SharePoint 2013 – Sneak Peek

By: Shailen Sukul

Who Is Shailen Sukul ?Shailen (pronounced Shay-Len) Sukul is a bleeding edge Entrepreneur working with the latest Web technologies to create compelling solutions. He loves to present at user groups and write articles and whitepapers based on his work.

He has founded a Melbourne based consulting company called SharePoint Cloud Design (http://www.SharePointCloudDesign.com), which specializes in consulting on the Microsoft SharePoint and Cloud stack (Azure), Identity Management (ADFS and ACS) as well as providing training on SharePoint and .Net.

Shailen also works on stealth startups in his night job. His newest startup (still under wraps) is a search centered solution built on the AWS stack. Leveraging cutting edge technologies like Geolocation, public single sign on, it is built in HTML 5/Javascript and will be unveiled to a beta soon. So stay tuned!

You can follow him on twitter @shailensukul and check out his blog at: http://shailensukul.com

Who Is Shailen Sukul ?

Checkout my open source projects Taxomatic: http://taxomatic.codeplex.com/ SharePoint Smart Serve http://smartserve.codeplex.com/ Multi-Threaded File Download Manager

http://bloodhound.codeplex.com/ DBRef http://dbref.codeplex.com/

Checkout my blog at: http://www.shailensukul.com

Changes from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013 –

35,000 Foot View

Features deprecated in SharePoint 2013 Preview

• Visual upgrade - The visual upgrade feature is replaced with deferred site collection upgrade. The site collection upgrade process is not reversible. The deferred site collection upgrade is a more comprehensive upgrade process than visual upgrade. With deferred site collection upgrade, you can continue to use the UI from the previous version (SharePoint Server 2010) more seamlessly than is possible with visual upgrade. The master page, CSS, JScript, and SPFeatures will remain in SharePoint Server 2010 mode.

• Migration path: Site collection administrators who are using visual upgrade to continue to use SharePoint Server 2007 must move to the SharePoint Server 2010 user interface before upgrading to SharePoint 2013.

• Templates Removed:• Document Workspace site template• Personalization Site site template• Meeting Workspace site templates• Group Work site template and Group Work solution• Visio Process Repository site template (deprecated in a next major release)

Features deprecated in SharePoint 2013 Preview• Services Deprecated:• Imaging Web service (deprecated in next major release)• Excel Services - Workbooks with external data connections that use Windows

authentication cannot be refreshed in the browser. Instead, you are prompted to open the workbook in the Excel client program. Workbooks that have database or Windows credentials stored either in the Secure Store Service or in the connection string can still be edited in the browser. This change applies only when Excel Web App in Office Web Apps Server is used to view workbooks, not when Excel Services in SharePoint Server 2013 is used.

Features deprecated in SharePoint 2013 Preview• Web Analytics in SharePoint Server 2010 - Web Analytics in SharePoint Server

2010 has been discontinued and is not available in SharePoint 2013. Analytics processing for SharePoint 2013 is now a component of the Search service. The Web Analytics Service is not upgraded to the Analytics Processing Component in SharePoint 2013. When you upgrade to SharePoint 2013, the databases that contain the data from Web Analytics in SharePoint Server 2010 are not removed. These databases are not used by or maintained by the Analytics Processing Component in SharePoint 2013. This means that documents on sites in SharePoint Server 2010 that are upgraded will show a hit count of 0.

More at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff607742(v=office.15)

SharePoint Architecture

In general model has stayed same as in previous version Numerous platform level improvements and new capabilities

New Features

Shredded Storage

The goal here is to make changes equal to the size of the change, not size of the file. Let’s have a look at how it works in SharePoint 2010 and 2013 to understand the purpose.

