What’s New in SharePoint 2013

Here is a consolidated view of the new features in SharePoint 2013, the information provide comes from various technet articles.

Hopefully this concoloated article is of some help

SharePoint Server 2013 provides a comprehensive solution for connected information work that enables people to transform the way they work while preserving the benefits of structured processes, compliance, and existing IT investments.

SharePoint Server 2013 has been optimized for the way people work, providing people with a familiar, consistent view of information, collaboration, and process, and IT with a comprehensive, easily-managed and integrated platform to meet the needs of the business.

Microsoft have released an eBook on this subject for more information please see: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35396

eDiscover

Electronic discovery, or eDiscovery, is the process of identifying and delivering electronic information that can be used as evidence. SharePoint Server 2013 introduces the eDiscovery Center, a new type of site collection that serves as a portal for managing eDiscovery cases. From this central location you can discover content in the SharePoint farm, in Exchange Server 2013, on file shares, and in other SharePoint farms. You can apply a hold to SharePoint and Exchange content that you discover. The hold ensures that a copy of the content is preserved, while still allowing users to work with their content. When you have identified the specific items that you will have to deliver, you can export them in an industry-standard format.

Site Policy

Even with good governance, SharePoint sites can proliferate and grow out of control. Sites are created as they are needed, but sites are rarely deleted. If sites persist when they are no longer needed, they require storage space and they might be unwanted for compliance reasons.

You can use site policies to help control site proliferation. A site policy defines the life-cycle of a site by specifying when the site will be closed and when it will be deleted. When you close or delete a site, any sub-sites are also closed or deleted. If an Exchange mailbox is associated with a site, the mailbox is deleted from Exchange Server 2013 when the site is deleted.

Site closure is a new concept in SharePoint 2013. When you close a site, you specify that the site is no longer used so that the site can eventually be deleted according to a schedule. A closed site does not appear in other places where sites are aggregated — for example, Outlook, Outlook Web App, or Project Server 2013 — but users can still modify a closed site and its content by using the URL to reach the site.

Search

Without having to open each search result, users can quickly identify useful results in ways such as the following:

• Users      can rest the pointer over a search result to preview the document content      in the hover panel to the right of the result.
• Users      can quickly distinguish search results based on their type. For example,      Microsoft Office documents display the application icon in front of the      title of the search result. Newsfeed conversation results display the      number of replies and the number of likes to the right. Site results list      the top links that users often click on the site. People in results show the      picture and the Lync availability status to the left.
• By      default, certain types of related results are displayed in groups called result      blocks. A result block contains a small subset of results that are      related in a particular way. For example, results that are PowerPoint      documents appear in a result block when the word “presentation”      is one of the search terms. Administrators and site owners can also create      result blocks to group other results. Like individual search results, you      can promote result blocks or rank them with other results.

Search helps users quickly return to important sites and documents by remembering what they have previously searched and clicked. The results of previously searched and clicked items are displayed as query suggestions at the top of the results page.

In addition to the default manner in which search results are differentiated, site collection administrators and site owners can create and use result types to customize how results are displayed for important documents. A result type is a rule that identifies a type of result and a way to display it.

Site collection administrators and site owners can use display templates to customize the appearance of search results by using an HTML editor, and they can customize the behavior of search results by using JavaScript. They can specify display templates that determine how result types appear.

In SharePoint Server 2013, you can configure crawl schedules for SharePoint content sources so that crawls are performed continuously. Setting this option eliminates the need to schedule incremental crawls and automatically starts crawls as necessary to keep the search index fresh. Administrators should still configure full crawls as necessary.

Social

Communities

In SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Foundation 2010, you could add a Discussion list to sites to facilitate discussions among members of the site. SharePoint Server 2013 and SharePoint Foundation 2013 continue to provide this Discussion list, but also expand on the discussion concept by introducing two new site templates named Community Site and Community Portal.

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 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 member and content reputation, which members earn when they actively post in discussions, and when their content is liked, replied to, or marked as a best answer.

You can deploy Community Sites or use community features in the following ways:

 

• By deploying a stand-alone community   With a stand-alone community, you can create the Community Site at either a site collection or a site level. For example, you might create a community in a divisional portal if you want to facilitate discussions among members of the division and use the community categories to keep things organized.
• By activating community features   You can activate community features on any site, which provides the core Community Site pages, moderation, membership, and reputation functionality within the existing site without creating a separate Community Site. This option is useful when you already have a site, such as a team site, where you want to include community functionality, such as earning reputations, without having to direct users to a separate site.

Additionally, when you have multiple Community Sites that you want to display to users in your enterprise, you can deploy the Community Portal. The Community Portal is a search-driven page that surfaces SharePoint site collections and sites in the SharePoint farm that use the Community Site template. Users can visit the Community Portal to discover popular communities and to search for communities that they might want to join. The Community Portal relies on enterprise search for security trimming, and displays only Community Sites for which a user has at least read permissions.

My Sites

In SharePoint Server 2010, My Sites provided a central place for users to store personal and shared documents, in addition to promoting their user information and expertise, tagging content, and communicating with others by using the Note Board. Through people search, users were able to connect with one another and benefit from expertise of others in their organization.

In SharePoint Server 2013, My Sites continue to provide the benefits from the previous release. However, the user interface is completely redesigned and modernized to give users an inviting and intuitive experience. A key change to the user interface includes a simplified and unified navigation experience for your own and others’ My Sites. Additionally, My Sites contain the new Microblog and Newsfeeds features. These features allow users to engage in short, public conversations, and keep up-to-date on activities from content and people in which they are interested.

