Six Mobile Features for the Enterprise

Let’s face it, mobility should absolutely be on your radar if you’re an IT executive or decision maker. Whether your firm has a substantial investment in mobile devices for the workforce or you’ve adopted modern BYOD policies, you cannot ignore the impact of mobile devices on how we do business. Microsoft knows this, and has been hard at work to upgrade SharePoint’s plumbing in relation to the mobile experience.

The below list comprises some of the notable, new features Microsoft has developed for SharePoint 2013. This isn’t really a list for any particular type of user; it’s just a general overview of how Microsoft is adding to the feature set. The list is ranked based on my opinion of relevance and value to the organization.

1. Contemporary View

The first feature that will grab everyone’s eye is the new HTML5 view that is best suited for mobile devices. Think of it as a mix between the boring and lifeless classic view from SharePoint 2010 and the new metro look and feel for SharePoint 2013.

What you get is a clean and highly compatible UI that should work on just about any device supporting HTML5. A new site feature handles whether or not mobile devices are automatically routed to this view or not, so it couldn’t be easier to deploy for IT pros. (Figure 1)

Figure 1

Figure 2

2. Device Channels

Here’s a gem for site managers and devs. You now have the ability to render content for the appropriate device without having to duplicate the content itself. This functionality lets you serve up the same content with multiple master pages, page layouts and style sheets. If all goes well, you should be able to support most of the mobile devices in your firm with a lot less overhead than with 2010. The current list of compatible mobile browsers is available on the Microsoft Technet site.

3. Better Office Web Apps UX with Touch Support on Tablets

Working with Office Web Apps on a mobile device in SharePoint 2010 left a lot to be desired. Editing documents was not really possible on many devices and browsers (without a hack), which left users with the ability to basically view only.

Fig. 3

Flash forward three years, and the dominance of information workers working on the go has caused Microsoft to revamp their offerings. Unless you were living under a rock, you should already be familiar with the big push Microsoft is making for the new web-based versions of the popular Office apps. (Fig. 3)








The new UI sports bigger buttons, gesture support, context menus (rejoice!), support for touch, mouse and keyboard input, and many more cool features. I don’t expect the experience to be any different coupled with SharePoint 2013, so you can test drive the experience now with SkyDrive or Office 365.

4. Push Notification Support for Mobile Applications

Push notifications have become staple features for mobile applications and the devices that support them, so it’s not shocking that Microsoft is now supporting this with SharePoint 2013. This feature requires adoption though from 3rd party developers or internal custom development.

The end result is that your device will be able to receive notifications from SharePoint lists and sites. For instance, a new document is uploaded in a library that you’re following, and the notification service sends your device a notification. Simple, yet necessary for today’s mobile devices

5. Support for PerformancePoint & Excel Services Reports on iPads

This is probably the least impressive new feature, because Microsoft only suggests that “certain kinds” of reports will be viewable on mobile devices. Since we don’t have an RTM build yet, I can’t say really what those reports will be. To further limit the exposure of this new feature, it’s apparently only available for iOS 5 iPads. To even further confuse you, Microsoft says on another page that “PerformancePoint dashboards can now be viewed and interacted with on iPad devices using the Safari web browser.” That seems to suggest that all PP dashboards can be viewed in Safari.

Regardless of what functionality actually makes it to RTM and beyond, it’s nice to know that we should be able to start interacting with dashboards, scorecards and maybe even some Excel BI/PowerPivot data on our iPads.

6. Geolocation Field Type Support

Although this is another “under the hood” feature of SharePoint 2013, it should have an interesting effect on using SharePoint with mobile devices in the future. Microsoft has added native support to geolocation fields which can be exposed through Visual Studio. By adding a geolocation field to a list, you can embed coordinates, which can then be rendered with Bing Maps. The obvious benefit here is the ability to use your GPS-enabled mobile device to plot your location in a SharePoint list.

Creating Your Brand in SharePoint 2013 On-Premises or In the Cloud

Creating Your Brand in SharePoint 2013 On-Premises
or In the Cloud

Fresh from my first developer session at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, "Creating Your Brand in SharePoint 2013 On-Premises or In the Cloud," I'm here to share a few of presenters Randy Drisgill and John Ross's tips for building a branded website in SharePoint 2013.

