Top 6 New Features for Designers in SharePoint 2013

Top 6 New Features for Designers in SharePoint 2013

As you probably know the SharePoint 2013 Public Preview was released this week and I’m sure all the designers out there want to know what’s new for branding? Well, you will be interested to know that making SharePoint design easier was a key goal for this version of SharePoint. Does that mean that all my professional branding peers are out of work now? Let’s check out what’s new and then revisit that question. Be sure to scan down the page, I save the most interesting for last (sort of like a David Letterman Top 10 list!).

6 – Managed Navigation – SharePoint navigation now has two different options: the old way, now known as Structured Navigation and the new way which is known as Managed Navigation.

This new method of navigation uses a Managed Metadata term set to populate the navigation control with items. The new method is more flexible and allows for some interesting new uses as you will see including allowing you to make friendly URL’s. Another interesting side benefit of Managed Navigation is you get a nifty Edit button next to the both the Global and Current navigation that lets you add, remove, and edit navigation from anywhere without visiting the Navigation option in the Site Settings.



Side Note: Styling this edit mode is going to be a bit of a pain on sites with highly stylized navigation… but that’s a good topic for a future post!

5 – Composed Looks – I’m thinking of Composed Looks as evolution of SharePoint 2010 themes… I imagine the product team was trying to make something a little closer to how Word Press themes work(though without changing the underlying SharePoint technologies that make up the look and feel).


The first big difference is you don’t make the themes with the Office client anymore. Instead you configure elements and add them to a Composed Looks Gallery (Site Settings > Composed looks). The composed look consists of several things:

• Name – Fairly obviously the name of the Composed Look
• Master Page – To arrange the elements of the page and do other master page-y stuff
• Theme URL – Points to an XML file that defines all of the colors you want to apply to different CSS. This works similarly to 2010 except you make your own theme id’s instead of using Accent1, Accent2, etc.
• Image URL – Points to an image that can be used to replace a background image in the CSS (I know… sweet… a background image!)
• Font Scheme URL – Points to an XML file which defines the fonts that can be applied to CSS
• Display Order – Helps you arrange the available composed looks

The idea here is that you put all this together with a preview file and you can provide configurable “composed looks” for your clients and users to select from and configure to their liking. You can apply Composed looks from Site Settings > Change the look.

4 – Device Channels – Don’t be fooled by the name, this has nothing to do with channels as you may know them… we are talking mobile / device specific page rendering here!

You setup Device Channels from Site Settings > Device channels, which allows you to give the channel an Alias (for referencing in the UI and in code) and then “Device Inclusion Rules”. These rules are substrings that SharePoint will look for in the browser’s User Agent. You can have certain master pages apply to certain device channels (for example: have a specific master page just for iPhones or Surface Tablets). This is a pretty cool feature, you can even use the Alias in your master page and page layouts to have different individual pieces of the page render differently based on the channel. It’s kind of like Media Queries in CSS3 only Device Channels don’t look at device capabilities (like width and height) they look for keywords in the browser’s User Agent.

3 – Web Content Management enhancements – There are probably several enhancements that are new to SharePoint 2013 WCM but the two that stand out to me are: Content Search Web Part and Catalogs.

• Content Search Web Part – A new Web Part that supersedes the old Content Query Web Part. As the name implies the new Web Part uses the search functionality in 2013 to query and filter information from around SharePoint. Unlike the CQWP, the Content Search Web Part is styled with HTML and JavaScript instead of XSLT.
• Catalogs – In SharePoint 2013 WCM you can create a catalog of products and use this catalog to create a robust product web site without creating pages for every item. Imagine having product categories, sub categories, and product detail pages all centrally managed!

I could probably fill an entire blog post on the new WCM features, but I'll let someone else take that charge :)

2 – No more SharePoint Designer for creating SharePoint branding! – Sure SharePoint Designer was updated for 2013 but you don’t have to use it to edit your branding anymore (I’m thinking the name SharePoint “Designer” is no longer appropriate!). In fact you can use any tool you want, including Visual Studio, Notepad++, Dreamweaver… ANYTHING. This feature works because the Master Page Gallery was updated to work seamlessly over a WebDAV mapping. So now, in Windows you can map a network drive directly to your Master Page Gallery and then edit away. Truth be told you could do this to some degree in previous versions of SharePoint, but back then Microsoft locked SharePoint from allowing you to work with master pages and page layouts.

