Feature Enhancements and Improvements in SharePoint 2013

Posted by Sophina Dillard on Wednesday, 29 May 2013 1

And yet again, we have a Guest blogger on our blog - All About SharePoint. Today's blogger is - Mansi Khurana and she is a technical writer with more than 3 years of experience. She has written various articles on SharePoint database recovery software and various other technologies. And Today's Topic is - Feature Enhancements and Improvements in SharePoint 2013.

Rapid SharePoint adoption accentuates the requirement of improvements and enhancements. Microsoft has added many new features and improved the existing ones in SharePoint 2013, let's read on to know.

Business Connectivity Services

Enhancements in Business Connectivity Services enable Office 2013 and SharePoint 2013 clients to get access to the data stored outside of the SharePoint environment, which is possible because of the support for OData. The SharePoint 2013 event listener features an event subscriber that enables custom code and SharePoint users to get notified when events occur in external storage system. SharePoint 2013 also supports apps that are designed for SharePoint. This support allows you to add relevant apps that do not affect the code of the system on which SharePoint server is running, resulting in enhanced security and easy installation and un-installation. Moreover, external list improvements enable users to sort, filter, or export other SharePoint lists.

eDiscovery

Improved eDiscovery in SharePoint 2013 provides help to users for protecting their businesses and enterprise platforms. The SharePoint eDiscovery Center is responsible to manage cases and holds. Improved in-place holds result in preserving Exchange mailbox and site-level, and includes ability to grant permissions so that users can access the original versions of the content that is preserved. Moreover, the export ability allows to export discovered content or the content that user gets as results of eDiscovery search.

Search

The Search feature in SharePoint 2013 resembles the related abilities of SharePoint Server 2010, however, is improved in various ways, such as search schema flexibility, query processing, new search architecture, and continuous crawl. Moreover, the search feature can be configured by administrators for enabling users to find information relatively more quickly.
Web Content Management

The improvements in Web Content Management simplify the way of designing publishing sites and enhancing the publishing processes within organizations. The Web Content Management capabilities in SharePoint 2013 are as follows:

• Menu items can easily be dragged and dropped to a page.
• Content can be copied from Word and pasted to Web Part.
• Visitors can go through the site using their familiar languages through language detection capability.
• Uploading videos is now smarter and simpler.
• An iframe element can be inserted so that user could include the dynamic content.
• When changes are made in some content, all the site collections reusing this content will reflect these changes.
• Designing a site just requires JS, HTML, CSS, and editing tools, for example, Dreamweaver. Therefore, understanding Visual Studio or SharePoint Designer is no more needed.
• User can publish single site in various ways on more than one device.

Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence applications and solutions in SharePoint 2013 allow users to organize performance requirements, enterprise goals, and processes. BI has the following capabilities:

• Users can view and change Excel Services items. The services include PivotTable reports and PivotChart reports.
• It is able to explore and analyze Excel Services reports data.
• It supports calculated measures created in Excel within Excel Services.

These are important improvements and additions in SharePoint 2013; others include identity management, management and compliance recording, social computing, and improved upgrade.