New Features in SharePoint 2013

1.) Deployment Flexibility

SharePoint Server 2013 provides unprecedented deployment flexibility, whether you’re looking to deploy on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid scenario. As business needs and technological advancements converge, IT professionals have a unique opportunity to take advantage of new innovations in their organizations. For example, IT professionals need an infrastructure that scales up and down quickly to meet changing business needs, minimize downtime and failures, and maximize cost efficiencies. Fortunately, several key innovations are making that possible:

1.) Virtualization

IT departments can respond more quickly to requests from business units, reducing the time it takes to deploy infrastructure and services. Plus, as always, virtualization significantly reduces the number of physical servers required to support the business.

2.) Cloud-based Applications

Anywhere access to critical applications can help to enhance work productivity, improve communication, and increase customer touch, allowing organizations to improve their regular business rhythm and respond to market changes and opportunities.

3.) Multitenancy and Cross-premises Integration

These innovations help IT departments and hosting service providers maximize existing infrastructure investments while exploring new services, improved management, and higher availability.

2.) Service Applications

While SharePoint Server 2013 provides a service application architecture consistent with SharePoint Server 2010, its new services are designed to maximize your investment and make information available to more people, in more formats, with more efficiency.

1. ) Translation Services

You can reach more people with new cloud-based translation services capable of translating not only sites, but also their content. These services have a comprehensive set of APIs, REST, and CSOM support, so content can be pretranslated when needed, or translated on the fly by users—asynchronously, synchronously, or streaming.

2. ) App Management

Applications are core to the SharePoint Server 2013 experience. A SharePoint application is a secure, focused solution that is easy to develop, deploy to a marketplace, monitor, and retire. Moreover, managing applications should be easy. SharePoint Server 2013 includes a new App Management Service designed to take the guesswork out of managing applications, permissions, and licensing, whether installed from the SharePoint Marketplace or Internal App Directory.

3.) Work Management

Software should work together. With SharePoint Server 2013, you can gain a 360-degree view of workplace activities and improve communication across your organization through connected systems. A new Work Management Service provides support for action-based event aggregation across Microsoft server products, including Microsoft Exchange Server, Lync® Server, Project Server, and SharePoint Server 2013. For example, users can edit tasks from Microsoft Exchange Server on a mobile phone, and the Work Management Service aggregates tasks from Exchange Server in the My Tasks SharePoint list.

4.) PowerPoint Automation Service

Information is at the core of SharePoint Server, and making that information available in a variety of formats leads to broader collaboration and access to improvements in software. SharePoint Server 2013 provides the new PowerPoint Automation Service (similar to the current Word Automation Service), which can automatically convert Microsoft PowerPoint® presentations into a variety of formats to promote a high degree of accessibility. Formats include converting from older Microsoft Office documents to newer Office documents, web pages, or PDFs.

5.) Office Web Apps

Office Web Apps has evolved into a separate server product, Office Web Apps Server, that can serve multiple SharePoint farms for viewing and editing documents. In addition, a server or farm that runs Office

Web Apps can be used to view files that are stored across data stores,

including the following:

• Microsoft server products, especially SharePoint Server,

Exchange Server, and Lync Server.

• File servers (URL accessible).

Third parties also can integrate with the service and provide access to documents in their stores, such as EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet, OpenText, and Oracle.

By separating Office Web Apps from the SharePoint farm, administrators can update servers more frequently, if desired. Administrators in large organizations can manage the scale and performance of Office Web Apps independent of the SharePoint environment. They also can serve multiple SharePoint farms, as well as Exchange Server and Lync Server, from one Office Web Apps Server environment.

6.) User Profile Service

User profile properties drive a broad set of SharePoint features—from social collaboration to authorization. SharePoint Server 2013 simplifies access to user properties with new profile import options that range from a traditional Microsoft Forefront® Identity Manager-based approach, to new direct Active Directory® Domain Services synchronization, to choices for using an external identity manager. Overall, you should see significant improvements in performance while also having greater

flexibility.

3.) Performance 

1.) Distributed Cache

Data-driven applications have become increasingly prevalent as data is consumed from more diverse sources, such as business applications, syndicated feeds, and social contexts. SharePoint Server 2013 includes a new Distributed Cache Service built on the reliability of Windows Server® AppFabric® Caching. Distributed caching helps to ensure that no request takes too long.