How It Works in SharePoint 2010: When a file is updated via Cobalt, only the bits that have changed are sent over the wire

from the client to the SharePoint WFE. However, because SharePoint lacks the concept of incremental updates to SQL it is forced to:

pull the entire file to the WFE merge the changes into it write the entire file back to SQL

How It Works in SharePoint 2013: The file is broken into pieces and stored in SQL On update only the shredded blobs that correspond to the updated bits are touched No more round tripping entire files to the WFE and back

Performance Improvements

In SharePoint 2010, entire copies of documents were saved on each subsequent save. This causes the database to explode and performance suffers.

Now in 2013, only delta changes are saved. This saves both network bandwidth as well as hard disk space.

SQL Improvements

In SharePoint 2013, Microsoft has tried to make significant improvements in server performance. They have reduced scenarios that might invoke full table scans. Also, there have been lots of improvements around finding docs for link fix-up and alert handling. They have reduced data redundancy for some features using advanced indexing features provided by SQL 2008 R2. The major change in architecture is to support wide lists, i.e. lists where a single item spans multiple rows in the database to hold the data.

Cache Service

There is a new distributed cache service in SharePoint 2013 based on Windows Server AppFabric Distributed Caching. It is used in features like authentication token caching and My Site social feeds. The same time it should be noted that SharePoint 2013 uses caching features that cloud-based cache (Windows Azure Cache) does not support at this time, so only local cache hosts can be used. Also, importantly, SharePoint ONLY supports the version of caching that it ships – you cannot independently upgrade it.

The config DB keeps track of which machines in the farm are running the cache service. It is all provisioned by the SharePoint setup. A new Windows service – the Distributed Cache service – is installed on each server in the farm when SharePoint is installed.

Cache Service

Request Management

The purpose of the Request Management feature is to give SharePoint knowledge of and also to have more control over incoming requests

Having knowledge of the nature of incoming requests – for example, the user agent, requested URL, or source IP – allows SharePoint to customize the response to each request.

The goals of request management (RM) are as follows: RM can route to WFEs with better health, keeping low-health WFEs alive RM can identify harmful requests and deny them immediately RM can prioritize requests by throttling lower-priority ones (bots) to serve higher-priority

ones (end-users) RM can send all requests of specific type, like search for example, to specific machines Isolated traffic can help troubleshoot errors on one machine RM can send heavy requests to more powerful WFEs

Service Application Changes

There are a few new service applications in SharePoint 2013: App Management Service: allows you to install SharePoint apps from the

Office Marketplace or the App Catalog SharePoint Translation Services: does simple language translation of Word,

PPT, and XLIFF files into HTML Work Management Service: provides task aggregation across systems such as

SharePoint, Exchange and Project. Azure Workflow Server is new and not exactly a service app but similar.

Provides an externalized host using REST and OAuth to run workflows.

Service Application Changes (cont’d) Also, Office Web App and Web Analytics are no longer a service

application. Web Application Companions (WAC) is now a separate product altogether and not a service application. You can create a WAC farm that can support multiple SharePoint farms. You can view files from a number of different data sources, including: SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, File servers. 3rd parties can integrate with WAC to provide access to documents in their data stores, e.g. EMC Documentum, IBM FileNet, OpenText, etc.

** Office WAC (Web Application Companion) is an Office app in a browser. for example: a Visio file with the status of servers in a rack – taking a real time data feed from SCOM via BCS

Apps

Previously in SP 2010 we had WSPs which were Full Trust or Sandbox. Sandbox solutions were restricted from running most server side code and extremely limited

Apps which interact with Office 15 via the upcoming Web Extensions for Office 15. App apply to both thick client (Word) or thin client (browser, Web Apps)

Goodbye VBA. Hello HTML 5/JavaScript Will target Office as well as Office 365 (not to mention Mac devices) 2 Kinds of Apps: ones which run in Office Client and ones which run in

SharePoint

Apps

Apps

Apps can run in a server which can be hosted in the cloud. This can be cross domain and interacts with SharePoint via REST/Oauth (Server Side code, JSONP for cross domain calls)

In the web.config of SharePoint, all of these cross domain calls, they have turned request validation to off for handlers which accept these calls. This means that the App developer has the ability to insert any JS or HTML from the client side. This means that Apps can have malicious code or can be hijacked by other IFrame apps. The resolution is to design apps to leverage Shared tokens. A simpler way is not to use a Part App and instead to use a Page App.

