SharePoint 2013 Five Fresh Features
SharePoint, with its robust and shrewd features has consistently increased its market share in the double-digit range year after year. It is undoubtedly a beast in its segment. With SharePoint, enterprises can now comfortably strategize to centralize knowledgebase, achieve better collaboration, develop applications with SharePoint as base and can also realize actionable intelligence about their overall business health.
Given the present popularity of SharePoint, SharePoint 2013 does not disappoint at all. In fact it excites with several interesting, brand new features. Here, we are listing the Fresh Five Features of SharePoint 2013, though there are plenty many of them!
Better Branding, Simplified Process
Branding is no more complicated, as it used to be earlier. Now, any web designer who has proficiency in HTML, CSS and JavaScript can comfortably brand a SharePoint site and create a good looking, public-facing or internal site within minimal time frame. This will result in the reduction of internal support expense, also makes it less costly to use SharePoint itself as a platform for public-facing websites.
Improved website hosting
Learning the right lessons from its predecessors, SharePoint 2013 has developed new capabilities in web hosting section, which can be regarded as a natural evolution into maturity. The new version comprises capabilities like serving up pages to different devices (such as mobile phones and tablets) based on their characteristics. It also includes several features for search engine optimization (SEO), including XML based sitemaps, friendly URLs, SEO settings by different site collections rather than sites, and robots.txt support to define out of bounds areas for search engine crawlers.
Business Intelligence got more Intelligent
The Business Intelligence capabilities have expanded in the 2013 release to make SharePoint the best choice to dig deeper into business insights and analytics. Also, there is tighter integration between SharePoint and Excel, which is an icing on the cake.
The PowerPivot feature has gotten more powerful; one can now work with billions of rows and columns directly in memory, and the other features like PerformancePoint Services, Dashboard Designer and Visio Services work together to provide a clear picture of the business' health and metrics.
Content Search Web Part
SharePoint 2013 comprises of a very powerful Content Search Web Part. In many ways this is the next generation Content Query Web Part. "Content Search Web Part that displays content that was crawled and added to the search index. One can use category pages when they want to aggregate content that meets certain criteria or parameters.
Better Mobile Device Support
Tablets and smartphones are here to stay and make our lives all the more mobile. SharePoint being the home for every sort of business, Microsoft has now addressed the problem of the poor SharePoint experience for mobile devices in previous versions, very effectively.
There is now an HTML5 coded view known as the "contemporary" view that is optimized for speedy access across iPhones, iPads, Android, BlackBerry and Windows Phone devices. There is also support for push notifications, with which SharePoint 2013 can reach out and push a message to the mobile device based on various factors. Location awareness is also built in.