2.) Disk I/O

With an increased need for larger quotas, storage costs remain a concern in many SharePoint environments, and there is generally very little room in IT budgets to multiply storage capacity by two, three, or even four times. In parallel, industry shifts and advancements have led to more high-capacity, low-cost commodity storage options. SharePoint Server 2013 can be deployed to a variety of storage architectures without sacrificing availability. Building on the performance improvements in SharePoint Server 2010, SharePoint Server 2013 delivers a significant reduction in disk input/output (I/O), lowering the bar for minimum disk performance. In addition, smoother I/O patterns reduce contention, making more storage options available to support a SharePoint Server 2013 infrastructure.

3.) Shredded Storage

Shredded Storage is designed to reduce an organization’s storage footprint, minimize bandwidth, and improve performance through a new file save algorithm that ensures all write costs for file update operations are proportional to the size of the change being made to the file (and not the size of the file itself). Shredded Storage enables the storage of incremental updates to files in SharePoint Server by breaking a file into pieces and storing those pieces in Microsoft SQL Server®.

4.) Minimal Download

SharePoint Server 2013 provides a rich, intuitive browsing experience. Minimal Download in SharePoint Server 2013 provides a new navigation framework that significantly improves page load performance and makes SharePoint Server feel more like a rich application. Minimal Download is designed to ensure a user only receives the difference between the source and destination page, minimizing bandwidth and improving overall performance.

To determine what content requires updates, Minimal Download implements a download manager interface between controls and content placeholders on the page and server. Developers can take advantage of Minimal Download by implementing controls and master pages that support the framework. Where controls do not support Minimal Download, the request reverts to a classic fully rendered page, ensuring pages are always available.

Data Platform

Scale and performance improvements are evident across SharePoint Server 2013, with depth that extends to the database layer. Database improvements in SharePoint Server 2013 take advantage of enhancements and capabilities through SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1, including:

• Conforming to Microsoft SQL Azure™ compliance criteria.

• Removing redundant and unused tables and indices to track links.

• Reducing I/O operations while browsing document libraries.

• Using SQL sparse columns to simplify SharePoint database schema

and optimize data access.

• Improving large list dependencies.

Social Computing

Social computing and collaboration enable people to work in ways that are familiar to them, but as social computing becomes more pervasive, more demand is put on the supporting infrastructure. To keep up with these demands, social computing data is now stored in the content database where personal sites are hosted, providing a method to scale horizontally in parallel with demand.


Request Management
Request Management in SharePoint Server 2013 enables IT to prioritize and route incoming requests through a rules engine that applies logic to determine the nature of the request and the appropriate response.
Request Management can be used to:
• Route requests to servers with good health characteristics based
on a new weighting schema.
• Identify and block known bad requests such as web robot.
• Prioritize requests by throttling lower priority requests to preserve resources
for those of higher priority.
• Route specific request types to other servers, either within or outside of the
farm handling the request.


Developer Dashboard
A completely redesigned Developer Dashboard makes important information about performance and reliability readily available. The Developer Dashboard aggregates details about individual requests and surfaces them in a new unified view. It also provides an improved structured view of request details through a revised user experience. This information, presented right on the page, can be invaluable for administrators working to troubleshoot performance issues, as well as developers
working to debug and optimize their code. The Developer Dashboard is disabled by default and can be enabled for each web application independently by using the Windows PowerShell® command-line interface.


Multiple Screens
In today’s connected world, responding to the consumerization of IT can be challenging. With a proliferation of devices across the organization, you need to be sure your software will support users’ preferred equipment. SharePoint Server 2013, with deep investment in HTML5, provides IT professionals and designers with capabilities that enable device-specific targeting of content. This helps ensure that users have access to the information they need, regardless of the screen they choose
to access it on. SharePoint Server 2013 further empowers your workforce by delivering a consistent
experience across screens, whether using a browser on the desktop, a mobile device, or a tablet or slate. Through this rich experience, users can easily transition from one client to another without having to sacrifice feature fidelity.


Mobile
Making decisions faster and keeping in contact are critical capabilities for increasing effectiveness in any organization. Users’ ability to access information while on the go is now a workplace necessity. In addition to a consistent cross-screen experience, SharePoint Server 2013 provides the latest technologies and standards for mobile push and information synchronization.

Open Data Protocol
The amount of information created and stored within applications has grown exponentially. However, that data is often limited to a specific application, resulting in data silos. SharePoint Server 2013 provides a more secure and consistent method for accessing and presenting external data through services such as Excel Services, Business Connectivity Services, and PerformancePoint Services. New support for the Open Data Protocol (OData) also allows people to take information outside of
application boundaries, providing integration and interoperability across a broad range of clients, servers, and services.