I was afraid entering the session that it would be code heavy, but was assured early on that there wasn't much code involved.
Agenda:

• Intro Branding On Premises and Online
• Low Effort branding
• Medium Effort branding
• High Effort branding
• SharePoint Online

Introduction

The talk begins with examples of branding, showing Microsoft logos that have changed over the years. Branding applies to all of your company's marketing and websites and can involve images, logos, CSS, etc.
Microsoft offers two plans, each with separate branding capabilities: small business plan and enterprise plan. It is interesting to see that Microsoft has different abilities on branding in the different plans.

The approach to branding is Low, Medium, High and apparently there is a fair amount of change beginning with the Medium Effort. When you reach the medium effort, it's time to bring in design manager.

Low Effort Branding

Page editor in SharePoint 2013 is pretty much the same as it was in SharePoint 2010: it still has the ribbon where you can add video, images, web parts, etc. I usually think that content publishing is important to get branding to look nice and create a good user experience.

Some of the new capabilities include composed looks — the themes have evolved and enable you to create themes with custom images and colors, master pages, etc.

My observation is that the default themes are pretty ugly. They actually looks a bit like editing a WordPress theme, but with less functionality, you choose your theme location, image url’s, master page url, and more. You can choose which fonts can be available in the editor, not sure that it's useful, but it's an option.

Medium Effort Branding

Medium effort branding brings the design manager into play. The design manager can be found in the site actions, but you need to have publishing activated on the site in order to locate it.

Basically you get your HTML and CSS uploaded to the design manager, then apply SharePoint objects like search. SharePoint designer is optional when using design manager, you are free to use whatever web tool to create your branding: notepad, Coda etc.
  
 Both the master page and the page layouts can be edited with your web tools.

You can use the snippets gallery to get your navigation, breadcrumbs, search boxes, title, logo, etc. into the HTML design by copying the snippet code from the snippet gallery into the HTML code, then adding your own CSS and branding to it.

All of this can be done in a sandbox solution before publishing.

In your master page gallery folder you can create a subfolder to store all of your branding assets. Keep it nice and simple so that it is easy to understand and manage. A good practice is to document what you do as well; you may need it if your servers crash.

Before you start adding snippets, publish a version of the HTML file, this will give you a master page in the theme folder. When you've done this, you can go into the snippets gallery and change the options on the snippets you want, copy the snippets code and add to the HTML file in the place you want it. When you click save the HTML file will update the master file automatically. Pretty sweet!

Important to remember here is that you need to brand all of your site templates that you use, if you don’t you will get an unbranded page when you search or similar.


CSS can be applied with a script editor web part, or added to your master page. The design manager also applies the CSS automatically.

Randy and John showed us some CSS tools, like F12 developer, Firebug for Firefox and more. I usually use them all to make sure the site works in all browsers. What is nice with Firebug and other tools is that you can change the CSS on the live site and see what the effect will be. When you have it right you can just copy it into the CSS file.

Full Effort Branding

Planning for full branding is more about governance of branding: you need to have vision, documentation, test specifications and a strategy for branding.

You need to remember that SharePoint foundation doesn’t have design manager. Also remember that when you brand collaboration sites, then MDS (Minimal Download Strategy) is on. But when you edit with design manager it turns that off. So if you want MDS to get up the speed then you need to create you brand the traditional way.

The content search web part can now be branded with HTML/CSS/java scripts.

SharePoint Online

Public facing websites in SharePoint Online is different, they have added ribbon tools to speed things like change the footer text and more to speed website loading times, but this is a discussion for another article.

SharePoint 2013 Extranet Collaboration Manager by SharePoint Solutions Released as Beta

The Extranet Collaboration Manager beta for SharePoint 2013 has just been announced by SharePoint Solutions, and as the SharePoint Conference 2012 gathers steam, the tool is ready to download for deploying and managing SharePoint extranets.

ExCM Updates

As with so many software updates, the issue here isn't new features, simply compatibility. With the release of something as huge as SharePoint 2013, many organizations will be looking for ways to upgrade in as painless a way as possible. For those eager to set up extranets for their partners and vendors in a SharePoint 2013 environment, the Extranet Collaboration Manager beta is the latest option for bridging the functionality gap left by Microsoft.

