With SharePoint 2013 reaching it’s General Availability (the expectation is somewhere in 2013-Q1), it is time to give it some first thoughts. I will/cannot go deep into it [yet], as my knowledge is strictly based on hearsay. Next month I will visit European SharePoint Conference in Copenhagen, and hope to increase my understanding another level.
From what I’ve read and heard so far about SharePoint 2013, I consider these the most significant differentiators wrt SharePoint 2010:
- For end-users: (Enterprise) Social-enablement
- For operations: Cloud-enablement
- For developers: New App model, favouring client-side development above server-side
For business: well, all of the above.
Although ‘social’ was already introduced in SharePoint 2010, it was just not good enough and cannot live up to the competition (products like Facebook, Twitter, Yammer (…), NewsGator, SocialText). The social capabilities are now re-designed and developed, and promise to get more on par, with the distinguishing emphasis on applying social within the enterprise. So you can like a sales quote from your colleague, micro-blog on a customer case, follow colleagues that are involved in same type of workactivities as yourself (or as you desire to…).
With Cloud, organizations can be rescued from SharePoint operations, an often cumbersome exercition to perform self as a business organization. Also it may ease migration to SharePoint 2013 as it relieves organization to buy, install and maintain own infra (hardware + software).
With the new App-model, it will be easier to custom-build extensions to the SharePoint platform; relying less on in-depth SharePoint internals knowledge. And due the hosting model of SharePoint Apps, they will not be able to corrupt and destabilize the SharePoint server platform itself.
Although ‘social’ was already introduced in SharePoint 2010, it was just not good enough and cannot live up to the competition (products like Facebook, Twitter, Yammer (…), NewsGator, SocialText). The social capabilities are now re-designed and developed, and promise to get more on par, with the distinguishing emphasis on applying social within the enterprise. So you can like a sales quote from your colleague, micro-blog on a customer case, follow colleagues that are involved in same type of workactivities as yourself (or as you desire to…).
With Cloud, organizations can be rescued from SharePoint operations, an often cumbersome exercition to perform self as a business organization. Also it may ease migration to SharePoint 2013 as it relieves organization to buy, install and maintain own infra (hardware + software).
With the new App-model, it will be easier to custom-build extensions to the SharePoint platform; relying less on in-depth SharePoint internals knowledge. And due the hosting model of SharePoint Apps, they will not be able to corrupt and destabilize the SharePoint server platform itself.
Matrix overview of what’s new in SharePoint 2013
Of course the 3 aspects discussed above form only a small portion of the total set of what is new or improved in SharePoint 2013 compared to SharePoint 2010. In below matrix I included several more (but I’m sure that it still is not the complete picture), again per functional, developer and operation perspective.