Business Connectivity Services

The information that lives outside of SharePoint Server boundaries has become as important as the information that lives within them. Users no longer create data in isolation: They compile, aggregate, and surface it. As external data has become ubiquitous, SharePoint Server 2013 introduces improvements across its business connectivity architecture to make working with data outside of SharePoint Server more transparent.
Business Connectivity Services enables more secure and efficient read/write access to a variety of external data. This is done through a comprehensive framework that provides standard user and programming interfaces. Further, you can create a wide range of business solutions—both no-code SharePoint Composite solutions for simple-to-intermediate activities and code-based solutions for advanced needs. SharePoint Server 2013 significantly improves the ability of Business Connectivity
Services to alleviate bottlenecks by offloading data retrieval, paging, filtering, and sorting to the external data source. This reduces memory and processing pressure on SharePoint Server, improving display, refresh, and data operations for users—whether through the browser with SharePoint Server or through the client with Microsoft Office products.


Search
In SharePoint Server 2013, search is better integrated with enterprise infrastructure, based on an entirely new engine that combines the simplicity and out-of-box relevance provided by SharePoint Search with the massive scale and extensibility offered by Microsoft FAST™ Search Server. IT can deploy a scalable search architecture that allows users to search remote data sources, navigate enterprise repositories, and bring more data within reach through new individual search results
based on how people interact with information in their daily work. SharePoint Server 2013 also extends traditional data search capabilities into a true knowledge search by including the expertise of people. Best practices can be disseminated rapidly because people can contribute knowledge easily through blogs, wikis, personalized sites, and communities of practice. This tacit knowledge then
becomes discoverable through search, so it can be reused for business value.


Business Intelligence
With SharePoint Server 2013, organizations can derive greater value from their investments in data warehouse and business intelligence (BI) and analytics systems. Self-service BI makes the insights from enterprise data more broadly and easily accessible across the entire organization. Users can build query and visualization tools and scorecards and expose enterprise data with dashboards. SharePoint Server 2013 BI enhancements include beautiful visualizations through Power View reports, improvements across Excel Services for exploring data, and tighter security and control for managing BI assets with new compliance tools. All of these capabilities are supported across devices and platforms, both on-premises and in the cloud.

Business Intelligence Center
A new, streamlined Business Intelligence Center site template is available to help manage reports, scorecards, dashboards, and data sources in a central location. Users can access Excel Services to publish reports, as well as PerformancePoint Services to create scorecards and dashboards.

Excel Services
Excel Services provides users with a rich experience and new capabilities when working with web-based workbooks.
• Power View now empowers users to visually explore data, quickly create
interactive visualizations, and easily present and share reports—all with the
familiarity of Microsoft Excel®.
• Users have the ability to mash-up and analyze data from virtually any source
and rapidly create compelling analytical applications using PowerPivot in Excel
and publishing to SharePoint Server.
• New data navigation features make it easier to drill into data displayed in Excel
Services reports and dashboards.
• Timeline controls render in a browser window similarly to those in the
Microsoft Excel client.
• Context menus in a browser window resemble right-click menus in the
Excel client.
• In a browser window, users can add, change, and remove items from rows,
columns, values, and filters in PivotChart and PivotTable reports.
• With Excel Services, users can publish workbooks that contain calculated
measures and members.
These capabilities can help your organization achieve better business outcomes
by increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of users, while reducing IT cost
and complexity. Plus, because the IT department maintains control over security
and policies, these benefits can be attained in a highly secure manner.

PerformancePoint Services

PerformancePoint Services provides a new level of transparent dashboards, complete with a fresh look and feel and capabilities such as searching items within filters, using custom background images, and support for moving entire dashboards to other locations in SharePoint Server. For example, executives and business users can monitor and discuss information through collaborative BI Dashboards, enabling them to make better decisions using scorecards and social features. Other key capabilities of PerformancePoint Services include the following:
• Users can create integrated dashboards that bind important reports and
scorecards customized for monitoring progress.
• Insights can be socialized to encourage collaboration using features such as
recommending reports and authors, tagging favorite documents and libraries,
and starting discussions on micro blogs and personal sites.
• SharePoint Enterprise Search enables users to instantly find trusted reports and
expose popular assets.

What's new for Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint 2013

Following are the new features in BCS in SharePoint 2013 :

1.)  OData  Support
SharePoint 2013 introduces support for OData Business Data Connectivity (BDC) connections. This is in addition to data connections for WCF, SQL Server, and .NET assemblies. The Open Data Protocol (OData) is a web protocol that is used to query and update data. OData applies web technologies such as HTTP, Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub), and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) to provide access to information from a variety of applications, services, and stores.

Business Connectivity Services supports Anonymous, Basic, Windows, and Custom authentication to OData services when it is used with the Secure Store Service. If you want to apply permissions at more discrete levels, use OData connections. OData connections provide an easier way to create BDC models that work for both SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 client applications. In SharePoint 2013, you can connect external lists that are surfaced through OData to Office 2013 clients and you can work with the data when you are offline. When the Office 2013 client reconnects, it performs bidirectional synchronization with the OData source.

