SharePoint 2013 New Features

Nagarajan R
Dec 13, 2013

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In this article I am sharing some of the new features of SharePoint 2013.

Social and Collaboration

Community Site

A wonderful new feature of SharePoint 2013 is "Community Site". This is used to get and post the information on their interested community. It's a new site template that has an extended discussion board. Some of the major features are:

Reputation score for each post
Categorize the questions
Will choose a 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 allows us to follow the people using SPSocialFollowingManager (Server Object Model) programmatically.

In addition to this, we may follow documents and sites and we will get the status update of the document in a News Feed and get the conversation on sites that we followed.

OneNote integration

A OneNote shared notebook is automatically created and inherits the permission when you created the team site. We can use this for capturing, compiling and sharing the information. We are able to embed the documents in a notebook. Those documents will be uploaded separately in a document library.

Search

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

Crawling is the capturing of all metadata associated with documents and the content resides in the entire site collection. Content Processing is the redirecting process to link to the database. Analyzing Processing filters the content based on their popularity. An anchor text within the text also counts for ranking purposes. Indexing, the architecture of indexing works like a 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 SharePoint 2013, we are calling all the components such as lists, libraries and so on, as apps. Users have the facility to create their own app and host it in the SharePoint store, this is called a Cloud App Model.
Some protocols for apps are:

Few/No dependency on any other software on the device
Doesn't have any custom code with dependency
May include SharePoint components like List, Workflows, and so on

We can choose any web application language (HTML, JavsaScript, PHP, .NET) to create an app. We can choose the development tool (Visual Studio 2012, "NAPA" O365 development tool) also. It supports a tiered architecture to develop. The Office Store and users around the world can publish and sell their app in the Office Store. An app catalog is a document library on SharePoint where manifest files for a 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 fits within the entire context. We are able to share project related data, documents and communication. Some notable features in a project site are:

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

Site Mailbox

We have a new feature, Site Mailbox in SharePoint 2013. This feature can exchange an inbox for a SharePoint site. You can drag and drop emails into a site mailbox and forward important mail to SharePoint and also drag and drop their attachments directly from an email to a document library.

Document Management

Document Management is always strong in SharePoint. We have versioning control with check in/check out. Now users are able to drag and drop the document in a document library, it reduces the number of clicks. We can preview the document with one-click editing. See also functionality in item properties that suggest the similar documents in common with the current item. Listwise, we are able to create and edit a list right away on the page like Excel Sheet. For example, just click a link and you can add, edit, or delete columns without leaving the page you're currently editing.

Allow/Disallow iFrames

IFrames are not allowed for some security reason in SharePoint 2013. We are able to allow this, while setting the website address in HTML Field Security.

Business Intelligence in Excel Service

SharePoint 2013 supports enhanced BI features and functionality in an 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 then you can view and interact with PowerPivot and Power View content in a browser window.

Workflow

In SharePoint 2013, Workflow architecture is redesigned by WF4. It was enhanced with Windows Workflow Foundation, built in messaging functionality that is provided by WCF. Workflows are no longer compiled into managed assemblies and deployed to an assemble cache. Tool wise, the SharePoint designer has been updated with an 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 the workflow designer. Some of new actions added in the designer are: