Archive for category: SharePoint

As Microsoft SharePoint websites are used to store vital information and processes, it’s extremely important that upgrades to your sites and service are swift and effortless yet preserving the original content and structure of your site. We’ll all agree that everyone either upgrades or move away from the platform.

Hence let’s talk about why businesses are accelerating their upgrades or where (in terms of workload) they are considering an ‘early’ upgrade to Microsoft SharePoint 2013 (from Microsoft SharePoint 2007 / SharePoint 2010). It’s pretty important to understand that why do people upgrade and, it’s worth noting why the IT team have to think about upgrading their technology.

• Upgrades provide multiple ways to do things in a more efficient way supporting the increasing demand on IT.
• It’s difficult to maintain old versions of a technology like Microsoft SharePoint. There is a scarcity of resources who have experience or knowledge of Microsoft SharePoint 2003 as
  •   there were less Microsoft SharePoint experts back then and
  •   Experienced professionals wanted to work with the latest versions.
• Often Microsoft SharePoint upgrades provide increased support for standards or newer technologies like improved browser support, device support, and windows/office integration can support related upgrades or the growing needs that result from new technologies in the workplace.
• Due to excess of options and increasing expectations for technology user experience and ease of use, IT needs to be more responsive and should speed up upgrade cycles internally to indicate they have competitive offerings and usability. This is also needed as leaders within organizations do tend to buy into SAAS.
• In multi-device environments, there is increased pressure for IT to provide support and options which was not supported or considered earlier in the past.

To understand why people are planning to upgrade to Microsoft SharePoint 2013, here are some of the Business Benefits and Reasons for Microsoft SharePoint 2013 upgrades are listed as under:

• End User enhancements – better Productivity & User Adoption
  The substantial enhancements done in Microsoft SharePoint 2013 are those that don’t require profound technical understanding to see the value of it. In case of some organizations enhancements like easier drag and drop, simpler sharing of content and general UI improvements may be a strong driver (due to increase in user adoption and productivity) for encouraging a partial upgrade of generalized team sites or content.Beyond these basic end-user enhancements, below is a list of points which can be a strong motivation to upgrade to Microsoft SharePoint 2013 farm.

     Easier sharing and permissions management for websites.

     Cross site collection roll ups and less site collection boundaries.

     Enhanced Task management and instinctive (yet configurable) task rollup and aggregation (across Microsoft SharePoint, Exchange etc.).

     Themes and a more accessible design experience for many developers or end users.

     Embedded and intuitive social capabilities.

• Improved Search Experience & Engine
  It’s good to see the effort Microsoft has done incorporating FAST and BING capabilities in a way that makes sense. This new search fundamental makes it so much easier to use the out of the box search experience from an end-user perspective. Below is a couple of points (not a complete list) WRT why the new Search is better and enhanced capability set.   The feature that allows you to see (as you type your search – or after you search and are reviewing the results) what you have searched for and selected previously is such a simple yet impactful feature. For recall scenarios, it will have a significant positive impact. Content by search allows a user very easily build the query they want and see the results as they build it.

     Much faster crawl of new or changed content (due to continuous crawling and general performance enhancements) makes sure that results are up to date and relevant.

     Many minor enhancements to the experience such as File Type identifiers on the left of search results, native PDF support on indexing, and a much more developer accessible HTML/JavaScript model of changing how search results display.

• Other Enhancements & Benefits   Technical benefits typically motivate upgrades only when there is a clear cost benefit. An organization may be able to predict considerable storage savings and performance improvements based on shredded storage improved caching, and improved control/flexibility at a site collection level (for organizations that have distribution model based on site collection access rights/controls). Based on technical changes or factors like this, the organization may be able to provide reasoning and benefits for upgrading that reduce technical limitations, or provide IT cost savings.

     It’s much easier to extend comparable to many social enterprise tools. Though there will still be a need for third-party improvements on top of the improved Microsoft SharePoint 2013 model, even without these tools it supplies a fairly complete social experience out of the box. When you add up the new enhancements, the richer feature set and improved capability can stand on its own as a reason to upgrade for some organizations.