2.) Support for apps for SharePoint

Business Connectivity Services supports apps for SharePoint in two ways. First, BDC models can be scoped to apps for SharePoint. Second, connection information is defined and stored separately from the app-scoped BDC model in BDC connections.

3.) Performance improvements in external lists

SharePoint 2013 introduces a number of improvements for external lists. These improvements reduce the load on the database servers in the SharePoint farm and increase the speed of list rendering. Performance is enhanced by having the external system do paging, filtering, and sorting of the external list data before it is sent to SharePoint.

4. ) Limiting records returned by the external system

5. ) Data source filtering

6. ) Sorting external lists

7. ) Export external lists to Excel

In SharePoint 2013, you can export an external list to Excel 2010 or to Excel 2013. This works much like exporting SharePoint native lists to Excel in SharePoint Server 2010. However, there are some differences in how you control what gets exported and how you work with the exported data. By default, exporting external lists is enabled. However, an administrator can disable this.
When you export an external list to Excel, you basically get the list as it is displayed in the browser. You get only the data that is present in the selected view and the rows and columns in Excel will have the same sorting and filtering applied as the external list. The column names in the exported data will have the same language settings as the external list and the exported data is subject to any filters that are on the external system.

The process of exporting data creates a one-way (external list to Excel) link between the external list and the Excel version of the list. The Excel version can be refreshed at any time to reflect the current state of the source external list. This means that any changes users might have made to the Excel version are overwritten. Changes that are made in the Excel version are never pushed back up to the source external list.


8.)  Business Connectivity Services in SharePoint Online enhancements

One can bring external data into SharePoint Online from cloud-based data sources and from data sources that are behind your company’s firewall in a hybrid scenario. Microsoft Business Connectivity Services can consume data sources that are exposed as WCF services, SQL Azure data services, OData endpoints, and web services.

9.) REST (CSOM) object model for Microsoft Business Connectivity Services for web and mobile app developers

In SharePoint 2013, Business Connectivity Services exposes the Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs for web and mobile app developers to use. These APIs provide a standard interface to the developers.

10.) Event listener for BCS

SharePoint 2013 provides an event listener. The event listener includes an event subscriber on the SharePoint 2013 side. The subscriber receives notifications from the event publisher (on the external system side) on changes to the data and then initiates predefined actions when changes occur. This enables SharePoint users and custom code to receive notifications of events that occur in the external system. The users and custom code need to explicitly subscribe to events on entities for which they want to receive a notification. The external system can use any of the supported connections (OData, SQL, or WCF) for transactions with the external system. However, to support eventing, the external system must implement interfaces that allow users to subscribe to events and it must send the notifications back as ATOM feeds or JSON objects to the SharePoint 2013 endpoint.

Learn SharePoint in 30 Days : Day 1 Part 5

Create a Hello WebPart Using Visual Studio 2010.

Step 1: Launch the Visual Studio 2010. On the File menu, click on New->Project.

 On the left panel, Select Visual C#, Sharepoint 2010. On the right panel, select Visual Web Part. Then, type the project and soluction name as well as the location.


Step 2: Specify the URL that the project will be deployed to.

Step 3: Add the following code to the file "VisualWebPart1UserControl.ascx.cs"


protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
            Label lb = new Label();
            lb.Text = "Hello world";
            this.Controls.Add(lb);
 }


Step 4: On the Solution Explorer, Right click on the Project and select Build. Right click on the project again and click on Deploy.


Step 5: Open the web browser and locate to your Sharepoint site. On Site Action menu, click on Edit Page. On Editing Tool tab, select Inser->Webpart

Step 6: Select Custom on Categories tab and click on the web part we've just created.

Then, click Add and then click on Save button on the left corner, we have the following result

Learn SharePoint in 30 Days : Day 1 Part 4

WebParts

Web Parts are one of the basic building blocks of pages on SharePoint sites. They enable you to customize a SharePoint page to display content or business data from many sources on the same page. You can also use Web Parts to display information from external sources, such as RSS feeds or news sites.

There are more than 15 Web Parts included with SharePoint Foundation 2010. You can also buy Web Parts from other companies, or, if you want to try your hand at writing code, you can develop your own.

This article describes the Web Parts that are available with SharePoint Foundation 2010. Its purpose is to help you decide which Web Parts you want to use to customize your SharePoint site.

