Microsoft’s SharePoint has been a beast in its industry. It’s grown into a multi-million dollar business that is steadily increasing its market share. Companies worldwide are adopting the SharePoint software to increase collaboration, realize actionable business intelligence, centralize knowledge, develop applications and monitor the business’ overall health.
The SharePoint 2013 showcases a number of significant changes which is why business considering adopting the latest version of the software should be aware of what the changes translate to. While there are a number of changes that have been initiated in SharePoint, the following four rank the highest in the order of importance.
Highlights of SharePoint 2013
- Improved Website Branding
Website creation and branding in earlier SharePoint versions used was an arduous process that involved complicated packaging processes, style sheets and designer assets. But, with SharePoint 2013 any website designer with a decent proficiency in JavaScript, CSS and HTML can create a fairly good internal or public facing website in short amounts of time. This will go a long way in reducing the cost of using the SharePoint platform for creating public websites as well as the cost of support and maintenance of the website.
- Enhanced Website Hosting Features
Hosting capabilities in the SharePoint 2013 has exhibited evolution into maturity which was otherwise challenging. The 2013 version includes a number of SEO-friendly features such as robots.txt support, SEO-friendly URLs, XML sitemaps and various other SEO settings. The new release also offers the capability to scale pages to support different devices such as mobile and tablets.
- Improved Business Intelligence Tools
The improvements that have been made on the Business Intelligence front in SharePoint 2013 vis-à-vis 2010 make it an ultimate choice for businesses to gain deeper insights into their big data capabilities.
Integration between Excel and SharePoint has been made even better than before making it easy to manage and transfer data to and fro. The PowerPivot feature has been significantly improved thereby making it easy to work with numerous rows and columns in memory directly. Introduction of metrics such as Visio services, Dashboard Designer, PerformancePoint Services, etc. is also geared at providing you with a better picture of your organization’s health.
So, even if you have provided your users with New SharePoint 2010 Business Intelligence training classes, considering the New SharePoint 2013 Business Intelligence (BI) Training Course can be a smart move, so as to ensure they make the best use of the new features available and thereby provide better insights into your organization’s data and performance.
- Improved Support for Mobile Devices
SharePoint 2013 has been optimized for faster access on mobile devices through its contemporary or HTML5 view. It supports a wide range of mobile devices including Windows, Blackberry, Android, iPads and iPhones. Support for push messages has also been improved which can now be accessed based on a wide variety of factors. Moreover, location awareness in the latest version of SharePoint makes it easier to develop location-specific applications.
How has your experience been using the Microsoft SharePoint 2013? What do you consider to be the best feature? Share your takes, opinions and experiences with me below.