I was fortunate to have some time available which was spent evaluating and reading what SharePoint 2013 has to offer. Below is the list of areas that I got involved with over the past few months and which are notably different between SharePoint Server 2010 and 2013. The list below is not complete as the 2013 version is even bigger, better and beautiful! More blog posts will follow as we unpack more goodies from this new version of SharePoint Server 2013!

• Installation & Configuration: Configuration database failed to create due to SQL server role error in the documentation.
• Performance: CPU and Memory leak contained using powershell command by hungry search service. Distributed Cache Service stopped to enable smooth evaluation.
• Setting up SharePoint App store with sub domain configuration.
• With SharePoint 2013 there are more SQL Server databases than in the 2010 version.
• Shredded storage: This one is my favourite – rather than storing entire copies of documents in database, only the differential changes will be stored!
• SharePoint Designer 2013: No more Design View to work with data views and other functional areas. The technet forum thread proved an interesting thread with mixed opinions.
• Workflow Farm: When setting up the workflow farm I came across the configuration issues due to the format of credentials supplied.user@domain.com format was preferred instead of domain\user.
• Web design: Composed Look is a new feature that extends the SharePoint theme gallery with more control of fonts and colour based xml files.
• Catalog connections: a cross-site collection list can now be created, spanning multiple site collections with managed navigation derived from the managed metadata term store.
• Search: no more FAST and now just one product. Search topology can only be configured using PowerShell and not from the user interface. Continuous crawl is a new feature for up to date retrieval of content items.
• HTML Field security: Ability to insert iframes from the controlled list of external domains (such as youtube.com) into pages on SharePoint site.
• Image Rendition: At last multiple views of the same image – Image renditions will not be generated until the blob cache is enabled for a web application.
• New Translation Service: with calls to Bing service (not sure how this would work sites with no external internet connection!).
• Promoted Links: nice look and feel with square tiles and text.

With SharePoint Server 2013 RTM just around the corner and more to unpack and share – we are working on it…

Chirag

This post first appeared here: http://blog.pointbeyond.com/2012/11/05/sharepoint-server-2013-preview-played-learnt-and-enjoyed/

Published by Chirag Patel @techChirag

Chirag is an independent Microsoft 365 consultant at Patel Consulting, and Microsoft MVP (Office & Apps Services), based in UK with more than 20 years of industry experience. He is also a BCS (British Computer Society) Member & Chartered IT Professional, Microsoft 365 Certified Enterprise Administrator Expert, MCT (Microsoft Certified Trainer) and TOGAF9 Certified Architect. He works with a wide variety of clients in many sectors, designing and implementing business collaboration, data and information management solutions and services based on Microsoft Teams, SharePoint and Microsoft 365 technologies, Power Platform to create business value for both themselves and their customers, including UK Microsoft Gold Partners with deployment, upgrade and migration services delivery. Chirag is an active Microsoft 365 community participant, frequent speaker at local and international events including Microsoft 365 Saturdays, Power Saturdays, SharePoint Saturdays, Collab365, TeamsFest, Modern Workplace Summit and Scottish Summit. You can follow Chirag on twitter at @techChirag. View all posts by Chirag Patel @techChirag