Web Parts in SharePoint Foundation 2010

In SharePoint Foundation 2010, Web Parts are organized in the following categories:

• Lists and Libraries
• Content Rollup
• Documents
• Forms
• Media and Content
• People

NOTE    Certain Web Parts can only be used with particular types of lists, libraries, or content or pages. For example, the Task Details, Task Decision Makers can only be used in a Task list.

Lists and Libraries

The Web Parts listed in this category are actually different forms of the List View Web Part. When the List View Web Part displays data from certain lists or libraries, it also takes the name of the list or library. In this way, the Announcements Web Part is actually a List View Web Part that displays a list of announcements; a Calendar Web Part is a List View Web Part that displays a calendar, and so on.

You can add a List View Web Part for the same list to several different Web parts or pages. Each will show the same data (in your own customized view, if you wish), and changes made to the data in one place will appear in all of the other places.

NOTE   You will often hear the term, “List View Web Part,” but you will not find a Web Part by that name. A List View Web Part automatically takes the name of the list for which it displays data. Thus, the List View Web Part for a calendar list is called “Calendar.” Similarly, when you create a new list or library on your site, a List View Web Part of the same name as that list or library is automatically created for you. For example, if you create a list called Customers, a List View Web Part called Customers will be available in the Site Name Gallery. The Web Part automatically displays the data contained in the list or library that you created.

Web Parts in this category are intended primarily to facilitate collaboration and communication among team members. When you create a new team site, the home page for that team site automatically contains Announcements, Calendar, Links, and Site Image Web Parts. Because a team site also features a Shared Documents library, a Tasks list, and a Team Discussions list, you can also add Web Parts for these types of lists to the home page.

You can add Web Parts to other pages to show the contents of these lists. For example, if your group has several document workspace sites, you could add a Web Part that shows the same group calendar information on each site, so users don't have to click back to the home page to stay up-to-date.

Web Part	Purpose
Announcements	The Announcements list contains messages posted by contributors to the site  (who have necessary permissions). Use the List View Web Part named  Announcements to display and update these messages on a site.
Calendar	The Calendar list contains upcoming meetings, deadlines, and other  important events. You can add a Calendar  List View Web Part to various locations on a site to display and update  the information on the calendar.
Links	The Links list contains links to Web pages that your team members will  find interesting or useful. You can use the Links  List View Web Part to display important or interesting links  in different locations on your site.
Shared Documents	A unique Shared Documents library is standard on all team and  document workspace sites. You can add the Shared Documents List View  Web Part to pages that are subordinate to the site where the library originated,  but not to other sites. Use the Shared Documents List View Web Part to provide  quick access to team documents in different locations on the site.
Site Assets	This library stores files that are included on pages of the site, for example,  images from Wiki pages.
Site Pages	This library stores pages on the site. You can use the Web Part to display  links to all those pages from a single page of your site.
Tasks	The Tasks list is where team members can keep track of work that needs to be done.  Add the Tasks List View Web Part to a page to view and update the list of tasks.
Team Discussion	The Team Discussion list contains newsgroup-style discussions among team members.  Use the Team Discussion List View Web Part to display and add to the discussions.

Content Rollup

The Content Rollup Web Parts are useful for displaying dynamic content on a page.

Web Part	Purpose
Picture Library Slideshow	This Web Part displays the images from a Picture Library as a slide show, displaying one image at a time as it automatically rotates through the images in the Picture Library. You can use this Web Part to make all kinds of images available to users – photos from the last office party, artwork for new ads, renderings of architectural plans, etcetera. You can set up a central Picture Library at the top of the site collection and then have users link to it with the Picture Library Slideshow Web Part. When you add images to the Picture Library, they will be available to users and included in the slide show.
XML Viewer	Use this Web Part to display Extensible Markup Language (XML) and apply Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT) to the XML before the content is displayed. You can use the XML Web Part to display structured data from database tables or queries, XML-based documents, or XML forms that combine structured and unstructured data, such as weekly status reports or travel expense reports.

Documents

There is only one Document Web Part. The Relevant Document Web Part displays a list of documents from all libraries in the current site that were created, last modified, or checked out (or all three) by the current user.

Forms

There is only one Form Web Part. The HTML Form Web Part enables you to connect simple form controls to other Web Parts.

Media and Content

The Media and Content Web Parts are useful for displaying text, images, and video on a page.

Web Part	Purpose
Content Editor	The Content Editor Web Part enables you to add formatted text, tables, hyperlinks, and images to a page. For example, you can use the Web Part to: Add a formatted introductory paragraph to a page Add a table of instructions to explain a chart on your page, the data that is used in the chart, and how the chart was created Add a set of hyperlinks to more information
Image Viewer	The Image Web Part displays a picture or other image on the page.
Page Viewer	The Page Viewer Web Part displays Web pages, files, or folders on the page. NOTE   Depending on the type of file you are displaying, the file may open in a separate browser window.
Silverlight Web Part	This Web Part enables you to make a Silverlight application available from a page on a SharePoint site.

