SharePoint 2013 New Features

In this article, I am going to share something about SharePoint 2013 new features.

Social and Collaboration

Community Site

A wonderful newly added feature in SharePoint 2013 is “Community Site”. This is used to get and post the information on their interested community. It’s a new site template which is having extended discussion board. Let we go through some of the major features,

• Reputation score for each post
• Categorize the questions
• Will choose question based discussion
• Find the best reply (it must be one reply)
• Popular Discussion and replies

Follow People and Site

We will get the information about interested people in the News feed and People I’m Following pages. SharePoint 2013 is allowing us to follow the people by using SPSocialFollowingManager (Server object model) programmatically.

Addition to this, we may follow documents and sites, we will get the status update of document in News Feed and get the conversation on sites which we followed.

OneNote Integration

OneNote shared notebook is automatically created and inherits the permission when you created team site. We can use this for capture, compile and share the information. We can able to embed the documents with notebook. Those documents will be uploaded separately in document library.

Search

In SP 2013, we have an enhanced search feature like KQL (Keyword Query language) and FAST – search technology. We have custom content processing with Content Enrichment service and result will be displayed by their type.

Crawling, its capturing all metadata associated documents and content resides in whole site collection. Content Processing, It is redirecting process to link database. Analyzing Processing, It’s used to filter the content based on their popularity. Anchor text within the text also counted for ranking purpose. Indexing, the architecture of indexing is works like FAST – search. The separation of indexing like row and column to scale both data volumes and query loads. So the content changes will reflect in the index within seconds.

Apps

In SP 2013, we are calling all the components like list, library etc., as Apps. Users are having facility to create their own App and host in SharePoint store, this is called Cloud App Model.

Some Protocols for Apps:

• Few/No dependency on any other software on the device
• Doesn’t have any custom code with dependency
• May include SP components like List, Workflows, etc.,

We can choose any web application language (HTML, JS, PHP, .NET) to create an App. We can choose the development tool (VS 2012, “NAPA” O365 development tool) also. It supports tiered architecture to develop. Office Store, users around the world can publish and sell their app in office store.  An app catalog is a document library on SharePoint where manifest files for task pane and content apps can be published. 

Project Site

It’s a kind of site template to handle lightweight projects. The Project Manager can easily track, what is going around the project. Team members can see how their work fit to entire context. We can able to share project related data, documents and communication. Some notable features in project site are:

• Project Summary webpart
• Task’s Timeline
• Notebook for quick capturing
• Ability to connect project server 2013 client application

Business Intelligence in Excel Service

SharePoint 2013 is support enhanced BI features and functionality in Excel Service:

• New data navigation features, such as Quick Explore and make it easier to drill into data displayed in reports and dashboards
• Slicers and Timeline control render the excel in browser like excel client
•  The ability to open and use the Fields list for a PivotTable report or PivotChart report enables you to add, change, or remove items from a view. You can focus on the information that you want to see without having to open the Excel client.
• Choose between worksheet view and gallery view when publishing workbooks. You can display an entire worksheet in a browser window, or display content so that one report at a time is featured in the center of the screen.
• If Excel Services is configured to support Data Models, you can view and interact with PowerPivot and Power View content in a browser window.

Workflow

In SP 2013, Workflow architecture is redesigned by WF4. It was enhanced with Windows Workflow Foundation, built in messaging functionality which is provided by WCF. Workflows are no longer compiled into managed assemblies and deployed to assemble cache. In tool wise, SharePoint designer has updated with authoring environment of choice for authoring SharePoint workflows. And you can do the custom actions in visual studio and import them into SPD 2013, where they can accessed from workflow designer. Some of new actions added in designer,

• Assign Task
• Start a task process
• Go to this stage
• Start site workflow
• Trim String
• Find substring in string
• Replace substring in string
• Translate document
• Set workflow status

We have more new actions in workflow. I explored some of those here.

References

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj163177.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/jj163091.aspx

Summary

 I have explored some of newly added SP 2013 features. Happy Learning!!!