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) Allows you to surface external data from SP Now supports OData SharePoint 2013 has made External Content Types (ECT) from external

lists accessible via Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) services or OData. This helps users more easily consume and interact with external data sources located outside of SharePoint.

External List Event Receivers and alerts are also now available in SharePoint 2013 along with filtering, sorting, and support for REST (Representational State Transfer). External systems can now notify when their data is updated

SharePoint REST

Provides support for CRUD (create, update, delete) operations from SharePoint Apps, solutions, and client applications using standard OData and REST web technologies.

Client-Side Object Model (CSOM) and JavaScript Object Model (JSOM) SharePoint 2013 is all about hosting external application functionality

in a SharePoint context. Those external applications (SPApps) will often need to interact with the SharePoint environment. In SharePoint 2013 CSOM has been greatly expanded to include the ability to access the query object model for online, on-premises and mobile development of search along with improvements in other areas. When it comes to JSOM, SharePoint 2013 includes support for JavaScript contexts, cross-domain queries and application programming interfaces (APIs) to access the workflow object model.

Workflows

Workflows in SharePoint 2010 were painful (to say the least). Workflows for large number of users would not scale. It was based on WWF 3.5. WWF 4/4.5 has a much better performance versus WWF 3.5. Sahil Malik maintains that you will see at least a hundred times performance improvement between the 2 versions.

Reasons: Every step in the Workflow requires a hydration and dehydration of the workflow stage from a persistence store. The DB storing this is the SharePoint 2010 content DB. This is the bottleneck.

With SP 2013, these legacy SP workflows will continue to run as is. With new workflows, they will actually run out of process on a Workflow Server (potentially) . SP 2013 talks to the WF Server over a REST/Oauth API

Workflows

SharePoint 2013 will include Windows Azure Workflow (WAW) Services, which is built on Windows Workflow Foundation 4. SharePoint 2013 also includes the AppFabric Workflow Model, which provides a lot more flexibility on the scalability of workflows

Windows Azure Workflow Manager Client server, SharePoint 2013 Preview, and SharePoint Designer 2013 Preview each provide significant parts of the new infrastructure:

Windows Azure Workflow Manager Client server provides the management of workflow definitions. It also hosts the execution processes for workflow instances.

SharePoint Designer 2013 Preview is the primary business-user tool for creating workflow definitions and publishing them, as it was in previous versions. It can also be used to package a workflow definition with or without associated SharePoint components.

Workflows

Web Content Management

Painful in SharePoint 2007/2010 “The Web Content Management story is a train which left in the

wrong direction ever since SharePoint 2007” – Sahil Malik They did not consider SEO, pages were extremely heavy, the platform

is quite complex. Navigation across site collections is a pain SP 2013 – new WCM features are driven off the Managed Metadata

store and Search

Web Content Management (cont’d)

Managed navigation Managed navigation lets you define and maintain the navigation on a site by using term sets.

Managed navigation supplements the existing SharePoint navigation that is based on site structure. You can copy the navigation term set and translate it into the same languages that are used for variations labels.

For example: In an authoring site collection, you create a term set for the navigation of the product pages. A

term within this term set typically represents a product category — for example, Audio, Cameras, or Computers.

In the publishing site collection, you create a term set for the navigation of the non-product catalog pages. A term within this term set usually represents pages — for example, Home, About, or Careers.

By using cross-site publishing to display content from the authoring site collection in the publishing site collection, you can combine the terms from the two site collections to create the complete website navigation — in this example, Home, Audio, Cameras, Computers, About, and Careers.