Web Content

Content authoring improvements

Content authors have a better experience in SharePoint Server 2013. Content authors can now copy content from Word, paste it directly into a Rich Text Editor Web Part, Content Editor Web Part, or an HTML field control on a page, and have the resulting semantically correct HTML markup display in the styles that were defined by the site designer. Site owners and designers can now customize the global and current navigation menus by dragging and dropping menu items directly on the page.

SharePoint Server 2013 adds many new features for videos and using videos on pages. A new video content type is added, and the video upload process is improved for content authors. Thumbnail preview images are created automatically when a video is uploaded to an asset library, and content authors can choose a frame from the video and use that as the thumbnail preview image. For automatic thumbnail creation to work, the Desktop Experience feature must be installed on the front-end web server that hosts SharePoint Server 2013.

In SharePoint Server 2013, content authors can insert an iframe element into an HTML field on a page. This lets content authors embed dynamic content from other sites, such as videos or map directions. By default, certain trusted external domains are already approved for use in iframes. Site collection administrators can customize the field security settings by changing the default trusted external domains. They can also allow content authors to insert iframes for any external domain, or prevent them from inserting iframes on any page. To change the field security settings for a site collection, click HTML Field Security on the Site Settings page.

Finally, SharePoint Server 2013 supports image renditions. Image renditions let you display different sized versions of an image on different pages. When you create an image rendition, you specify the width and height for all images that use that image rendition. For example, if the site has a news article page layout that contains an image field, you can create an image rendition named Article_image to display the full-sized image in the article page. A second image rendition named Thumbnail_small can be used to display a smaller version of the image associated with a particular article when the image is displayed in a Web Part that lists all recent news articles on the site home page. To use image renditions, you first define the image rendition sizes. Next, you generate the default image preview by uploading an image, which you can adjust if it is necessary. Finally, you add the image to a page and specify which image rendition to use on that page.

Cross-site publishing

Cross-site publishing lets you store and maintain content in one or more authoring site collections, and display this content in one or more publishing site collections. When you change the content in an authoring site collection, those changes are displayed on all site collections that are reusing this content.

Friendly URLs

By using managed navigation and category pages, the URLs of category pages can be built from the terms that you have specified in the term set, such as Computers or Marketing. For individual catalog items, you can specify that the URL consists of additional properties from the library or list that is shared as a catalog. This lets you create more meaningful, user-friendly URLs, instead of having URLs that consist of strings that do not make sense to users. In SharePoint Server 2010, the URLs for publishing sites included the name of the Pages library — for example, http://www.contoso.com/Pages/Computers.aspx#/ID=453&Source=http%3A%2F1010101. In SharePoint Server 2013, you can create URLs that are more user-friendly — for example http://www.contoso.com/Computers/model101.

Analytics and recommendations

The new Analytics Processing Component in SharePoint Server 2013 runs different analytics jobs to analyze content in the search index and user actions that were performed on a site to identify items that users perceive as more relevant than others.

WorkFlow

SharePoint Server 2013 brings a major advancement to workflow: enterprise features such as fully declarative authoring, REST and Service Bus messaging, elastic scalability, and managed service reliability.

SharePoint Server 2013 can use a new workflow service built on the Windows Workflow Foundation components of the .NET Framework 4.5. This new service is called Workflow Manager and it is designed to play a central role in the enterprise. Processes are central to any organization and workflow is the orchestrator of processes.

Two SharePoint workflow platforms

The SharePoint 2010 Workflow platform has been carried forward to SharePoint Server 2013. All of your workflows that were built by using SharePoint Server 2010 will continue to work in SharePoint Server 2013.

In SharePoint Server 2010 the workflow engine installed automatically with the product. This continues to be the case with the SharePoint 2010 Workflow platform in SharePoint Server 2013. If you simply install SharePoint Server 2013 and do not install and configure Workflow Manager then you will have a nearly identical experience with building workflows as you did in SharePoint Server 2010.

The SharePoint 2013 Workflow platform only becomes available to you, and your tools, after you download and install the new Workflow Manager service and configure it to communicate with your SharePoint Server 2013 farm.

Apps

SharePoint 2013 introduces a Cloud App Model that enables you to create apps. Apps for SharePoint are self-contained pieces of functionality that extend the capabilities of a SharePoint website. Apps integrate the best of the web and SharePoint; they are targeted, lightweight, and easy-to-use, and do a great job at solving a user need. Users discover and download apps from the SharePoint Store or from their organization’s private App Catalog and install them on their SharePoint sites.

For example, let’s say you have a SharePoint site to collaborate with a team, and you want to create a survey to gather more data. In SharePoint 2013, you get a “survey app” from the SharePoint Store or from the App Catalog and install it on your site. Another example would be a mortgage broker who sets up a website with apps from the SharePoint Store. These apps might include a “bank rates app” that helps find the best mortgage rates, a “mortgage calculator app” that helps calculate mortgage payments, and a “property value estimator app” that provides an approximate value of a property. The website might also include apps from the mortgage company’s App Catalog that help the mortgage broker view and update client details and initiate a mortgage loan for a client.

Shredded storage is a new data platform improvement in SharePoint 2013 related to the management of large binary objects (I.e. BLOBS such as Microsoft PowerPoint Presentations, Microsoft Word Documents, etc.).

SharePoint 2013 allows content to be stored either a monolithic stream or a collection of independent BLOBs (Shredded Storage). When shredded the data associated with a file such as Document.docx is distributed across a set of BLOBs associated with the file. The independent BLOBS are each assigned a unique ID (offset) to enable reconstruction in the correct order when requested by a user.