     New Document Set features may be important if you are heavily leveraging this feature.

     Organizations looking out for multilingual support may find the improvements to variations and automatic translation to be a driver for upgrading.

     Metadata navigation, image renditions, clean URLs, and other WCM improvements may be extremely important for your public facing website or publishing based intranet site.

• Enhanced mobile browser experience For some companies this may be a deciding factor to upgrade. For smartphone mobile devices, Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Preview provides a lightweight, contemporary view browsing experience for users to navigate and access document libraries, lists, wikis, and Web Parts.   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

     Contemporary view: This view offers an optimized mobile browser experience to users and renders in HTML5. This view is available to Mobile Internet Explorer version 9.0 or later versions for Windows Phone 7.5, Safari version 4.0 or later versions for iPhone 4.0, and the Android browser for Android 4.0.

About risks, well it’s true that there are risks involved around cost when you don’t upgrade. While these aren’t often the primary drivers they can still motivate upgrades. A few examples of these potential costs are:

• It costs more to upgrade from Microsoft SharePoint 2007 to Microsoft SharePoint 2013 than it does from Microsoft SharePoint 2010 to Microsoft SharePoint 2013.
• Integration scenarios and third-party product availability may vary based on the versions of your Microsoft SharePoint implementation.
• Moving from Microsoft SharePoint 2013 to Office 365 will be pretty easier than moving from other versions of Microsoft SharePoint to Office 365.
• The amount of content in your organizations is always growing and storage becomes more challenging to coordinate, control, and manage over time. With the new versions of the product and the underlying storage technologies (like SQL), new features enable scalability, performance, and flexibility (thanks to shredded storage).
• Some web-based systems require certain browsers or browser compatibility that can be costly or challenging to maintain over time when they are not upgraded.
• When you skip a version or two it results in even more significant changes for the end user experience and can be more challenging to train (at all levels) and deal with the change management involved.

Microsoft SharePoint is an incredibly powerful platform that delivers huge benefits to various facets of the business. There is much new and exciting functionality and out of those many, here are some of Microsoft SharePoint 2013 features which will help people to get there.

Business User Benefits

1. Access anywhere anytime – People can access contents through any browser or smartphone and even on iOS devices anytime provided you are connected to the internet. You can also sync content onto a device and work on the same offline and sync back again.

2. Add & Share Content with ease – People can drag and drop contents straight into any browser window and then share a document with your colleagues by simply clicking the Share link.

3. Aggregated Task Management – People can view tasks on project sites and can easily edit them in the browser window. These are then rolled up into the MySite section to show users a combined list of tasks (including personal tasks) that have been added/modified in Microsoft SharePoint and in Exchange 2013.

4. Robust Search – People can search for colleagues, content, videos, and reports, sites and get into the details both via text values and visual refiners to easily find information to reuse. In a preview pane, Users can use Documents preview including drilling down into the detail of the document. Users can also retrieve information easily based on historical search behavior.

5. Effective Content Collaboration with others – People can work on the content concurrently as their colleagues are. This is useful when you are working on meetings notes via OneNote and putting together large documents or presentations where your colleagues are also working on the part of the content they are responsible for. This makes it swifter to combine content.

6. Integration with Exchange Server – People can work with all team based communication from a Microsoft SharePoint site (i.e. from a single location). These emails will be stored in an Exchange mailbox so are also fully functional from within the mail client (i.e. MS Outlook etc.)

7. Expert Advice – People can use Community Sites to enquire their queries/doubts to the specialists and discuss items with peers. People can also search for experts based on items they have been working on as well as information they have entered.

8. The pool of Apps – With the introduction of Apps and the Marketplace in Microsoft SharePoint 2013, the apps for Microsoft SharePoint are an easy way to add functionality to a particular Microsoft SharePoint site (may include applications running outside of Microsoft SharePoint).