In 2013 the Master Page Gallery is the place where you can put ALL your branding assets including CSS and images. This is a pretty interesting change that takes a little getting used to… but it really is a lot nicer than being forced to use SharePoint Designer or a plugin to Visual Studio to work with your branding files directly on the Site Collection.

Note: I’ve noticed that sometimes WebDAV can be slow. There is a strange but easy fix to this, see the following post: http://oddballupdate.com/2009/12/18/fix-slow-webdav-performance-in-windows-7/ After making this change my mapped drive to SharePoint is super-fast!

1 – Design Manager – I saved the most interesting for last! This new feature is so important that Microsoft even added it as a top level selection under Site Actions in Publishing sites! It includes links to a lot of common design tasks including some of the previous topics I’ve discussed but it also includes the following new features:

• Create and Edit Master Pages - This is probably the biggest change for SharePoint branding folks. From here you can create a minimal master page or convert an existing HTML design. Did that get your attention? Yes, you can actually add an HTML design with CSS and images to the Master Page Gallery and then use this feature to convert it to a functioning master page. You also get a preview of the new master page and a snippet gallery that allows you to copy and paste SharePoint functionality (like navigation, search, web parts, etc.) right into your HTML based design.

You no longer have to edit .master files; you can continue editing your HTML file in whatever editor you like and every time you hit save SharePoint will notice the changes and update the corresponding .master file.

Does this mean that SharePoint branding is so easy now that anyone can do it? Yes and no, if you need to make a branded SharePoint site you probably can do it all from the Design Manager with converting an HTML design and using snippets. However to make a fully branded portal or web site you will still need to understand a lot of SharePoint CSS and you still need to understand how Content Placeholders and a variety of other SharePoint specific technology works.

I'll be very curious to see how the SharePoint branding community reacts to this feature and see where we land with what newcomers can do with SharePoint branding on their own. I tend to think the Design Manager is a great starting point that changes things so that there is no middle level effort branding... either there is branding that anyone can do with the Design Manager or there is advanced branding that you need to understand the underpinnings in order to make things work the way you want.

• Create and Edit Page Layouts - When you create a page layout from the Design Manager you get an HTML file that contains a minimal page layout and all the fields that come from the content type that you base the page layout on. When you make changes to this HTML file the corresponding .ASPX page layout is updated behind the scenes
• Create a Design Package - Export your entire design from one place to another (even a completely different server). You can then import the design package to another site collection or server from Site Actions > Import Design Package.

Well, that’s the end of the Top 6 list. I invite you to discuss these features as you start to play with them. Do you think the Design Manager is an end-to-end branding solution or are is it more like a really great kick start to the SharePoint branding process? Let me know in the comments!

For more information about some of these features, check out Microsoft's article:
What's new in web content management for SharePoint 2013 Preview publishing sites http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219688(v=office.15)#BKMK_contentsearch

Sharepoint 2013 features

Sharepoint 2013 Features 

User Interface:

Authentication

Microsoft says that SharePoint 2013 Preview has been improved to make claims-based authentication easier to use. It extends support for application authentication via Open Authorization 2.0 (OAuth) as well as for server-to-server authentication.
Users can grant apps in the SharePoint store and catalog access to certain resources and data. Server-to-server security tokens that contain user identity claims enable cross-server authenticated access between, say, SharePoint 2013 Preview and Exchange 2013 Preview.

Business Connectivity Services
There's been a bunch of new features added, including these: Support for OData Business Data Connectivity (BDC) connections, in addition to connections for WCF, SQL Server, and .NET assemblies. Automatic generation via Visual Studio 2010 of BDC models for OData data sources. An event listener with an event subscriber on the SharePoint 2013 Preview side, to enable SharePoint users to receive notifications of changes to the external system. Self-contained apps for SharePoint.
But wait--there's more: Enhancements to external lists that bring them to functional parity with other SharePoint lists. The exposure of the REST APIs for web and mobile app developers to use. Six new Windows PowerShell cmdlets specifically for OData. And the ability, via Business Connectivity Services Client Runtime, to have side-by-side installations of Office 2010 and Office 2013 Preview on the same client computer.

eDiscovery
Showing SharePoint's increasing presence in the world of litigation, eDiscovery improvements have been added that, unfortunately, are probably sorely needed. They include a new site template, the eDiscovery Center, which creates a portal for managing cases—you can access cases to search, hold content, and export content.
Microsoft has added improvements to in-place holds, including site-level preservation; the ability for users to work with content that's preserved; and the ability to define the scope of preservation via a query filter.
You can also now take the results of your eDiscovery search—including documents, wiki pages, Exchange email messages and tasks-- and export them into a review tool.

