If you haven’t been living beneath a rock in the last two days, you probably heard the news we released the SharePoint 2013 Preview and Office 2013 Preview. Since there is already a massive amount of content available on blogs, TechNet etc. I’m not going to add even more with this blog post. My goal is simply to give you a limited amount of resources to quickly get you up to speed with all the news.

First of all, there was the announcement two days ago by Steve Ballmer. It was broadcasted live, and you can watch it on demand again. It takes 1h, it’s entertaining, shows some high level demos (mainly of Office 2013) and is a good starting point of your exploration.

• (If you are a developer, skip to the next bullet point!) After watching the announcement, you probably want to install the Office 2013 Preview. Just go to http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/ and sign up, it’s super-easy, free and the streamed install takes less than a minute. The nifty thing is that while the installation is finishing (takes like 5 to 10 minutes), you can already start the Office clients!
• If you are a developer and want to build apps for Office or SharePoint , I’d recommend to sign up for an Office 365 Developer Site. It includes a subscription for the Office clients too! An Office 365 Developer Site is a preconfigured SharePoint 2013 Preview site that you can use to create, test, and deploy apps for Office and SharePoint. You can deploy the “Napa” Office 365 Development Tools development tools to this site to get started developing SharePoint-hosted apps, and apps for Office documents and mail items, even if you don’t have Visual Studio 2012 and SharePoint development tools in Visual Studio 2012 installed on your developer computer.
• After you have signed up for the Office 365 Developer Site, you can familiarize yourself with the new apps for Office and SharePoint.
• A good introduction to the “Napa” Development tools can be found on Jason Zander’s blog. Also check out the Build apps for Office article on MSDN.
• When you want to learn more about the Office 2013 Preview features, I’d recommend to check out Office for IT pros and/or What’s new in Office.
• When you want to learn more about developing for Office 2013 Preview, check out the Developer training.

• To quickly get a chance to play around with the SharePoint 2013 Preview, I’d recommend to sign up for an Office 365 Developer Site. If you already have done this for the Office 2013 Preview, you can skip this step of course.
• A quick rundown of what’s new can be found here. (check the What’s new sections in the navigation)
• If you prefer to install the SharePoint 2013 Preview on your own machine, you can download the bits:

> SharePoint Server 2013 Preview (hardware and software requirements)
> SharePoint Foundation 2013 Preview

• Before you start the installation, it’s probably a good idea to check out the downloadable eBook: Deployment guide for SharePoint 2013 Preview. Remember, you can always try out the SharePoint 2013 Preview on Office 365 if you don’t want to install it yourself. 🙂
• If you are a developer, first read the Apps for SharePoint overview. Then check out the developer content on MSDN and especially the What’s new for developers in SharePoint 2013 article (and also the videos). Another good general starting point is the SharePoint for developers on MSDN.
• When you want to learn more about developing for SharePoint 2013 Preview, check out the Developer training.
• If you are an IT-Pro, there is a nice resource center for the SharePoint 2013 Preview on TechNet.
• More in-depth IT-Pro training can be found in the SharePoint 2013 training for IT pros videos.

This article was published by Jan Tielens. Check out our resource centre for more SharePoint content from Jan and other SharePoint specialists!

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