This makes it a lot easier to configure a site for a specific purpose without sound technical knowledge.

Portal Governance Benefits

1. Microsoft SharePoint site policies can be used to define suitable actions to occur when a site owner closes a particular site. After closure, that site/s can be archived or other necessary actions can be performed automatically.

2. An Organization can have a Controlled Application Store to control and apply security over which applications can be installed by site owners and includes an interface for requesting and managing licenses. These can be internal applications or applications that are purchased and/or run externally to the organization.

3. Microsoft Office 365 has the similar functionality (in the majority of features) as of on-premise installation. For an Intranet portal, people can choose to run the same on a cloud without loss of functionality or performance (here, the onus is on Microsoft to manage and maintain the Office 365 service). A Cross environment can also be created where Microsoft SharePoint search can be designed to be self-managing to support reporting and rights management and provide an integrated user experience across cloud and on-premise environments.

There is no doubt that Microsoft SharePoint 2013 is a new way to collaborate/work together. A lot of new things are introduced with Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and many of these are expected and seem an extension of existing functionality from the older version. In this post we will look at the principal changes done between Microsoft SharePoint 2010 & 2013 in a categorized manner, just to give you a gist about what is depreciated and what is introduced in the new Microsoft SharePoint 2013 version.

Changes Intended Towards Developers

• In SharePoint 2013, Microsoft introduced a new Cloud App Model for designing Apps for Microsoft SharePoint. Apps for Microsoft SharePoint are independent pieces of functionality that extend the competency of a Microsoft SharePoint website. You can use HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and protocols like the Open Data protocol (OData – a web protocol that is used to query and update data), and OAuth to communicate with SharePoint using Apps.

• Tools – Microsoft SharePoint 2013 has introduced new Tools for App development. Visual Studio 2012 now lets you develop apps for Microsoft SharePoint and apps for Office. In addition, a new web-based tool called “Napa” Office 365 Development Tools were introduced for developing apps.

• Napa is a new browser-based development environment which allows a user to amend the HTML 5 and JavaScript behind an application and test it within their Microsoft SharePoint site. Although Napa is very limited, it also provides an export option so that the app can be worked on in Visual Studio 2012.
• Meeting workspace site template has been deprecated Microsoft SharePoint 2013.
• Web analytics feature of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 has been deprecated from Microsoft SharePoint 2013.

• No more Sandbox solutions. Microsoft SharePoint 2013 sandboxed solutions are deprecated.

• The visual upgrade feature in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 is not available in Microsoft SharePoint 2013. It has been replaced with deferred site collection upgrade which is a more comprehensive upgrade process than the visual upgrade. Visual upgrade preserved only the old master pages, CSS files, and HTML files. Deferred site collection upgrade preserves much more, including SPFeature functionality. To achieve the deferred site collection upgrade, major changes in the architecture were required, including the removal of visual upgrade.

• Various site templates have been removed to simplify the list of templates that are available when a user creates a new site collection. The below list of site templates will continue to operate in Microsoft SharePoint 2013. But these site templates will be removed completely from the next major release of Microsoft SharePoint and sites that were created by using below listed site templates will not be supported o Document Workspace site template o Personalization Site site template o Meeting Workspace site templates o Group Work site template and Group Work solution o Visio Process Repository site template

Social and Collaboration features

Microsoft in SharePoint 2013 Introduced new Social capabilities for better collaboration in the company. New Features added are,

• Interactive feed – In Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013, interactive social feeds are designed to encourage people to share information and to stay connected with people and content. You can see many of the feed features on the Newsfeed page on My Site. Feeds contain collections of threads that represent microblog posts, conversations, status updates, and other notifications.

