SharePoint used to be a collection of shared document libraries but today it has transformed into a powerful system that can act as your enterprise intranet and business social network, and also host your external web site. It has now changed from being a local server system to a cloud service, which you can subscribe to, and scale out.
Microsoft SharePoint is no longer the boring corporate intranet of yore. SharePoint 2013 rings in significant phase of the platform’s continuing evolution. It’ve a very new elegant look. The latest version of Microsoft’s document sharing and collaboration tools gets the same ‘Microsoft Design Language’ appearance as the company’s Office 2013 desktop software including its own version of local sync for files and HTML-based apps you can build or buy.
A variety of mobile-friendly changes enable better user experiences across devices, which is a must today for multi-platform and BYOD environments. It’s a potential advantage for SharePoint admins who don’t want to lose sleep over employee screen sizes, OS and other factors that can make the help desk’s phone ring off the hook. There are also more social features, like shared calendars and timeline, new tools such as Community Sites, Facebook-style status posts on your personal page, along with tasks that sync to Outlook.
Manage, search and share with SharePoint 2013
Document libraries and Sites (personal or shared) still provide the heart of SharePoint. Now you don’t need Internet Explorer and ActiveX control for uploading documents. You can simply drag a document onto a site page using any modern browser.
With advanced search capabilities, which deliver rich results, you can find useful documents quickly and easily without digging through libraries. Search capabilities including automatic recommendations based on your previous behavior giving you more useful results quickly. You can follow useful documents as if it’s a friend on Facebook.
Share documents with anyone or just your team. You can share with upto 10000 colleagues, external partners, associates and customers who don’t need to have SharePoint themselves with ease. Click on the sharing option and type in names or email addresses, choose whether they can view or edit – or copy the URL and send in an IM or put in a blog post. You can see with whom you are sharing documents and also stop sharing a document when you’re done collaborating making the management easy.
Business Intelligence
SharePoint 2013 has powerful Excel-like business intelligence tools for creating dashboards with charts, scorecards and maps using the latest versions of Power View and PowerPivot, so you can do whatever you want with the information in the documents you find. These tools are based on familiar Excel Services and SQL Server 2012.
Deep integration with Office apps also makes it simple and easy to use the information via SharePoint. You can view and edit documents straight in latest and updated versions of the Office Web Applications. SharePoint 2013 adds itself to the list of destinations Office can save files.
Your personal files stored on SharePoint can be auto synced to your PC with a replacement for SharePoint-Workspace called SkyDrive Prom. Team sites come with their own mailbox and OneNote notebook to use in discussions. Collaboration through SharePoint 2013 is also possible via new Newsfeed view.
You can use SharePoint with Office 365 Information Rights Management service to control who can see a document and what they can do with it, like you can turn off copying and printing functions for confidential information.
Similar to Yammer, Twitter or Facebook you can follow projects, people, sites, documents, hash tags and events. Use Twitter-style @names to mention people and see when someone mention you. You can also post your own updates to the team you’re working with or to everyone.
You’ll see in the activity stream when someone does something new or update information or makes a change. It allows you to filter the stream to make it more manageable. Preview videos and documents right from the Newsfeed. Or convert any item into an action that becomes part of your task list.
Customising SharePoint 2013
Building web pages to host in SharePoint 2013 has also been made far easier. It’s simple and easy to change the look and feel of a SharePoint site without any code. Choose from different themes, drag and drop images or choose different colors to use as the site background. You can add pages with more than just document libraries, and you can also create different layout for mobile viewing.
You don’t need SharePoint designer. Upload HTML pages to see them automatically converted to SharePoint master-page or copy-paste code from a standard web development tools. (Eg. Adobe Dreamweaver or Expression Blend).
SharePoint 2013 permits you to include language translation services for documents and sites. For structured tasks, you can add workflows designed in Visual Studio 2012 and if you need the full-trust managed .NET code that lets you customize it on your own server, you can deploy it on Windows Azure.
The SharePoint app store
You can get plenty of useful business apps in the SharePoint store, from mapping tools to WordPress blog hosting, for many of the functions that would previously have needed customisation. These apps are written in HTML and CSS so web developers can also create their own apps. Administrators can control apps, which are available from the store (and who can buy or can’t buy).
Final Words
SharePoint can do a massive amount of work required by most of the businesses to organize themselves. The new release is easier than ever to get started both for the IT administrators and for the end users.
You can use SharePoint to search and share documents, files and information, to analyze data with the Excel-like business intelligence tools, to plan new projects with the help of new timelines and shared notebooks, to discuss data and information via OneNote, email or news-feeds and to manage and protect it, with rights management and access control (internal or external to your company) and legal holds.
New interface and tools make SharePoint-2013 an extremely valuable business tool, which provides you the critical mass of business information. Unless you need to keep local servers or you’re not comfortable moving to Windows Azure, the SharePoint Online service on Office 365 is the easiest and most cost-effective way of getting it. It is going to massively improve your enterprise collaboration, productivity and efficiency. Super charge your business with SharePoint 2013 for higher growth.
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About the Author: Bhasker Thapan
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