On my visit to London last week, I was able to spend some time
with the Microsoft Information Worker field team. One of the things
presented was my take on the forthcoming SharePoint 2013 release.
In a previous post, I shared my thoughts on some of
the themes that I saw within this release — and I talked about
those themes with the Microsoft team at length, but I also shared a
quick snapshot of the standout features that, for me, make this
release compelling.

Forgive me if I hold back on some of my images and thoughts here,
since I’m gearing up for a major roadshow to various user groups
and Microsoft teams across the middle east and Europe next month,
and I don’t want to share everything before I even get started. But
the following list should provide you with a good picture of what
I’ll be talking about and demonstrating from the road.

Within this release, there are some fairly dramatic shifts — part
of Microsoft’s evolving release planning, and due to trends in the
industry that are driving customer expectations, such as the
consumerization of IT, the ability to access and consume data
anytime, anywhere, and on any device, and in the increased use of
the cloud. You can see much of these influences in the SharePoint
2013 Preview and much of Microsoft’s content surrounding the
impending release, including a focus on web content management, on
extending the social experiences — including richer Office app
integrations, more integrated search, and the evolution of their
“online first” model in which we will very soon see parity between
on prem and online versions, and not too far away, online
out-pacing on prem in available features. When Microsoft says that
this is a landmark year, they aren’t just spinning the marketing
wheels. These are some pretty big changes.

Within the SharePoint 2013 preview, there are broad and granular
features that stand out in my mind:

•Web Content Management (WCM)
There is so much wrapped up underneath this one banner, but the
main idea is to allow for cross-site publishing, variations and
content translation, image renditions, video and embedding, and
everything else you require to publish across your intranet,
extranet, and internet sites. While 2010 focused on ECM features,
feedback from customers across the board nailed Microsoft for poor
WCM capabilities. 2013 answers those requests.

•Design Manager
I love the ability to better manage the SharePoint branding
experience from within the platform, allowing administrators and
designers to manage their various master pages, images, and sites.
This will come in handy when designing a SharePoint site for
viewing by browser, tablet and mobile device — the Design Manager
will help you to build the framework for each, allowing you to then
manage the content in one place, but consume across each device
type. Cool stuff.

•Integrated FAST Search
I heard these complaints back in 2006 and 2007 — why should I pay
for good search when it should be part of the standard license?
Well, FAST is no more, and the search tools are better integrated
and available through your existing CAL, with some new query and
navigation capabilities available out of the box.

•Social Communities
We all knew this was coming. It was blatantly missing from 2010,
and several partners created their own versions of communities
(such as NewsGator and Neudesic). Now it comes out of the box,
giving teams the ability to develop community sites with shared
calendars, tasks, noteboards, and so forth — all integrated with
the corporate platform.

•Yammer Integrations
While we do not yet have visibility into what is coming from
Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Yammer, there is a lot of
speculation. I have my theories, and its all good news for the
social experiences inside of SharePoint. One guess (I don’t have an
insiders view here — this is purely my speculation) is an
expansion of what is available today for 2010, in which you can
push content from SharePoint 2010 to an existing Yammer community
site, by allowing two-way content sharing between the platforms. I
expect more on this at the SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas this
November, and am eagerly awaiting the news.

•Office Integrations
This is a great usability story. When I first saw screens of 2013
back in March (at the MVP Summit), the first thing I noticed was
the smooth integration with Office, and the simple, drag-and-drop
movement from desktop to SharePoint. Love it. A reduction in the
need to pop open a context menu to edit a list or table — just
click and edit.

•SkyDrive Pro
SkyDrive is not new — its been around since 2007. In the 2013
platform, it displaces Workspace (which was Office Groove) and
provides a method for online/offline content synchronization. And
as with the other Office integrations, provides drag and drop —
which you can do with a folder, with no browser open. With SkyDrive
and SharePoint, you can centralize your task management, and work
synchronously with others to edit a single document.

•The App Model
Here more than elsewhere is Microsoft addressing the move toward
the cloud, offering a new way to build out tools and access data,
allowing end users to use the platform the way they want to use it.
Organizations can build out an array of apps, offer them to users
through a private (or public) marketplace, and allow them to
consume data how they want.

•Shredded Storage
And finally, the concept behind shredded storage is to reduce the
amount of content sent across the wire by making changes within the
database equal to the size of the change, rather than the size of
the file. For example, if I have a word doc and edit a single word,
the size of the version would only be the text that was changed —
not the entire document. There are a number of different storage
optimization solutions out there, from WAN optimization to remote
blob storage, but shredded storage is a fairly innovative solution
to a large problem for many organization contemplating moving all
of their content into SharePoint.

This is not a comprehensive list, by any means, but are the
features that stood out to me upon first look at the preview
version. Of course, I’m also leaving out here a key component of
what I presented at Microsoft — the business value of SP2013, and
the value prop for moving to the new version, even if an
organization has only recently moved to 2010. I do believe there
are compelling reasons to move. And therein lies the value in
coming to see me present live 🙂

I’ll be posting dates and locations for my travels as I get closer
to my travel dates, and will be blogging from the road at each
stop, sharing anecdotes from each tour stop and pictures of those
whom I come in contact with. I start in Tampa, Florida (#SPSTampa)
and head to the middle east, and end my trip by going from London
to Minneapolis (#SPSTC). I’m looking forward to this trip, and hope
to see many of you out there.

This article was first published on BuckleyPlanet. Check out our resource centre for more
SharePoint content from Christian and other SharePoint
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