Mobile devices
Optimized viewing for mobile device users was a no-brainer addition to SharePoint Server 2013 Preview—it had to be done.
Other new features include the following: The ability to render a single SharePoint published site in multiple formats for different devices. The ability to enable a push notification service on a SharePoint site to send device updates to a Windows Phone device.
We're not done yet: A new geolocation field type for use in mobile app development. The ability for some devices to display PerformancePoint Web Parts, Excel Services reports, and SQL Server Reporting Services reports. And finally, enhanced viewing of Office Web apps (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) via mobile browsers.

Records management and compliance
Reflecting perhaps not a dearth of added features, but the distance SharePoint 2010's records management features had improved from SharePoint 2007's, you'll find that SharePoint 2013 Preview has enhanced compliance simply by extending retention policies to SharePoint sites.
This also applies to any Exchange Server 2013 Preview team mailboxes associated with those sites.

Business intelligence
SharePoint 2013 Preview adds tons of new features, including the following: New features in Excel for business intelligence (BI): In-Memory BI Engine (IMBI) for near-instant analysis of millions of rows of data; Power View Add-in for Excel, which offers visualizations, animations, and smart querying to enable users to visualize modeled data; decoupled PivotChart and PivotTable reports allowing for the creation of PivotChart reports without having to add a PivotTable report on the same page; and the ability to do trend analysis from cells in PivotTable reports that use OLAP data.
It also adds Excel service enhancements such as an updated Business Intelligence Center site template, and improved timeline controls.
Visio Services improvements include the ability for users to add comments to a Visio drawing on the web via Visio Services.
And PerformancePoint improvements include the ability for users to copy dashboards and dependencies to other users or site collections; an enhanced UI; support for Analysis Services Effective User feature, which eliminates the need for Kerberos delegation for per-user authentication; and support for PerformancePoint on the Apple iPad.

Social computing
It's no surprise that Microsoft wanted to beef up the social computing features in SharePoint, and with SharePoint 2013 Preview, it's on track for doing so. Basically, it's enhanced the administration and user experience, and added ways for enterprise users to collaborate more fully and naturally using social media features.
One way is by enhancing the ability create discussions—via two new templates called Community Site and Community Portal. Microsoft also redesigned the UI for MySites, and added Microblog and Newsfeeds features, and improved features users need around saving, synchronization, sharing, and moving content.
Because of the new MySites features, you'll also find Microsoft made several changes to the User Profile service application settings in Central Administration around configuring permissions, privacy, micro-blogging and newsfeeds, and more.

Web content management
Microsoft improved the video upload process for content authors, and improved image display and performance of a site with its image renditions feature, which reduces the size of an image file that is downloaded to the client.
It added an integrated translation service that gives content authors or managers the ability to choose which content will be exported for human translation and which for translation by machine.
And cross-site publishing does just as it says, giving you the ability to display content in one or more publishing site collections. You can also designate any library or list as a catalog, enabling content to be reused on publishing site collections.
It added managed navigation, which lets you use term sets to define and maintain navigation on a site. And it added the ability to create more user-friendly URLs.
In the area of branding, Microsoft made it less mysterious, and now designers use such tools as Adobe Dreamweaver, Microsoft Expression Web, or another HTML editor, rather than having to use SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio 2013 to brand a SharePoint site.
And it added the ability for designers to design sites for display on different devices, such as tablets, smartphones, and desktops. Additional features enhance search, authoring, and publishing.

Workflow
Microsoft made architectural changes in SharePoint Workflow. If you want to have the nearly identical experience of building workflows in SharePoint 2013 Preview as you do in SharePoint 2010, you simply install SharePoint Server 2013 Preview.
But if you want the SharePoint 2013 workflow platform, you need to install and configure Windows Azure Workflow to communicate with your Preview farm. SharePoint Designer 2013 Preview includes new functionality designed specifically for Windows Azure Workflow, and called the SharePoint 2013 Workflow platform.
These new features include a visual workflow that uses a Visio 2013 Preview add-in, the ability to enable no-code web service calls from inside a workflow, new actions for the task process, the ability to start a workflow built on SharePoint 2010 from a workflow built on SharePoint 2013, and new workflow building blocks called Stage, Loop, and App Step.
Note that to manage and monitor the Windows Azure Workflow in SharePoint 2013, you must use Windows PowerShell.