or an audit — a user with the appropriate permission can create a new case, add sources of information to be searched, create queries to identify the specific material to be located, and then execute the queries. The user can then preserve the sites and mailboxes in which content was discovered, retain the items that matched the queries, and export the items. When the case is closed, all of the holds associated with the case are released. In-place preservation In SharePoint 2013, content that is placed on hold is preserved, but users can still modify it. The state of the content at the time of preservation is recorded. If a user modifies the content or even deletes it, the original, preserved version is still available. Regular users see the current version of the content; compliance officers who have permission to use the eDiscovery features of SharePoint 2013 are able to access the original, preserved version. Preserving content is similar to placing it on hold, with the following enhancements:

  • Documents, list items, pages, and Exchange Server 15 mailboxes can be preserved.
  • Preservation is done at the level of a site. Preserving a site preserves the contents of the site.
  • Users can continue to work with content that is preserved. The content remains in the same location, and users can edit, delete, and add new content.
  • A user with the permission to perform eDiscovery can access the original version of preserved content.
  • You do not have to preserve an entire site or mailbox. You can specify a query to define the preservation scope, and preserve only the content that matches the query.

Discovery export SharePoint 2013 includes the Discovery Download Manager, a Windows 7 application that you can use to export the results of an eDiscovery search for later import into a review tool. The Discovery Download Manager can export all of the content that is associated with a discovery case, including:

  • Documents: Documents are exported from file shares. Documents and their versions are exported from SharePoint 2013.
  • Lists: If a list item was included in the eDiscovery query results, the entire list is exported as a comma-separated values (.csv) file.
  • Pages: SharePoint 2013 pages, such as wiki pages or blogs, are exported as MIME HTML (.mht) files.
  • Exchange objects: Items in an Exchange Server 15 mailbox, such as tasks, calendar entries, contacts, email messages, and attachments, are exported as a personal storage (.pst) file.

An XML manifest that conforms to the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) specification provides an overview of the exported information. Enterprise-wide eDiscovery With SharePoint 2013, you can centrally manage eDiscovery across multiple SharePoint farms, Exchange servers, and file shares. From one discovery center you can:

  • Create a case, define a query, and search SharePoint 2013, Exchange Server 15, and file shares throughout the enterprise for content that matches the query.
  • Export all of the content that was identified.
  • Preserve items in place in SharePoint 2013 or Exchange Server 15.
  • Track statistics related to the case.

To implement eDiscovery across the enterprise, you first select one farm to host the discovery center. The Search Service application that is associated with this farm becomes the central Search Service application, for eDiscovery purposes. You create a proxy to the central Search Service application in each SharePoint Server farm that contains discoverable content, and configure the central Search Service application to crawl file shares that contain discoverable content. SharePoint 2013 automatically discovers the connection to Exchange Server 15. Any content from SharePoint 2013, Exchange Server 15, or a file share that is indexed by the central Search Service application or by Exchange Server 15 can be discovered from the discovery center.  

SharePoint 2013 vs. 2010

​I have been asked many times in the past few weeks about the differences between SharePoint 2013 and 2010. A lot of questions in the community on what changed, what has been added or removed, and what features have been enhanced.   TechNet or MSDN do not go into much details of feature comparison, they provide a high level checklist.   There are so many features to cover that can be added to just one post. To this matter, I have decided to put series of blog posts showcasing what I have gathered about SharePoint 2013 while working with in the past year or so. I will start with Search, the most change that Microsoft has undertaken in this versions. Search Search in SharePoint 2013 is most enhanced feature from 2010. FAST Search is now included as part of SharePoint unlike 2010 where we had to have 2 separate products and farms for FAST and SharePoint. Here are the many improvements features of search in 2013 that do not exist in 2010:

  

New features

  

Enhanced features

1.     Query Throttling: Query throttling is a new feature set which allows throttling of queries in tiers. 2.     Search Portability: This new feature of search portability allows for the transfer of query rules, results sources, result types, schema, and custom ranking models from one place to another.  They can be transferred from and to a tenant, site collection, or site. 3.     Hybrid: Another new feature in SharePoint 2013 allowing you to connect the on-premise SharePoint 2013 deployment with the Office365 content. 4.     Enhance User Experience: The entire SharePoint product, including the search experience, has a new look and feel to the user interface that's clean and simple.  The search experience now has larger previews of PowerPoint and Word documents when hovering over results (requires Office Web Apps).  In same hover panel, you can now see the section headers of Word documents and the slide titles of PowerPoint presentations.  Clicking on these headers and slide titles will take your straight to the right paragraph or slide! 5.     Crawl Freshness Report: The crawl freshness report is a new report that shows the freshness (the average time since the document was last updated and when it was crawled) of the documents that crawl is currently processing.  6.     Query Rule Management: The query rule management UI has been refreshed for improved readability.  Functionality for debugging query rules has been added as well.  You can test out query rules to see which ones are firing.