To build an extranet in SharePoint 2013, there is some heavy lifting to be done. SharePoint Solutions is offering a simpler way to do this, and its ExCM for SharePoint Server 2013 and SharePoint Foundation 2013 offers features like helping solve login issues and facilitate simpler admin actions. (Fig 1)

Figure 1.
Manage extranets with the ribbon toolbar interface, and easily add a new user.

 

SharePoint Solutions has released new ExCM versions with each of the last two previous SharePoint upgrades. However, unlike when SharePoint 2010 debuted, SharePoint Solutions has not added any new features this time around.
ExCM for SharePoint 2013 offers the ability to deploy, secure and manage extranets, and also delegate routine admin tasks, register new users and support services to assist with set up.

SharePoint Conference 2012 Rundown

Day two of this year's Las Vegas based event is underway, and so far we've heard a bit about Microsoft's Yammer roadmap and an important new release from Webtrends analytics. We've also got some news from Axcelor on the Yammer front, and some special insights from SharePoint MVP Jennifer Mason.
The SharePoint Conference goes through Nov. 15, and there are still highlights to come this week from CMSWire. If you are at the event or if you need keynote highlights, we've got you covered.

Planning a Search Strategy

Planning a Search Strategy

 
The Olympic Games and US Presidential Elections come around every four years but SharePoint upgrades come on a three year cycle. There are still organizations using SharePoint 2007 and in the process of migrating to SharePoint 2010 and now we have SharePoint 2013 in all its glory.

Microsoft also seems to be hinting that in future there could be more frequent upgrades. Before long you will probably be able to major in Microsoft Upgrade and Migration Planning at most major universities.

My particular interest is in enterprise search and here I have to congratulate Microsoft on the progress it has made since the fairly terrible search functionality in SharePoint 2007. The company was also smart enough to go out and buy FAST Search and Transfer in 2008, but not quite smart enough about financial due diligence and building a sensible search technology strategy for itself and for SharePoint.

The Technology Story So Far

The immediate result was the arrival of FAST Search Server for SharePoint 2010, abbreviated to FS4SP. This took a lot of the components of FAST ESP 5.3, suitably modified to SharePoint 2010, and offered a substantial enhancement to SharePoint Search 2010 which itself was a significant leap forward from the search offering in SharePoint 2007.

Two issues immediately became obvious. First, many companies were convinced that they now had a licence for FAST ESP 5.3 and had no idea of the real state of affairs. Second, no one in the Microsoft partner community had any idea of how to get the best (or indeed anything at all!) out of FS4SP. My experience says that not that much has changed since launch unless the company has brought in external implementation expertise.

In 2010 Wrox published "Professional Microsoft Search" by Mark Bennett and his colleagues that covered all the Microsoft search products (including FAST ESP 5.3) in 450 pages. It is an excellent book because of the substantial amount of guidance it gives on the skills and management attention needed to get the best out of any search application.

It was not until earlier this year that Microsoft itself published "Working with Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint," which runs to 450 pages just on FS4SP. There are so many omissions from this book that it would take me the rest of this column to list them, but the most notable are no references at all to using search logs to manage search performance and a total absence of any indications of the staffing requirements to support the product. It creates the impression that search implementation is a project, when at the minimum it is a program and in reality it is a journey without end.

The other significant problem is that (unlike the Wrox book) the book does not tell you what FS4SP does not do. A good example is document thumbnails, which out of the box are only supported for Word documents and Powerpoint files. Certainly there are some good third-party solutions (Documill comes to mind) but that misses the point.

Fortunately there are many excellent search implementation companies (Comperio, Findwise, Raytion and Search Technologies for example) that can really make FS4SP sing and dance but that inevitably adds to the implementation cost. Even then, any company running FS4SP probably needs a search support team of at least 3-4 people full time. A look at Sadie van Buren’s invaluable SharePoint benchmarking service shows search way down the list in maturity of implementation.

Planning for 2013

Now comes FAST Search Server for 2013. Why Microsoft retains the FAST branding defeats me, especially as ESP has now gone out of mainstream support. Oracle bought BEA in 2008 but does not still use the brand name!

There are quite a number of enhancements, some of which are going to need careful attention in the upgrade from SP2010 to SP2013. Nicki Borell is in the middle of a good set of blog posts on the changes.