People

The People Web Parts enable you to provide information about users in the organization.

Web Part	Purpose
Site Users	Displays a list of the site users and their online status.
User Tasks	Displays tasks that are assigned to the user currently viewing the page.

Why can’t I find the Web Part I want?

When you attempt to customize a Web page, if you can’t find a Web Part that's listed in this article, it may be because

• The SharePoint features that are required to support the Web Part are not enabled for your SharePoint site.
• The administrator of the SharePoint Server has disabled the Web Part.
• You do not have sufficient permission to use the Web Part.
• The Web Part is not available for the type of page you are working on.

If you can’t find a Web Part, contact your SharePoint administrator.

Where can I find more Web Parts?

You are not limited to using only the Web Parts that come with SharePoint. You can create your own, or you can search for "SharePoint Web Parts" on the Internet and find numerous companies with Web Parts for sale.

You can also get Web Parts for free from CodePlex, the Microsoft community development Web site. People who like to develop software post their products there for anyone to download at no cost. If you find a Web Part on CodePlex that you would like to use, there are a few things to keep in mind:

• While Microsoft supports and encourages open-source software development, it does not provide technical support for the software on CodePlex, nor does it guarantee that the software will work as described.
• Developers who post software on CodePlex are encouraged to help users who have problems and questions, but the level of support may vary from one product to another. Do not expect real-time help.
• Depending on your level of permission and technical skill, you may be able to install and use the Web Part yourself, or you may need to ask your SharePoint administrator for help.

don't forget to read about Visual Web Parts 

                                                                                      Continue to Part 5 ...........

Learn SharePoint in 30 Days : Day 1 Part 3

Configuration and customization

Web-based configuration

SharePoint is primarily configured through a web browser. The web-based user interface provides most of the configuration capability of the product.

Depending on your permission level, the web interface can be used to:

Manipulate content and page design.

Manipulate content structure, site structure, create/delete sites, modify navigation and security, or add/remove apps.

Enable or disable product features, upload custom designs/themes, or turn on integrations with other Office products.

Configure basic workflows, view usage analytics, manage metadata, configure search options, upload customizations, and set up integration.

SharePoint Designer

Main article: SharePoint Designer

SharePoint Designer is a 'fork' of Microsoft FrontPage, used to provide a faster configuration UI for some features in SharePoint.

It provides easy to access 'advanced editing' capabilities for HTML/ASPX pages, and workflow editing.

WYSIWYG HTML editing features were removed in Designer 2013, and the product is expected to be deprecated in 2016.

PowerShell & Central Administration

Microsoft SharePoint's Server Features are configured either using PowerShell, or a Web UI called "Central Administration". Configuration of server farm settings (e.g. search crawl, web application services) can be handled through these central tools.

While Central Administration is limited to farm-wide settings (config DB). It provides access to tools such as the 'SharePoint Health Analyzer', a diagnostic health-checking tool.

In addition to PowerShell's farm configuration features, some limited tools are made available for administering or adjusting settings for sites or site collections in content databases.

A limited subset of these features are available by SharePoint's SaaS providers, including Microsoft.

Custom Development

The SharePoint "App Model" in SharePoint 2013 provides various types of external applications that offer the capability to show authenticated web-based applications through a variety of UI mechanisms. Apps may be either "SharePoint-hosted" , or "Provider-hosted". Provider hosted apps may be developed using most back-end web technologies (e.g. ASP.net, NodeJS, PHP). Apps are served through a proxy in SharePoint, which requires some DNS/certificate manipulation in on-premises versions of SharePoint.

The SharePoint "Client Object Model" (available for JavaScript and .NET), and REST/SOAP APIs can be referenced from many environments, providing authenticated users access to a wide variety of SharePoint capabilities.

"Sand-boxed" plugins can be uploaded by any end-user who has been granted permission. These are security-restricted, and can be governed at multiple levels (including resource consumption management). In multi-tenant cloud environments, these are the only customizations that are typically allowed.

Farm features are typically fully trusted code that need to be installed at a farm-level. These are considered deprecated for new development.

Service applications: It is possible to integrate directly into the SharePoint SOA bus, at a farm level.

Customization may be surfaced via:

Application-to-application integration with SharePoint.

Extensions to SharePoint functionality (e.g. custom workflow actions).

'Web Parts' (also known as "portlets", "widgets", or "gadgets") that provide new functionality when added to a page.

Pages/sites or page/site templates.

