Earlier this week, some of Entrance’s consultants attended the SharePoint 2013 conference to learn about best practices and find out about new features for the 2013 release.
SharePoint represents one of Microsoft’s biggest investments, so they really pulled out all stops this year, including fireworks and a private Bon Jovi concert!
Microsoft also made a few announcements at the conference about SharePoint 2013 that our consultants are excited about:
Applications
Traditional SharePoint functionality, like a list or a library for example, will now be called SharePoint Apps. The apps will be hosted on their own domain, providing application isolation for the production environment. Custom solutions will also be released as apps. Microsoft said that they hope these applications will “open the door to development.”
SharePoint apps will also be able to be sold on the App Store, for example, a ready-made e-commerce site.
Drag and drop
Similar to other file storage applications, SharePoint 2013 will allow users to drag and drop files for upload. Attendees of the conference broke out into applause for this one!
Better navigation
Out of the box, users will have the ability to manage top navigation across multiple site functions from one place. This only used to be possible with customization.
Shift away from software releases
Microsoft also announced that they are moving away from releasing a new version of their software every few years, “2013 may be the last version of Windows ever released.” While the exact details remain to be seen, this means that they will release periodic updates that fix bugs that may have languished for three years in their past model.
Read more about the Office 2013 release!