Remember that the search integration partners are going to need to get up to speed. It doesn’t matter how much support they get from Microsoft, they need to get hands-on experience from an initial set of customers willing to let them establish good implementation practice. Microsoft might not get round to publishing the book of the product until 2015.

As with all search technologies, it is not a case of making the best use of what SharePoint 2013 offers, but whether these features are of value to users given the content being searched and the use that they will make of the search application. A Ferrari F12berlinetta is a very high performance sports car but where do you put the suitcase for even a weekend away? Maybe you should stick with your Aston Martin DB9.

Even if you are not immediately thinking of a migration to SharePoint 2013, starting work on a search strategy should be a very high priority.

SharePoint 2013 for Administrators

 

Are you ready for SharePoint 2013? Microsoft recently released the public beta of SharePoint 2013, and with so many changes it can be difficult to keep up. This is the first of a four-part series that provides a 35,000-foot overview of some expected updates and how they will affect various roles within your organization.

The series specifically focuses on major changes and how they will impact administrators, developers, designers and end users.

What’s New for Administrators?

SharePoint 2013 includes many new features, tools and functionality that every administrator will want to know about. Keep reading to learn more.

Requirements

The software requirements for SharePoint 2013 are what you might expect. SharePoint 2013 requires the use of the latest OS and SQL Server software, which means no support for Windows Server 2003 or SQL Server 2005. You have to install SharePoint 2013 on Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) and must have SQL Server 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) or higher as the minimum version of SQL Server. And yes, SharePoint 2013 does support SQL Server 2012.

 

Upgrades

SharePoint 2013 has removed the In-Place Upgrades and only supports the Database Attach Upgrade process. Now, all Web Apps and even select Service Apps Databases can be upgraded using Database Attach Upgrades.
The Service Application databases that can be updated include the Business Data Catalog (BDC), Managed Metadata Service (MMS), User Profile Service (UPS), Search and Secure Store Service. This avoids the need for administrators to recreate and reconfigure these service applications when upgrading to SharePoint 2013.
Another new upgrade feature is the Site Collection Upgrade. Although the databases are upgraded during the database attach process, the site collections contained can remain in SharePoint 2010.
Previously, sites could be displayed in the SharePoint 2007 interface until the site owner or administrator upgraded the site to the new SharePoint 2010 user interface. Now, with Site Collection Upgrades, administrators and users can test the functionality of sites in a SharePoint 2013 site collection evaluation environment before completing an official upgrade of their production site collection.

Service Applications

There are a couple of SharePoint 2010 Service Apps that are not included in SharePoint 2013. For instance, there is no longer a Web Analytics Service Application; however, that doesn’t mean that the functionality of this app has been taken away. Instead, the functionality has been integrated into the Search Service App. Also, the Office Web Apps service application has been deprecated in SharePoint 2013, as it is now a separate product and no longer part of SharePoint 2013.
There are three new Service Applications expected in SharePoint 2013:

• App Management Service The App Management Service application allows administrators to manage SharePoint Apps. SharePoint Apps are mini apps that can be purchased if external to the organization, or downloaded if internal to the organization by end users. Each time a SharePoint App is accessed, the App Management Service verifies that permissions and licensing information is up-to-date before allowing users to access the app.
• Work Management Service The Work Management Service Application is another new service application that allows users to aggregate and synchronize tasks between multiple environments, such as Project Server, Exchange and SharePoint.
• Translation Service The Translation Service Application performs automated machine language translation. This makes it possible to create content in one language and automatically convert it to a different language. This service application works well with new cross-site publishing functionality when you need to propagate the translated content to a different site collection.

SQL Server 2012

SQL Server 2012 contains a new feature called AlwaysOn Availability, which is a high-availability, disaster recovery solution that can be used when using SharePoint 2013 with SQL Server 2012. In addition to the AlwaysOn Availability, SQL Server 2012 also has reduced input/output (I/O) when browsing libraries, which will improve performance in SharePoint 2013.

Databases

Seven SharePoint 2010 databases have been deprecated in SharePoint 2013, but there are five new databases added to SharePoint 2013. The databases that have been removed include four project related databases: Project Publish, Project Archive, Project Draft, and Project Reporting. These databases will be replaced by a single database called Project Service.