Custom Development in SharePoint 

Using Visual Studio

Using SharePoint Designer

Using Visual Studio : Visual Studio  provides an alternative to creating SharePoint applications through SharePoint Designer. Visual Studio promotes rapid SharePoint development by providing such features as advanced debugging tools, IntelliSense, statement completion, and project templates. Visual Studio also takes advantage of advanced .NET Framework-based tools and languages. SharePoint projects can be developed by using either Visual Basic or Visual C#.

Benefits of using Visual Studio

1.)Workflows created in Share point Designer can be exported and imported to visual studio but the other way around is not possible.

2.)When developing solutions for SharePoint using Visual Studio, there is nothing special if you are targeting SharePoint. All of your sources files are handled as they normally are when you are using a version control system.

3.)You can use Visual Studio to group related SharePoint elements into a Feature. Next, you can create a SharePoint solution package (.wsp) to bundle multiple features, site definitions, assemblies, and other files into a single package, which stores the files in a format needed by SharePoint to deploy the files to the server.

In SharePoint 2010 we can create  Sandbox Solutions using SOM 

and In SharePoint 2013 we can create App Solututions (Cloud-App Model)

   
                                                                                          Continue to Part 4 ...........

Learn SharePoint in 30 Days : Day 1 Part 2

Key features in SharePoint :

Pages
SharePoint provides free-form editable pages, which can be modified using the ribbon. Pages are stored as 'aspx' files, in libraries. Features exist for publishing and enterprise wiki pages, which have functionality such as the ability to surface metadata, set custom URLs, control SEO metadata, and define custom layout and designs.

Web-Parts & App-Parts
Web parts and App parts are components (also known as portlets) that can be inserted into Pages. They are used to display information from both SharePoint and third party applications.

Lists 
A list is a data storage tool. It contains content items, with named data fields. List 'columns' allow you to view the data fields, and views of these columns are configured the list's settings.

Libraries
A library is a collection of files. In SharePoint, a library is a type of list. Each file is a content item. Libraries have extra features, such as synchronization, viewing/editing, or managing files.

Content
A content type is a metadata definition. Lists can be configured to contain certain multiple content types, and will have columns for all fields in the associated content types. Some content types such as 'contact' or 'appointment' allow the list to expose advanced features such as Microsoft Outlook or Project synchronization.

As of SharePoint 2013, in some locations, Lists and Libraries are referred to as 'apps' (despite being unrelated to the SharePoint app platform).

Sites
A SharePoint Site is a collection of pages, lists, and libraries. A site may contain sub-sites, and those sites may contain further sub-sites. Sites can be created according to pre-packaged functionality. Examples of Site templates in SharePoint include: collaboration (team) sites, wiki sites, blank sites, and publishing sites.

Search
SharePoint contains a re-worked version of Fast Search & Transfer's search technology, which combines advanced search and analytics features. This feature is highly customisable.

The content of documents (including PDFs) are searched.


Sharepoint can be classified as either on-premise or online.

Various SharePoint editions :

Microsoft SharePoint Foundation

SharePoint Foundation is available for free on-premises deployment. It is dependent on various hardware/software requirements, including a proper license for Microsoft Windows Server. It contains much of the core functionality and architecture drawn on by the commercial version of the package. Microsoft is not expecting to release a SharePoint Foundation 2016, and is currently considering different options for existing SharePoint Foundation customers.

Download SharePoint Foundation

Microsoft SharePoint Standard

Microsoft SharePoint Standard builds on the Microsoft SharePoint Foundation in a few key product areas.

Sites: Audience targeting, governance tools, Secure store service, web analytics functionality.

Communities: 'MySites' (personal profiles including skills management, and search tools), enterprise wikis, organization hierarchy browser, tags and notes.

Content: Improved tooling and compliance for document & record management, managed metadata, word automation services, content type management.

Search: Better search results, search customization abilities, mobile search, 'Did you mean?', OS search integration, Faceted Search, and metadata/relevancy/date/location based refinement options.

Composites: Pre-built workflow templates, BCS profile pages.

SharePoint Standard licensing includes a CAL (client access license) component and a server fee. SharePoint Standard may also be licensed through a cloud model.

It is possible to upgrade a SharePoint farm from Foundation to Standard.

Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise

Built upon SharePoint Standard, Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise features can be unlocked simply by providing an additional license key.

Extra features in SharePoint Enterprise includes:

Search thumbnails and previews, rich web indexing, better search results.

BI Integration, Dashboards, and Business Data surfacing.

PowerPivot and PerformancePoint.

Microsoft Office Access, Visio, Excel, and InfoPath Forms services.

SharePoint Enterprise Search extensions.