Web Content Management (cont’d)

Content Search Web Part, Refiners and faceted navigation – work with Managed Metadata

Branding New features for publishing sites in SharePoint Server 2013 minimize

the special SharePoint knowledge that is required to successfully design and brand a SharePoint site. To brand a SharePoint site, designers just create a site design as they typically would, by implementing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Designers can create these files by using their design tool of choice, whether that is Adobe Dreamweaver, Microsoft Expression Web, or some other HTML editor.

Web Content Management (cont’d)

User Friendly Urls - In SharePoint Server 2010, the URLs for publishing sites included the name of the Pages library — for example, http://www.contoso.com/Pages/Computers.aspx#/ID=453&Source=http%3A%2F1010101. In SharePoint Server 2013, you can create URLs that are more user-friendly — for example http://www.contoso.com/Computers/model101.

Web Content Management (cont’d)

The pages are a lot lighter. There are 2 aspects: You can create a lightweight page from scratch New SPWeb object property called EnableMinimalDownload. This works with

a control called DownloadManager on the page. Newer MasterPages and Controls only download a delta or difference of the page instead of fetching the whole page every time

Gotchas- older upgraded pages will not work with MinimalDownload. You can turn off EnableMinimalDownload when performing migrations to maintain backwards compatibility

Mobile Devices

Device-specific targeting - SharePoint Server 2013 supports targeting different devices such as smartphones, tablets, and set-top boxes. Designers can create channels that allow a single publishing site to be rendered in multiple ways by using different designs that target different devices.

SharePoint Server 2013 offers improvements to the mobile browser experience with the introduction of a new contemporary view. Depending on the mobile browser, users have one of the following browsing options:

Contemporary view This view offers an optimized mobile browser experience to users and renders in HTML5. This view is available to Mobile Internet Explorer version 9.0 or later versions for Windows Phone 7.5, Safari version 4.0 or later versions for iPhone iOS 5.0, and the Android browser for Android 4.0 or later versions.

Classic view This view renders in HTML format, or similar markup languages (CHTML, WML, and so on), and provides backward compatibility for mobile browsers that cannot render in the new contemporary view. The classic experience in SharePoint Server 2013 is identical to the mobile browser experience of SharePoint Server 2010.

Full-screen UI There is also the ability to have a full desktop view of a SharePoint site on a smartphone device.

Mobile Devices

SharePoint Search

SQL Query syntax is not supported. FQL and Keyword QL supported Search REST API for remote invocation The Query web service (located in the path

http://server/site/_vti_bin/search.asmx) is deprecated in favor of Query CSOM or Query REST service

IFilter and Parser support. Parsers can work against documents with no extensions for ex. http../download.aspx?id=123

Enterprise Search - Logical Architecture

App Demonstration

How to develop Apps

Instructions at http://bit.ly/VoGhIR

App Demonstration

Database:• The SQL Azure version of AdventureWorks has been downloaded and installed from here:

http://msftdbprodsamples.codeplex.com/releases/view/37304. • Server: zhchkgzlaa.database.windows.net• DB: AdventureWorksLTAZ2008R2

RESTful Web Service:• Windows Azure details – http://sukulwebservice.cloudapp.net/AWDataService.svc/Customer • Example:• http://sukulwebservice.cloudapp.net/AWDataService.svc/Customer?$format=json&startswith(FirstName, 'J') – find all customers whose

first name starts with the letter and present the results in JSON format. For results in ODATA format, omit the $format parameter• Used WCF Data Services (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/odata.aspx) to enable the creation of ODATA feeds with a few lines of

code.

SharePoint App:• Site: http://sukul.sharepoint.com • App Url:

https://76fea8dd-e752-4fb4-a08b-fdcb64685665.o365apps.net/Pages/Default.aspx?SPHostUrl=https://sukul.sharepoint.com&SPLanguage=en-US

For more info, check

outhttp://

shailensukul.com

Resources

SharePoint 2013 Preview - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh973397.aspx

Office 365 Preview - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/hh973397.aspx

END OF PRESENTATION