The Search Property Database has also been removed, but in its place you will find a Links Store Database associated with the Search Service Application. The Search Service Application Analytics Reporting Store Database stores the information that was formerly stored in the Web Analytics Report and Web Analytics Staging databases, meaning the functionality of the Web Analytics Service Application has been integrated into SharePoint Search.

he five new databases are:

1. Project Service
2. Search Service Application Links Store Database Library
3. Search Service Application Analytics Reporting Store Database
4. App Management Service Database
5. Translation Service Database

Office Web Apps

Office Web Apps will still exist for SharePoint 2013, but they will likely be sold under a separate SKU, which will require you to purchase them for use with SharePoint 2013. Even though Office Web Apps are now a separate product, Visio will likely be part of the SharePoint 2013 product for support of workflow diagrams.
The Office Web App Farms will be created using PowerShell, but the data is not stored in SQL Server. SharePoint 2013 also uses PowerShell 3.0 in place of PowerShell 2.0. PowerShell 3.0 supports .Net 4.x framework now available in SharePoint 2013.
In SharePoint 2013, PowerShell commands are used to add machine instances into an Office Web App Farm, which hosts your Office Web Apps. This farm provides easier scalability and high availability in Office 2013. It also means an Office Web App Farm can host multiple SharePoint farms, and it provides the opportunity to apply patches to the Office products with little or no downtime.

Web Apps

Claims-based authentication is the default authentication method when creating a Web App from within Central Administration. This is different from having to choose between claims-based and classic authentication as we did in SharePoint 2010. However, you can still use classic authentication when creating a Web App using PowerShell. Claims-based authentication supports Windows, Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), as well as Forms-Based Authentication (FBA).

Self-Service Site Creation

Self-Service Site Creation is turned on by default in SharePoint 2013. Administrators can use Self-Service Site Creation to create a site template for users to provide them with pre-approved templates when creating sites using self-service creation. This feature will likely be available for both site collections and sub sites.

Cross-Site Collection Publishing

SharePoint 2013 introduces a long-awaited feature called Cross-Site Collection Publishing, which allows users to share content in their site collection and make it available to other site collections.

URL Mapping

SharePoint 2013 introduces site collection URL Mapping, which allows administrators to map a URL to a site collection that has its own host header. Alternate Access Mapping is not going away, but the site collection URL Mapping feature provides a more efficient option for creating a unique URL for each site collection.

Request Management Functionality

Request Management Functionality is a brand new feature in SharePoint 2013. It controls incoming requests and determines how they are processed. It dictates how requests come in, how they are prioritized, and how they are routed to a server that will process the request.

My Sites

Microsoft is putting a heavy emphasis on social features, which is reflected in the social functionality of My Sites in SharePoint 2013. In SharePoint 2010, site collections are not created until a user starts adding content into a library. In SharePoint 2013, site collections are created as soon as a user starts using My Sites. As a farm admin, you need to be prepared for this change by ensuring that you have enough databases to support the My Sites site collections.

FAST Search

FAST Search was a separate SKU in SharePoint 2010, but now the functionality of this feature is built into SharePoint 2013 as the default search functionality.

Continuous Crawl

SharePoint 2013 includes a feature called Continuous Crawl, which eliminates the need to do scheduled crawls of your content sources. Instead of scheduling an incremental crawl, Continuous Crawl constantly scans content for updates. However you can, and should, still have regularly scheduled crawls.

Default OOB Search Health Reports

SharePoint 2013 includes several default Out-of-the-Box (OOB) Search Health Reports, which can be reviewed by your search administrators to ensure search is running as optimally as possible.

Business Connectivity Service

Business Connectivity Service (BCS) has added the following functionality:

• OData Support
• BCS Support for SharePoint Apps
• Enhancements when accessing external lists

Business Intelligence

SharePoint 2013 includes Business Intelligence (BI) enhancements and updates to Excel BI, Excel Services, PerformancePoint and Visio. If you are using the BI functionality available in SharePoint 2010, be sure to review the new features and functionality in the BI components in SharePoint 2013 before deploying them.

User Profile Application

The User Profile Service Application (UPS) has a new option that wasn’t available in SharePoint 2010. In SharePoint 2010, administrators were required to choose the two-way synchronization with Active Directory, (if configured), but in SharePoint 2013, administrator can choose to use the two-way synchronization or simply use an active directory import which is much easier to configure and prevents the need for the pesky User Profile Synchronization Service.

