Few Things About SharePoint 2013 All IT Pros Should Know
Few Things About SharePoint 2013 All IT Pros Should
Know
SharePoint, for Microsoft, has grown
into a billions-of-dollars-a-year sort of business that increases its market
share in the double-digit range each year. Not to put too fine a point on it: SharePoint
is a beast in its space. Companies are adopting it worldwide to centralize
knowledge, increase collaboration, develop applications on top of it and
realize actionable intelligence about their overall business health.
However, SharePoint 2013 represents a
major new release in the lifecycle of the product, and that may cause you to
wonder what it is, what it can do for you and what your organization needs to
know before considering and deploying it. Here's a brief SharePoint 2013 cheat
sheet to help you sort out with some of those concerns.
SharePoint 2013 Highlights: Better
BI, Mobile, Public Website Support
What are the big points Microsoft wants
to sing about when it comes to the SharePoint 2013 release? While there are
many improvements, the following five points rise to the top:
Better
branding for Your Web Presence.
What used to be an arduous process that
involved complicated designer assets, style sheets and a confusing packaging
process has now been made much easier. Now, any Web designer with proficiency
in HTML, CSS and JavaScript can in a short amount of time brand a SharePoint
site and create a public-facing or internal site that looks good. This will
reduce your internal support expense, as well as make it less costly to use
SharePoint itself as a platform for public-facing websites.
Improved
public-facing website hosting.
Hosting a public website (e.g., your
.com site) on SharePoint 2007 was an exercise in frustration. Hosting that same
site on SharePoint 2010 was better, but that product wasn't as full-featured as
some competing platforms.
SharePoint 2013's capabilities in this
regard are a natural evolution into maturity. The new release includes the
capability to serve up pages to different devices (such as mobile phones and
tablets) based on their characteristics. SharePoint 2013 also includes numerous
features for search engine optimization (SEO), including XML based sitemaps,
friendly URLs, SEO settings by different site collections rather than sites,
and robots.txt support to define out of bounds areas for search engine
crawlers.
Enhanced
business intelligence.
Using SharePoint as a platform to expose
business intelligence and big data reports had its coming-out party with the
2010, but the capabilities have expanded in the 2013 release to really make
SharePoint the choice to dig deeper into business insights and analytics.
Integration between SharePoint and Excel is even tighter, too.
Finally, the PowerPivot program has gotten even more powerful
in SharePoint 2013; you can work with billions and rows and columns directly in
memory, while features such as PerformancePoint Services, Dashboard Designer
and Visio Services all work together to paint a picture of your business'
health and metrics.
End-user
training.
SharePoint 2013 includes a new feature
called "deferred site collection upgrade." This essentially lets a
specific set of site collections run under SharePoint 2010 while SharePoint
2013 code is installed. You are basically running SharePoint 2010 code within
the 2013 product, which makes it easier to test and maintain compatibility with
any custom code and applications you have built on top of SharePoint.
It also eases the transition for your
users between the look and feel of how SharePoint 2010 libraries and sites
operates. You can get the benefit of deploying the new product while you manage
the timeline on which you convert the look and feel of your site and turn on
the new features and capabilities that face your end users. This is a good
thing.
More, better,
mobile device support.
Of course tablets and smartphones are
all the rage these days. With SharePoint sites becoming the home for more and
more work product in all sorts of businesses, Microsoft had to address the
problem of the poor SharePoint experience for mobile devices in previous
versions.
There is now an HTML5 coded view known
as the "contemporary" view that is optimized for speedy access across
iPhones, iPads, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone devices. There is also
new support for push notifications, so SharePoint 2013 can reach out and push a
message to your device based on a variety of factors. Location awareness has
been built in as well, if you plan to develop location-aware applications on
top of the SharePoint platform.
SharePoint 2013 Concerns: The Onsite vs.
Cloud Conundrum
Of course, SharePoint 2013 isn't all wine
and roses. Here are two pain points:
Migration.
Of course, migrating anything to
something new is an endeavor typically fraught with frustration, trouble and
delays, and you probably never end up quite where you thought you would end up.
SharePoint migrations are certainly no exception to this rule; there is a
reasonably high bar to even getting started.
In short, you cannot move to SharePoint
2013 unless you are already running SharePoint 2010, unless you purchase some
third-party tools that are on the market now or will come onto the market soon.
This is a reasonably big obstacle for many organizations that are either still
on SharePoint 2007 or are already underway with their SharePoint 2010
deployment plans.
Different product editions.
As part of Microsoft's cloud strategy,
the company is offering this product in two flavors: SharePoint Server, which
you install on your own premises and in your own datacenter—just like all
previous versions of SharePoint--and Office 365, which runs "in the
cloud" in Microsoft's own datacenters. There is a ton of overlap when it
comes to features and capabilities between the boxed product version and the
cloud-based subscription service, but the company is hoping to appeal to all
subsets of customers.
While this article has focused primarily
on the SharePoint Server product, Microsoft has said publicly that it will
continue to produce and, perhaps more importantly, support both on-premises and
cloud versions of SharePoint for the foreseeable future. The challenge remains
deciding the right option for your business. If the answer turns out to be a
hybrid of both on-premises and cloud deployment, the further challenge is the
ongoing question of managing both. How do you keep them up to date? How do you
ensure a great user experience no matter where the data is located?
SharePoint has become a staple for many
organizations worldwide. Any time there is an update to such a core technology,
there is a healthy amount of skepticism and care required. SharePoint 2013
brings some useful enhancements to the table—including some that have the power
to transform the level of understanding you have about your business—but it is
always important to understand the complications and obstacles that go along
with a new edition.
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