• Community Site – In Microsoft SharePoint Server / Foundation 2010, you could add a Discussion list to sites to facilitate discussions among members of the site. Microsoft SharePoint Server / Foundation 2013 continue to provide this Discussion list, but also expand on the discussion concept by introducing a new site template named as Community Site. Community Sites offer a forum experience to categorize and cultivate discussions with a broad group of people across organizations in a company. Community Sites promote open communication and information exchange by fostering discussions among users who share their expertise and use the expertise of others who have knowledge in specific areas of interest.

With Community Sites, you organize discussions in categories. Visitors can view the discussions and become members if they want to contribute to those discussions. Moderators manage the community by setting rules, reviewing and addressing inappropriate posts, marking interesting content as featured discussions, and so on. Moderators can also assign gifted badges to specific members to visually indicate that the member is recognized as a specific kind of contributor in the Community Site, such as an expert or a moderator. Each Community Site contains information about the member and content reputation, which members earn when they actively post in discussions, and when their content is liked, replied to, or marked as the best answer.

• Follow people/sites – It is a good feature introduced in Microsoft SharePoint 2013 to stay connected with people and content the user likes. With this feature, a user can follow people, content etc. If you follow people, then the posts and activities of the followed people show up in the user’s newsfeed. A user can also work with Client Object Model and Server Object Model to follow. Users can also follow contents.

Search

Microsoft SharePoint 2013 includes several enhancements, custom content processing with the Content Enrichment web service, and a new framework for presenting search result types. Some of the features added are,

• Consolidated Search Results – In Microsoft SharePoint 2013 the two Search Engines “SharePoint Search” and “FAST Search Server for SharePoint” is combined in one Search Engine. About 80% of FAST Search was embedded in the Microsoft SharePoint Search platform, representing the most used features of FAST Search. It also includes the new framework for search result types. It includes many of the capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and provides numerous improvements, such as in query processing and targeting of search results. It also helps administrators to configure search in such a way that the users can find relevant information more quickly and easily.

• Rich Results Framework – Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Search includes a new results framework that makes it easy to customize the appearance (i.e. look and feel) of the search results user interface (UI). Now, instead of writing a custom XSLT to change how search results are displayed, you can customize the appearance of important types of results by using display templates and result types.

Enterprise Content Management

Microsoft SharePoint 2013 added some of the best capabilities of an ECM software. The newly added features are,

• Design Manager – If you want your Microsoft SharePoint 2013 site to represent your organization’s brand and not OOTB SharePoint look & Feel you can create a custom design and use Design Manager to achieve that goal. Design Manager is a feature in Microsoft SharePoint 2013 that makes it easier to create a fully customized, pixel-perfect design while using the web-design tools that you’re already familiar with. Design Manager is a publishing feature that is available in publishing sites in both Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 and Office 365. You can also use Design Manager to brand the public-facing website in Office 365. With Design Manager, you can create a visual design for your website by using whatever web design tool or HTML editor you prefer, using only HTML and CSS, and then upload that design into SharePoint. Design Manager is the central hub and interfaces where you manage all aspects of a custom design.

• Managed Navigation – A well-designed navigation tells your site’s users a lot about the business, products, and services that the website offers. By updating the taxonomy behind the navigation, businesses can drive and keep up with change without having to recreate their site navigation in the process. In Microsoft SharePoint 2013, the managed navigation feature enables you to design site navigation that is driven by managed metadata and create SEO-friendly URLs that are derived from the managed navigation structure. Managed navigation provides an alternative to the traditional SharePoint navigation feature—structured navigation—that is based on the structure of Microsoft SharePoint. Because managed navigation is driven by taxonomy, you can use it to design site navigation around important business concepts without changing the structure of your sites or site components.

• Cross-site Publishing – Cross-site publishing is the tool that enables you to write content in one place and surface it in other places through search. You’ll be able to generate sites in some new and exciting ways. And for the first time, Cross-site publishing breaks down the site collection barrier—content can be shared across site collections, web apps, and farms.