 

Enterprise Content Management for SharePoint 2013

Enterprise Content Management for SharePoint 2013

The topic of enterprise content management (ECM) on SharePoint is always a hot one, and the hype is ever-growing with the 2013 release.

After all Microsoft is a Gartner MQ ECM Leader, so it must continue to innovate in this space to keep up with the other ECM leaders. At #spc12, I attended a session covering Microsoft’s efforts to increase their clout in ECM with SharePoint 2013. The presenters were Tejas Mehta, Microsoft Senior Product Marketing Manager, and Jim Masson, Group Product Manager — Enterprise Content Management.

ECM in SharePoint 2010 vs SharePoint 2013

The session began with a quick recap of what Microsoft’s message was with the 2010 release and how that contrasts to the current message with 2013. In 2010, Microsoft really drove home the concept of combining traditional ECM capabilities with newer social capabilities on one platform. The impact of enterprise social was a major shift for Microsoft, and they drove that notion with much of the features in the 2010 Office/SharePoint products.
But we’re 3 years removed from that change, and most organizations are at the very least aware of enterprise social and looking at ways to invest in it. In 2013, the message with ECM is one of convergence and usability. This is in line with the greater Microsoft message about cleaner interfaces and better usability across all of their flagship products, which recently had brand new releases this year.

ECM in SharePoint: Create, Control, Protect

More specifically, the marketing team is selling the theme by highlighting 3 specific pillars, Create, Control and Protect.

Create: Content Creation & Access

The Create pillar is all about content creation and access. Microsoft is making it easier to find documents and e-mail together in SharePoint with unified views on team sites. For social, the newsfeeds are much more impactful for understanding how your colleagues are working with content that you’re interested in. The enterprise social features are much easier to use and they resemble the big social networks, as you can follow just about anything in SharePoint and even use mentions and hashtags, a la Twitter.

Control: Governance & Search Driven Experiences

The second pillar, Control, has a focus on a mixture of governance along with search driven user experiences. And although the oft-overused term of governance has been fairly played out, there were five specific things in the demo that showed how the product team is increasing value in this pillar.

First we saw a demo of dragging and dropping a document from Windows Explorer right into SharePoint without having to load any windows or apply metadata. This was also shown during the keynote, and for obvious reasons garnered several applauses. Right after that we were shown how you can edit more than one document at the same time from within SharePoint and apply different types of metadata than you could with 2010.

Specifically you can apply managed metadata terms en masse to all the documents in the library without much trouble. Again, applause from the attendees. The next is the ease of dragging and dropping e-mails from your inbox to Exchange site mailboxes, which can be unified with SharePoint documents on a team site. The great thing here is that any relevant retention policies will apply to both the documents in SharePoint and the Exchange site mailbox. The next was a really nice showing of the new metadata-based navigation with the content query web part in SharePoint. The idea is that you use a managed metadata term set to create a visually appealing navigation based on content already stored in SharePoint matching those terms. And last but not least, we were shown the support that SharePoint 2013 has for HTML 5 video content as well as its ability to automatically recognize video-based content when posting a link on the feed.

Protect: e-Discovery

The final pillar, and the most intriguing for me was the Protect pillar. This is where Microsoft is really adding a lot of functionality for end users, who are completely on the Microsoft stack. The key here is all about e-Discovery. As I mentioned briefly in the previous pillar, e-Discovery now spans documents in SharePoint as well as related e-mail in Exchange.

SharePoint 2013 now offers a fairly advanced set of queries that can help end users find content pertaining to a legal hold or some other reason. The pervasiveness without having to ask IT looks quite good so far, although a more in depth study will need to be performed to see how it will really compete with popular 3rd party e-Discovery tools. The demo of these new features also touched on the ability for a user to export the entire return set based on a query without having do much of anything with IT. Once content is found in SharePoint matching the query, the export will span documents in SharePoint, e-mail stored in Exchange, list data as an Excel file and webpages as an MHT snapshot. The pertinent e-mail is stored in a PST alongside the documents and Excel files. And it will even export a proper manifest in EDRM XML format for compliance reasons.

All in all, these e-Discovery features are quite promising, and it will be interesting to see how vendors respond to this and how they will adapt to remain competitive.

A more in depth look of the new e-Discovery features will be shown in a subsequent post detailing how these changes will be utilized across the entire Office platform.

Favorite Things in SharePoint 2013

Favorite Things in SharePoint 2013

This year at the SharePoint Conference, Greg Brill and myself had the opportunity to present two express sessions. Our sessions were relatively short sessions, designed to quickly highlight key features with SharePoint 2013. One of the sessions was designed to cover five simple improvements in SharePoint 2013 that will make everyday tasks easier to complete. In this article we will be reviewing the five features that made it into my top five list!

1. Sharing Content

The first feature to make the list was Share. Within 2013 there are now easy ways for users to see who has access to the content they are reviewing, as well as a way for them to easily share the content with users. The Share features depend on the User Access Request settings being configured and they follow a process so that if a user doesn't have the permissions required to grant access that the request is first filtered through the site admin. This allows for users to quickly and easily share content with other users, but doesn't allow permissions to be granted on a whim.

With this new scenario a user really only needs to understand that they want to share data, click the link and enter the user's name. The admin will then get the request and then grant access or deny the request. 90% of the time in previous versions of the product it seemed like permissions where being managed correctly, but when that last 10% hit it could often result in a large mess that needed to be corrected.

Because of the risk, it was often required that only a small subset of users could manage permissions. This could cause issues because it became a large bottleneck of requests. With this new approach you get the best of both worlds because users can Share content on their own directly from the document or site and then the admin can intersect the request and ensure that permissions have been configured correctly. This is a great example of empowering the users to complete common tasks without assuming a great deal of risk.

2. New Task List Features

Second on the list was the features included in the new tasks list, specifically the timeline features. Gone are the days of a non-customizable Gantt list view that was difficult to read and process. Instead, with this release the SharePoint team and the Project Team worked together to provide us a way to view tasks in a configurable manner. An example is shown below in the image (Fig. 1):

Figure 1

 Any task in the list can easily be added to the Timeline view and then each task can be configured to have its own display style. All of the customization is done in the Ribbon menu that is only selected when you click on the timeline.

In addition to the easy customization options there are improvements with the way that the date format is displayed. SharePoint 2013 includes a setting for each column of the type data that allows for a display in what is referred to as the friendly display. This allows for dates to be displayed in very friendly terms such as “Tomorrow” and “Yesterday” or “A Few Second Ago”.

Having this enabled provides a very natural user experience. And finally, the last win to be highlighted in the task list is the fact that by default, without any configuration, conditional formatting is applied to the contents in the list. This allows for dates to be displayed in Red when they are past due.

3. Following Content

Third on our list of favorites is the ability to quickly follow content. For sites and documents within a site there is an associated Follow link that when used with add a link to the user’s personal pages, allowing them to easily return to the content at a later point in time. This functionality comes with the latest set of Social features that are available in SharePoint 2013.
 
But it is important to note that the following features goes beyond just saving a link to content. With the new Social features also comes the ability to Micro Blog, including the ability to tag a user in a post. When a user sees that they have been tagged in a post they are able to select an option allowing them to “Follow Up” on an item. Once they select this link to follow up a Task will be created for them in their personal page, which also will synchronize to their Outlook tasks (Fig. 2).

Figure 2.

4. Interacting with Search Results

The fourth item to make our top 5 was the ease of interacting with and working with the search results. With the integration of Office Web Apps into the search experience, users can easily see real time data of the content that has been returned in their search results. When a user completes a search they have the ability to see a full preview version of the document that they can interact with, without having to leave the search results. (Fig. 3)

Figure 3

5. Team Mailbox

The final feature in our top 5 is the ability to set up a group mailbox within a team site. Users are able to easily create a shared component in the site that allows for emails to be easily sent to a common shared address. Using these features allows for a team to have access to a shared email account that can easily be managed within SharePoint but still allow for users outside of SharePoint to interact with the team through standard emails.

Just a Few of the Many

This article summarizes just a few of the newest tips and tricks available within SharePoint 2013. The emphasis of this release is definitely about bringing refinement back to the basics. A new take on an old classic! One of the best selling points for moving to 2013 is looking at how all of the small wins and changes can have a big impact in your environment.