SharePoint Enterprise licensing includes a CAL component and a server fee that must be purchased in addition to SharePoint Server licensing. SharePoint Enterprise may also be licensed through a cloud model.

SharePoint Online

Microsoft's hosted SharePoint product is offered as part of their Office 365 product. The on-line version has a constantly changing feature-set and licencing arrangements, but is typically comparable with SharePoint Enterprise. Currently, additional capabilities include:

'NextGen Portals'

Microsoft Delve & Sway

Yammer Integration & Office 365 Groups

Integration with Outlook Web App

Newer versions of Online Office Document Editor Tools

Small business web publishing capabilities

Removal of various file size/number limitations

Missing capabilities include

Task roll-up feature

Some BI features must be purchased as part of Power BI

Some search & UI customizations are not possible and/or not recommended

Web publishing capabilities are significantly limited for larger organizations

Limited Tenant Administration options

N.B. Changes in SharePoint Online are listed on the Office Roadmap.

                                                                                                    Continue to Part 3............

Learn SharePoint in 30 Days : Day 1 Part 1

SharePoint is a web application platform in the Microsoft Office server suite. Launched in 2001SharePoint combines various functions which are traditionally separate applications: intranet, extranet, content management, document management, personal cloud, enterprise social networking, enterprise search, business intelligence, workflow management, web content management, and an enterprise application store. SharePoint servers have traditionally been deployed for internal use in mid-size businesses and large departments alongside Microsoft Exchange, Skype for Business, and Office Web Apps; but Microsoft's 'Office 365' software as a service offering (which includes a version of SharePoint) has led to increased usage of SharePoint in smaller organizations.


Versions
Successive versions (in chronological order):

Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2001
Microsoft SharePoint Team Services (2002)
Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 (free license) - Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 (commercial release)
Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (free license) - plus Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (commercial extension)
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 (free) - plus Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 (commercial extension for Foundation), and SharePoint Enterprise 2010 (commercial extension for Server)
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013 (free) - plus Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 (extension on top of Foundation)


The most common uses of the SharePoint include:

Enterprise Content and Document Management
 Enterprise content management and document management
SharePoint is often used to store, track, and manage electronic documents and assets. Integration with the Office Suite, Office Apps on Mobile Devices, and Office Web Apps enable editing scenarios, while OneDrive for Business (or third-party tools) enable offline synchronisation. It provides integrated version history tracking, collaborative live editing, and search capabilities. These capabilities are configurable to comply with record management or legal discovery requirements. SharePoint also provides search and 'graph' functionality enabling tracking of projects, documents, and users. Centralised location for storing, versioning, and collaborating on documents significantly reduce dependence on email for collaboration.

Personal Cloud

SharePoint Server hosts OneDrive for Business, which allows storage and synchronisation of files across devices, and public/private file sharing.

Intranet & Corporate Social Network

A SharePoint intranet or intranet portal is a way to centralize access to enterprise information and applications. It is a tool that helps a company manage its internal communications, applications and information more easily. Microsoft claims that this has organizational benefits such as increased employee engagement, centralizing process management, reducing new staff on-boarding costs, and providing the means to capture and share tacit knowledge (e.g. via tools such as wikis/blogs).

Extranet & Web Content Management

SharePoint can be used to provide web-facing access to external users. Organizations often use functionality like this to integrate third parties into supply chain or business processes, to provide a shared collaboration environment, or as part of delivering a product to a customer.

Using the 'Publishing' features, SharePoint can be used to manage public websites. It has publishing workflow, authoring, multilingual, and scaling features suited to managing larger websites.

Software framework

SharePoint's development stack provides an additional layer of services and that reduce custom development required to provide a working application. It may also be referred to as a web application framework. SharePoint 2013's "App Development" model provides these services through standards such as REST, SAML, and JSONP. A multitude of APIs enable enterprise application developers to exploit SharePoint's security and information management capabilities across a variety of development platforms and scenarios.

Related Software and Competitors

	Enterprise Content Management[	Personal Cloud for Business	Intranet & Corporate Social Network	Web Content Management
Major Competition	EMC Documentum OpenText Onbase IBM FileNet Oracle Corporation Perceptive Content Newgen Software	Dropbox Box Google Drive Tonido BitTorrent Sync	Yammer VMWare SocialCast Slack Salesforce Chatter Jive TIBCO Software IBM Connections	Drupal Joomla modx WordPress DotNetNuke Umbraco
Open-Source Competition	Alfresco (software) Nuxeo eXo Platform	Seafile OwnCloud AeroFS Syncthing	Diaspora (social network) eXo Platform	All major competition is open-source. For more see: List of CMS

                                                                                                           Continue to Part 2.....