• EDiscovery – eDiscovery is how records managers and litigators discover content in electronic format. Typically, eDiscovery requires searching for documents, websites, and email messages spread across laptops, email servers, file servers, and other sources, and collecting and acting on content that meets the criteria for a legal case.

eDiscovery uses search service applications (SSAs) to crawl SharePoint farms. You can configure SSAs in many ways, but the most common way is to have a central search services farm that crawls multiple SharePoint farms. You can use this one search service to crawl all SharePoint content, or you can use it to crawl specific regions—for example, all SharePoint content in Europe. To crawl a SharePoint farm, search first uses a service application proxy to connect to it. The eDiscovery Center uses the proxy connection to send preservations to SharePoint sites in other SharePoint farms.

No Licensing for SharePoint for Internet Sites

For someone estimating their SharePoint license costs for a new farm, this is a big deal. In Microsoft SharePoint 2010 companies were required to purchase an Internet-facing license if your solution would be accessible by an anonymous user (typically for a website) or by large numbers of external but authenticated users (for a portal).

How do they define an external user? For this licensing change, this is the big question. It is probably easier to define what they consider an internal user and you can induce an external user as anything outside of that definition. Internal users are a company’s employees or its affiliates and any onsite contractors or onsite agents. All other users are considered external users and do not need licensing.

No separate licensing for Enterprise and Standard

Besides making licensing simpler, this move adds some serious horsepower to your SharePoint Portal. There are three big gains with the new enterprise functionality:

• FAST Search capabilities: This is now part of a standard Microsoft SharePoint installation. So not only is it now free, it’s a lot easier to deploy and configure. Besides greatly increasing the search center capabilities, site designers can efficiently use dynamic page templates to build very large and more personalized websites and portals.

• Hosting multiple domains on one farm: In an earlier version of Microsoft SharePoint, licensing multiple websites on one farm was a big investment which alarmed away a lot of prospective users, now this capability is included with every SharePoint deployment.

Business Intelligence/Dashboard Features: This gives you the ability to add Performance Point, Excel Services, Visio Service and now Power View to your portal. We are expecting to see powerful BI dashboards to be much more common as more companies start to experiment with these capabilities.

A well-known concept about SharePoint is property promotion & demotion. Quite simply put, property promotion refers to a document’s property being sent to the document library in which it resides and demotion is just the opposite.

While this may sound trivial, it has some deep founding implications. Say that you’re making a sales proposal. Most of us have proposal templates from which we start. Perhaps the first thing we do is search & replace the client name. Now suppose that the client name was automatically replaced for us – wouldn’t that be a treat? Let’s see what this looks like in action and where it becomes possible for this to work and where it won’t.

For the purpose of illustration, I have created a custom list in SharePoint called “Customers” – this will hold the customer details for me. A document library called “Proposals” has been created which has a custom field of the type “Lookup”; pointing to the “Customers” list.

The “Customers” list is shown in the picture below. This list has two columns – “Customer Name” refers to the parent company and “Contact Name” refers to a contact person within that company.

The settings screen for the proposed library is shown below. The proposals library has a lookup column called “Customer” which points to the “Customers” list. The contact name is also present here as an included column.

That is all there is to set up this procedure. At this point, let’s click the “New Document” link of the Proposals library – this will open a new word document.

Now we will insert a new document property (as shown in the screen below). As can be seen, the “Customer” property declared on the document library is now present as a document property.

Upon inserting this property in the document, a smart tag is inserted into the document, which is attached to the live data in the SharePoint customers list.

Select “IOTAP” from the list and save the document in the document library. The document appears in the library as shown below.

Now edit the document property via the SharePoint property editor and set the Customer property to “Al-Ansari Construction Division”. Then open the document in Microsoft Word.

As you can see, the property has now changed to what it was set on the server.

That, in a nutshell, is the concept of property promotion & demotion. While the functionality is great, it is not without caveats! For example, the contact name property defined on the document library didn’t make it through. Using document properties in itself is a great way to manage document meta-data but when these properties are bound to a SharePoint document library in a duplex mode, it takes the managed meta-data to a whole different level.