SharePoint 2013 New Features

I am holding your hands to travel with me in this article to grasp the new features of SharePoint 2013.

Social Computing and Collaboration

It offers an improved user experience for users to share and collaborate with others in their organization.

Communities

In SharePoint 2010, it provides a Discussion List to start discussions among the site members. In addition to this, SharePoint 2013 has two site templates. One is a Community Site and the other is a Community Portal that holds the individual community sites.

Community Site offers:

Users become members once they start their contribution
Based on the user's level of contribution, badges (Beginner, Moderator and Expert) will be assigned
Interestingly, a score is calculated based on likes, dislikes and best answers contributed by the user

A Community Portal is a collection of community sites. It provides the overview of popular communities from where we can join to interested communities.

My Sites

My Site is our owned site where we can store personal information, shared documents and tagging content. In addition to SharePoint 2010 My Site features, SharePoint 2013 has a better design and modernized user interface with extendable features such as:

Microblogging and Newsfeeds
Follow people and edit profile

Task Management

SharePoint 2013 allows you to manage and sync the tasks list in the following ways:

Newsfeed discussions have a follow-up option. This automatically creates a task in your My Tasks area.
The My Task page will aggregate all our tasks available in the SharePoint farm.
By configuring the Work Management Service application, we have an option "Sync to Outlook" that will sync the task list information to Outlook and vice versa.
Microsoft Project 2013 now fully integrates with a SharePoint 2013 task list that gives us a two-way sync between project files and the underlying task list connected to Microsoft Project.

Design Manager

The Design Manager isn't a simple new feature. It is an entire new web-based tool to help you manage Master Pages, Composed Looks, Devices, Reusable style templates and managing all aspects of branding your SharePoint Site. If you are an expert in the design of HTML and CSS, the Design Manager will simply integrate the HTML form into a functional Master Page.

Content Search Web Part

The Content Search Web Part is the mature level of the Content Query Web Part. It is used to produce the search results instantly using continuous crawl introduced in SharePoint 2013 using a search-based query and an advanced query building to aggregate the content from various locations. The Design Manager helps us to create HTML and JS friendly templates for a Content Search Web part instead of using XLST and itemstyles templates.

Business Connectivity Services

Using this service:

SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 can access data stored outside of SharePoint
Visual Studio can connect to an OData end point to automatically generate the BDC model for an OData data source

These improvements in BCS support:

App for SharePoint
External list to access with other SharePoint Lists and OData Business Data Connectivity (BDC) connections

SharePoint 2013 listeners and subscribers play a vital role in receiving notifications from external systems when data changes.

Business Intelligence

It provides a BI tools integration with Microsoft Office applications and Microsoft technologies. Some of the important services are listed below:

Excel BI: that provides the capability to analyze and explore the data in any size. The features included in it are In Memory BI Engine (IBMI), Power view Add-in and Decoupled PivotChart and PivotTable reports
Excel Services: that provide us to view and interact with the Excel workbook with features including exploring the data with SQL Server Analysis Service and Power Pivot data models. Also we can view and change the fields and values in PivotChart and PivotTable Reports
Performance Point Services: that is mainly used to interact and create dashboards using KPI's with extendable features like Dashboard Migration, BI Center Update, Filter Enhancements and Filter Search, support on iPad devices and Analysis Services Effective User

Identity Management

It's the new term for authentication management that is mainly the process of using claim-based authentication. Addition to this, SharePoint 2013 consists of:

Server-to-server authentication
App authentication by utilizing and extending the Open Authorization 2.0 web protocol

Mobile Devices

SharePoint 2013 plays a vital role in optimized view experiences across different mobile platforms. It offers several new features with functionality including Optimized mobile browser experience, Push notifications, GeoLocation field type, Business Intelligence content.

Apps for SharePoint

As a developer: We can design our app by using web application languages (HTML, JS, PHP and .NET) and development tool (Visual Studio 2012, NAPA and O365) and it also supports a tiered architecture model. As a user we have the ability to create our own App and publish or host it in a SharePoint Store called Cloud App.

Site Collection Health Checker

It is one of the great features in SharePoint 2013 mainly used by site collection owners or administrators to detect and address any potential issues before and after or during the site collection upgrade to the new version. The checker will sometimes detect the issue and repair it automatically but others require manual steps to repair.

References

Summary

I hope you enjoyed this journey with me on SharePoint 2013 Features.