Every new release Microsoft takes huge leap towards making SharePoint as one of the most robust enterprise level products out there for IT Pros. In 2007, it was Shared Services Provider. In 2010, there were Service Applications Framework, SAML Claims Support, and Remote Blob Storage. In 2013, there are impressive list of new features which got mixed responses from seasoned SharePoint professionals.

Microsoft recently released refreshed version of TechNet IT Pro Ignite Videos for SharePoint 2013 RTM. Last winter and this spring, as I was reviewing Preview version of these videos along with SPC12 videos, I had posted various articles for What’s New in CSOM and REST API, What’s New in Social, What’s New in Office Web Apps, and What’s New in WCM for SharePoint 2013. It seems like with refreshed version of TechNet Videos, it would be nice to post some of my new favorite investments for IT Pros.

Here are the highlights of major IT Pro investments and architectural improvements in SharePoint 2013.

Request Management

• Disabled by default
• Request Management is implemented as a service instance named “Request Management”. There is no associated service application.
• The Request Management service instance should be provisioned on every Web Server in the farm. That is, every machine that runs the SharePoint Foundation Web Application Service (SPFWA), Request Management is scoped and configured on a per Web Application basis, for each Web Application configured, there is a Request Manager. The Request Manager runs within SPFWA under SPRequestModule.
• It is a Reverse Proxy implemented in SharePoint 2013.  It is defined by the SPRoutingReverseProxy class.  Request Management is implemented in the Http Module of SharePoint -Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationRuntime.SPRequestModule.
• Request Management manages routing requests based on rules and health, Prioritizes and routes incoming requests at application level to healthy machines, routes requests for specific types like search, block requests or send request to another farm or specific server in farm
• It’s not replacing load-balancer, trying to solve load-balancer problem of routing route requests despite web server health, it sits behind load balancer in HTTP request management
• Resources
  • Spencer Harbar’s Request Management Series -http://www.harbar.net/archive/2012/11/12/Article-Request-Management-in-SharePoint-Server-2013.aspx
  • Steve Peschka’s Working with Request Manager in SharePoint 2013 – http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2012/09/14/working-with-request-manager-in-sharepoint-2013.aspx
  • Chris Given’s How Request Management Works in SharePoint 2013 – http://blogs.architectingconnectedsystems.com/blogs/cjg/archive/2013/01/06/How-Request-Management-Work-in-SharePoint-2013.aspx

Distributed Cache

• Enabled by default
• Distributed Cache is implemented as a service instance named “Distributed Cache”. There is no associated service application. It is based on Windows Server AppFabric Cache (configured as windows service called Appfabric Caching Service), runs on all web and application servers by default where SharePoint bits are installed
• Leveraged by Authentication Token, Task Aggregations & Work Management Service, and Social feed caching, SharePoint 2013 is so dependent on Distributed Cache that it is virtually not recommended to disable Distributed Cache.
• Redundancy is complicated, timer job needs to run to repopulate cached content
• You must use SharePoint shipped “Velocity” version of cache engine, You can’t independently upgrade it, Cloud based cache services like Windows Azure Cache is not supported at this time, only local cache hosts can be used
• Resources
  • Idera’s The Five Minute Cheat-Sheet on SharePoint 2013′s Distributed Cache Service  – http://blog.idera.com/sharepoint/the-five-minute-cheat-sheet-on-sharepoint-2013s-distributed-cache-service/
  • Josh Gavant’s App Fabric Caching and SharePoint Part I and II - http://blogs.technet.com/b/mspfe/archive/2013/04/02/appfabric-caching-and-sharepoint.aspx

Shredded Storage

• Enabled by default
• Files shredded and stored in SQL Server, Only deltas are stored in SQL Server, updated bits are mapped to shredded BLOBs, Reduces file storage,
• Default shred chunk size is 64 KB, You can change default chunk size to large number but can’t disable it, plan to increase chunk size to large number to effectively shutting off shredded storage (see Benjamin Athawes’s link below)
• Works best with office XML documents, Update of document library metadata does not generate additional shred, it doesn’t create another copy of blob with shredded storage
• Non-office documents don’t have same benefits of shredded storage, these documents gets shredded as well but it’s not optimized or efficient, shredded storage might store larger copy of non-office documents like images or PDF, some of the industry SharePoint experts thinks this can serve severe performance implications.
• Resources
  • Jereme Thake’s The Truth behind Shredded Storage in SharePoint 2013 – http://www.jeremythake.com/2012/12/the-truth-behind-shredded-storage-in-sharepoint-2013/
  • Bill Baer’s Introduction to Shredded Storage in SharePoint 2013 – http://blogs.technet.com/b/wbaer/archive/2012/11/12/introduction-to-shredded-storage-in-sharepoint-2013.aspx
  • Bill Baer’s Shredded Storage and the Evolution of SharePoint’s Storage Architecture – http://blogs.technet.com/b/wbaer/archive/2012/12/20/shredded-storage-and-the-evolution-of-sharepoint-s-storage-architecture.aspx
  • Chris Given’s How Shredded Storage REALLY works in SP2013 – http://blogs.architectingconnectedsystems.com/blogs/cjg/archive/2012/12/21/How-Shredded-Storage-REALLY-works-in-SP2013.aspx
  • Dan Holme’s SharePoint 2013 Shredded Storage and The End of the World –  http://www.sharepointpromag.com/blog/dan-holmes-viewpoint-on-sharepoint-blog-24/sharepoint-2013/sharepoint-2013-shredded-storage-144987
  • Benjamin Athawes’s How to disable Shredded Storage in SharePoint 2013 – http://www.benjaminathawes.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=41

Licensing Model

• Introduced flexibility on licensing model, this is based on similar model designed in SharePoint Online
• Licenses and licenses check are per user, no longer per farm. it means, you can two different users in same farm, same web app, same site collection with 2 different licenses for 2 different user experience based on license
• Licensing enforcement is applied to web parts, web part gallery, web templates, document libraries
• Requires Claims Auth – claims token contains licensing info, Uses claims architecture to determine licenses structure e.g. assign enterprise CAL to AD group
• Allows you to reduce licensing cost and able to turn on & off features based on licensing in single farm
• Licensing Enforcement and Assignment accessible through PowerShell, Enables licensing attributes to AD security groups e.g. Enterprise CAL Users, Standard CAL Users, Office Web Apps Users AD Groups can be mapped to specific licensing CALs, This would enable mixing multiple CALs in same environment
• Resources
  • Bill Baer’s Introduction to User License Enforcement in SharePoint Server 2013 -http://blogs.technet.com/b/wbaer/archive/2012/11/12/introduction-to-user-license-enforcement-in-sharepoint-server-2013.aspx
  • Wictor Wilen’s SharePoint 2013: A look at the new options for managing users and their licensing – http://www.wictorwilen.se/sharepoint-2013-a-look-at-the-new-options-for-managing-users-and-their-licensing
  • Sahil Malik’s SharePoint 2013 Licensing Simplified - http://blah.winsmarts.com/2012-12-SharePoint_2013_Licensing_Simplified.aspx

Minimal Download Strategy

• Enabled by default, MDS is SharePoint feature and scoped at the web level, Can be disabled on per SPWeb level, just set SPWeb.EnableMinimalDownload to 0
• The Minimal Download Strategy is by default enabled on Team sites, Community sites and a few others in SharePoint 2013. Once this feature enabled, all pages for that site is rendered “through” the /_layouts/15/start.aspx page
• Provides an new smooth navigation framework on client side, significantly improves page load performance and user perception, downloads only delta between page requests
• OOB master pages, quick launch control, XSLT list view supports MDS, Chrome/master page area should stay static while content flickers while refreshing page, Custom controls & master pages needs to support framework
• The MDS is not enabled on publishing sites and not compatible with publishing sites. If you enable publishing features, you don’t have to worry about MDS.
• MDS not supported in Sandbox Web Parts
• MDS may have adverse performance implications if some of custom coded web parts is not adhere MDS architecture.
• Resources
  • Bill Baer’s Introduction to Minimal Download Strategy in SharePoint 2013 – http://blogs.technet.com/b/wbaer/archive/2012/11/12/introduction-to-minimal-download-strategy-in-sharepoint-2013.aspx
  • Wictor Wilen’s Introduction to the Minimal Download Strategy – http://www.wictorwilen.se/sharepoint-2013—introduction-to-the-minimal-download-strategy-mds

Upgrade and Site Provisioning

• System Notifications
  • Upgrading SP2010 to SP2013 shows System Status Notifications
  • Available during upgrade, read-only mode, and scheduled maintenance
  • Enables customizable integrated system status notifications
• Improvement on Upgrade Architecture
  • Separation of Schema and Site Collection Upgrade
  • IT admins upgrades schema when they attach databases – SP2013 still runs with SP2010 experience at this stage
  • Deferred Site Collection – Anything site collection and below will be upgraded later in deferred site collection upgrade step, Once site collections are upgraded, SP2013 will run with SP2013 user experience
  • You can’t force both schema & site collection upgrade in 1 step, it has to be done separately, site collection upgrade can be done by end user or automated with PowerShell
  • SP2013 has all the SP2010 bits required to run SP2010 user experience
• Site Collection Health Checks
  • Rule-based health checks and validation
  • Site collection level scoped tool
  • Helps addressing post-upgrade issues – missing features & templates, known issues etc.
  • Exposed to site collection administrators via site collection settings page, cmdlets for farm administrators
  • Prevents upgrade if blocking issues detected
  • Runs automatically before site collection version to version upgrade, does not run before any built to build upgrade
• Evaluation Site Collection
  • Allows site collection admins to preview SP2013 without upgrading production site collection
  • Requesting evaluation site collection triggers “Create Upgrade Evaluation Site Collections” timer job which typically runs once a day by default
  • Enabled through a copy of production site collection, causes no read-only outage as source is snapshot
  • Takes advantage of SQL snapshots when available, uses site collection backup process if SQL snapshots are not supported
  • Available only in SQL Enterprise and SQL Developer editions
  • By default, they runs only for 30 days
• Upgrade Throttling
  • By default, only 5 concurrent web apps and 10 concurrent content databases can be upgraded. You can change this setting for faster hardware, you can trigger 10 web apps upgrade from 2 WFES (5 web apps per 1 WFE and 10 max content databases)
• Site Provisioning
  • Supports both SP2010 and SP2013 Site provisioning using both central admin or PowerShell, Allows users to choose experience version while selecting site collection template
  • In SP2010 backward compatibility modes, only SP2010 site templates available, all the new SP2013 features like news feed, new performance improvements like MDS are not available in SP2010 mode
• Self-Service Site Creation
  • Enabled custom forms that should be used to create a new site, form can be in same web app or entirely in different web app even in different farm
  • Enables choice between new site collection or new sub site creation
  • Settings are scoped at the web application level
  • Allows users to select information management policies like retention policies, auditing policies etc. while creating sites or site collections, decide these policies during your internal governance framework

Service Applications

• Review this article for recommended locations for Service Applications – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219591.aspx
• Same service application framework as SP2010, You still have service applications, proxies, proxy groups, instances, databases, and federation support
• Service Federation -  Any farm can publish, as a general rule, as long as service application has database, it can be federated, LAN Federation supported in BCS, Managed Metadata, Search, Secure Store, Machine Translation, and User Profile, WAN Federation supported in Search, Managed Metadata, and User Profile. BDC is supported but you shouldn’t do it, Machine Translation and Secure Store not supported in WAN
• Access Services
  • Use Access 2013 to create SharePoint Apps
  • Supported only on SQL Server 2012
  • Recommendation is to use dedicated SQL instance for Access services database backend
  • SQL will hate you – It uses SQL Authentication, It uses Named Pipes, Each app creates its own database
• App Management Service
  • Provides Corporate App Catalog services
  • Governance may be required, which site collections or site owners are allowed to App store, manage licenses or manage what you can lock down etc.
  • For Adoption, Turn off App store initially, Turn on progressively and have Apps requested through workflow
  • DNS and App domain- try to use peer of your domain like constoapps.com for Apps hosting, don’t use sub domain like apps.contoso.com, sub domain will work fine from technical perspective but may not be secure option
  • Resources
    • http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2012/09/03/planning-the-infrastructure-required-for-the-new-app-model-in-sharepoint-2013.aspx
    • http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2012/12/07/using-sharepoint-apps-with-saml-and-fba-sites-in-sharepoint-2013.aspx
• Business Connectivity Services
  • Added OData Support, Now we have BDC Connections support for OData, WCF, SQL Server, and .NET assemblies
  • Added support for SharePoint Apps and new App-Scoped BDC models
• Machine Translation Service
  • Provides programmatically translate sites, documents, pages from one language to another
  • Provides automatic translation of content using cloud based free MS translator solution, Needs Microsoft account to sign up, Supports word, HTML, and TXT
  • Cloud based machine translation service based on WAS architecture
  • Supports sync, async, and streaming data access process
  • Full extensible – full trust solutions, CSOM and REST support
• Managed Metadata Service
  • Creation and configuration is same
  • Managed Metadata driven Navigation & WCM Integration
• Office Web Applications
  • No longer service application, separated into new server product
  • Provides services to multiple SharePoint farms, exchange, Lync, Url accessible file servers, or 3rd party document stores
  • Improved WAC Urls – No longer very long complex URLs for sharing, Append ?Web=1 to display documents in web apps
  • Office web apps can’t be installed on SharePoint box, it’s blocked on SharePoint server
• PowerPoint Automation Service
  • Similar service as Word Automation Service
  • Programmatically converts PPTXs to HTML, Image, or PDF read only format or Converts old PPT to PPTX
• Search
  • Creation and configuration is same but underlying architecture is vastly different, runs six noderunner.exe with heavy dependency on RAM usage, changes how you architect your application tier
  • FAST and Enterprise Search is unified, Same UI but FAST is no longer separate product
  • Additional crawling option – continuous crawl
• Subscription Setting Service
  • Used to manage only for multi-tenant,  Now handles App Management
• User Profile Service, User Profile Sync Service, My Sites, and Sky Drive Pro
  • Creation and configuration is same
  • Added support for Active Directory direct import, FIM/User Profile Sync is still supported for advanced scenarios
  • Integrated User Profile Replication Engine in User Profile service, it was shipped as separate SP2010 Admin Toolkit component
  • My Sites and Social data – Social data like newsfeed, following, social tags & notes are stored in user’s my site content database instead of Social database, My Sites are required for social features
  • Improved Social performance – distributed cache to cache social data. In SP2010, there was 1 Social DB per User Profile Application, only way to scale in SP2010 was to scale vertically, by moving data out of Social DB – IO performance will be improved
  • Resources
    • http://www.harbar.net/archive/2012/07/24/348.aspx
    • http://www.harbar.net/archive/2012/07/23/sp13adi.aspx
    • http://www.benjaminathawes.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=42
    • Oauth and User Profile Service – http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2012/08/15/oauth-and-the-rehydrated-user-in-sharepoint-2013-how-d-they-do-that-and-what-do-i-need-to-know.aspx
    • http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog/Pages/BlogPost.aspx?pID=1033
    • Requires Office 2013 for Sky Drive Pro, Story is not clear- http://www.jeremythake.com/2013/01/sharepoint-2013-skydrive-pro-problems-with-syncing-and-ui-inconsistency-will-hurt-adoption/
• Web Analytics
  • No longer service application, new analytics platform based on search platform
  • Based on views, click through in search relevance, Use this popularity info to populate views through the Content By Search or Search Results web part e.g. Popular Communities etc.
  • Extensible for 3rd parties to build into the platform
• Work Management Service
  • It’s task aggregation across work management systems like SharePoint, exchange, project, or Lync
  • Aggregate tasks from all SharePoint sites to your my site – My Tasks list

I had also taken various notes for another major investments like IT Pro and WCM features. As I was reviewing refreshed material, I thought it would be great to post my notes here on my blog for others to enjoy.

Having said that, here are major highlights of new investments & features introduced in SharePoint 2013

Easy content authoring and management

• Variations and Content Translation using Machine Translation Service
• Rich Text Editing Usability especially clean copy-paste

Cross-site Publishing

• Author content in multiple site collections and aggregate that using content by search web part across site collections, web applications, or even farms
• Different than traditional content deployment approach, instead it uses Search as opposed to export-import methods, works with non-publishing content as well
• Driven by managed metadata – tagging of content enables reuse through search
• Requires planning – location of authoring & publishing sites,
  location of asset libraries, search settings, security & permissions, managed metadata etc.
• Pattern – Authoring.contoso.com (en-us) -> Translate -> Authoring.contoso.com (Fr-fr) -> Search Index Crawl -> Contoso.com shows data using Content By Search web part

Catalog enabled libraries

• Requires cross-site collection publishing feature – enabled by default on the product catalog site template, can be turned on using PowerShell on other site templates
• Can be created from pages libraries, document libraries, asset libraries, or lists
• Requires at least one single-valued managed metadata column
• Only HTML & text content is indexed by default, documents-images-videos are considered as BLOBs
• Requires an incremental crawl to be discoverable as a catalog, New result source is added with the query isolating items from the catalog
• Catalog connection is link to search index based on managed metadata indexed terms
• Use CSWP or managed navigation to reuse content from catalogs
• You can use catalog-enabled sites for scenarios such as content repository, knowledge base, or product catalog

 Content By Search Web Part

• Similar to content by query web part but search index based and cross-site collection support
• New presentation template model for easy content presentation using HTML display templates, not XSLT based
• Easy editors like query helpers as web part editors for defining planned query and previewing results

Managed Navigation

• Drive your navigation and URLs based on term store hierarchies
• Clean friendly URLs created for each page for actual end users, friendly URLs uses term store hierarchies
• Pages are added for terms & term set added to navigation
• Pages are based on category page definition, category pages are page layouts, new category pages can be created and designated for use with specific terms in the term store
• Provides dynamic topic pages capability for minimizing amount of physical pages for catalog type sites. e.g. same page renders different experiences unlike in SP2010, you have to create different pages with same page layout

Refiners and Managed Metadata driven faced navigation

• Define refiners for catalog content drill down in catalog driven scenarios
• Provides easy filtering capabilities for catalog information
• Content editors can define which managed properties are available as refinements
• UI rendering can be customized for each refiner
• Different data types have different rendering options

Search Engine Optimization Improvements

• Numerous improvements in site and page level
• Clean friendly URLs, no “pages” in URL
• No Home Page redirects to /pages/default.aspx, no HTTP 302 redirection
• Country code top level domains (e.g. .com, .mx, .fr etc.)
• XML sitemaps – automatically generates robots.txt for external search engine crawler
• SEO properties for meta description, browser title, and meta keywords
• Webmaster tools integration

Variations and Multi-lingual enhancements

• Support for automated or manual translations in variations
• Supports both content (pages, documents etc.) and terms in term set
• You can manually export the XLIFF file or send cloud based machine translation service for automated translations

Image Renditions

• Image transformation dynamically in SharePoint, great for large images to optimize page load
• OOB four image rendition templates available , every image has 4 renditions by default
• Thumbnails are actual thumbnails
• Resizing will resize actual image, not only it’s presentation
• Takes advantage of blob caching, blob cache configuration is required at the web application level, image renditions are cached when image is first accessed
• While adding images on WCM publishing pages, you can select different renditions for select image

Video and Embedding Improvements

• Enable easy enterprise podcast scenarios
• Embed video to any content page including internet videos like YouTube
• Thumbnail generation, any image from video
• Renditions also supported for videos, different than image renditions, each rendition is separate asset, allows different codex-format-bitrate-resolution of same video
• External video support to store
• Multiple encoding for single video
• Video player is HTML 5, no longer Silverlight by default, it will fall back to Silverlight with older version of browser like IE 8 or earlier

Usage Analytics

• Built to scale from group up
• Analytics changed to be search driven – based on usage counts, click through, and item relationships
• Personalized search queries based on user or usage analytics data e.g. recommended for you
• Includes preconfigured Content By Search web part e.g. Top Pages

Design Manager and general rendering changes

• Empowering web designers, completely revamped CSS classes
• Web parts rendering with DIVs, not tables
• Site design and branding based on standards like HTML5, CSS, and JS using their preferred tools like Dreamweaver
• Design manager to assist with templates, modifying master pages on fly, and export-import design package from 1 site to another

Device based rendering – Channels

• Target different designs based on user agent string for different devices
• Different channels defined at the SPWeb level
• Define channels for single devices or group of devices
• Assign alternate “Master Pages” per channel
• Selectively include or exclude portion of page layouts per channel
• Preview while designing and authoring
  • Specific control to define mobile rendering areas in content, if you want to use same master page for multiple devices
  • By default, It will fall back to browser device channel if it can’t find any specific device channel implementation, you can also define default device channel

Additional Resources

• What’s new in web content management for SharePoint 2013 publishing sites – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219688.aspx
• Case Study: Mavention and web content management in SharePoint Server 2013 – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj822912.aspx
• The Top 30 New Reasons to Use SharePoint Server 2013 for Public-Facing Internet Sites -http://blogs.technet.com/b/mspfe/archive/2013/01/29/public-facing-internet-sites-based-on-sharepoint-server-2013.aspx
• Using the Content Search web part in SharePoint 2013 - http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2012/10/using-content-search-web-part-and.html
• SharePoint 2013 Cross-Site Publishing Step by Step – http://blogs.perficient.com/microsoft/2012/09/sharepoint-cross-site-publishing-step-by-step/
• How to set up a product-centric website in SharePoint 2013 – http://blogs.technet.com/b/tothesharepoint/archive/2013/02/14/how-to-set-up-a-product-centric-web-site-in-sharepoint-2013.aspx

I have recently tried to activate Hyper-V role on my Windows 8 Enterprise desktop and ran into issue of Hyper-V manager couldn’t connect to local host. As I tried to force local connection, I was welcomed by very criptive message – An error occurred while attempting to connect to server. Check that the virtual machine management service is running and that you are authorized to connect to the server – Hyper-V has not been installed on computer.

This has definitely pointed me in the right direction. As I looked further in the Windows Feature On or Off program, “Hyper-V Platform” was grayed out. It means, Hyper-V wasn’t installed on my host machine. This is such a weird situation.

Being new to Hyper-V installation process, quick “Google” brought me to multiple places and all of them pointed to check my computer System Info to see if Hyper-V can be supported by my hardware and CPU. According to reference article, Hyper-V requires SLAT (Second Level Address Translation) feature of CPU. Every Intel Core i3, i5 and i7 CPU supports SLAT but my current laptop’s Core 2 Duo CPU doesn’t support it. That tells me why I couldn’t install Hyper-V role on my laptop hardware.

To verify if you can install Hyper-V on the desktop, all the four options in Hyper-V requirements in the System Info should be Yes.

Here are the basic hardware requirements to run Hyper-V role on the Windows 8 Host servers.

• Windows 8 Pro or Windows 8 Enterprise, 64 bit version
• CPU should support Second Level Address Translation (SLAT)
• At minimum 4G RAM
• Update BIOS and enable virtualization.

Having said that, please beware before buying new laptop or aftermarket laptop and check basic hardware requirements for Hyper-V to run Hyper-V virtualization feature on windows 8 desktops or laptops.

Resources

• Hyper-V: List of SLAT-Capable CPUs for Hosts – http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/1401.hyper-v-list-of-slat-capable-cpus-for-hosts.aspx
• Installing Hyper-V on Windows 8 Pro (Great Article) – http://blogs.msdn.com/b/olivnie/archive/2013/01/18/hyper-v-on-client-windows-8-pro.aspx
• How to Install or Enable Hyper-V Virtualization in Windows 8 -http://www.howtogeek.com/76532/how-to-install-or-enable-hyper-v-virtualization-in-windows-8/

As far as Physical Topology, We have three tiered approach since MOSS 2007 days. In MOSS 2007, we had Web Tier, Application Tier (Central Admin, Shared Service Providers – Search, Excel, Profile Import), and Database Tier. In SharePoint 2010, there wasn’t much changed and we had almost same 3-tier topology (except Application Tier dedicated for Service Applications instead of SSP) but dedicated servers can be added in application tiers for high preformat service applications like Search or PerformancePoint etc.

With SharePoint 2013, we had lot more service applications and many of these service applications can be grouped in similar groups either based on their CPU and RAM needs or either based on their latency, throughput, or workloads/resource utilization to optimize system resources and maximize performance for users. Even though we can get away with traditional 3-tier topology approach in SharePoint 2013, there are some new services may require additional tier and dedicated attention on Application tier. All the windows & WCF services can be divided into – very low, low, and high tolerant latency and this may require us dividing up application tier in multiple tiers for each type of latency tolerant service applications.

As shown in the diagram below, Microsoft provides us alternative farm design topology by redefining traditional web and application tier into multiple tiers.

• Traditional web tier is redefined as Caching and Request Processing tier which would group similar web front end servers for end user request processing along with new service applications like Request Management and Distributed Cache which would require very low latency but very high throughout. Request Management is disabled by default and Distributed Cache is enabled by default. Since Request Manager is CPU intensive and Distributed Cache is memory intensive, both of these services can share same server without any major performance hit.
• Traditional Application tier is divided into two optimized tiers – Front End Servers and Batch Processing Servers.
  • Front-End Servers would group similar service applications which would serve user requests with low latency, low resource utilization, and optimized for faster performance and response time. Services like Central Administration, Managed Metadata, User Profile, App Management, Search Query Role, and Business Data Connectivity are ideal for Front End Servers.
  • Batch Processing Servers would group similar service applications which would typically require long running back ground processes, high latency, and high resource utilization, and optimized for higher workload by maximizing system resources. Services like User Profile Sync, Work Management, Search Crawl and Index Role, Workflow, Machine Translation etc. are ideal for Batch Processing Servers. For large scale farms, Batch processing tier can be divided further into specialized load servers for services like Search, PerformancePoint, or Excel Services which can cause high spikes in performance during peak time.
  • Database tier stays same in both traditional and streamlined model. These servers can be either clustered, mirrored, or configured with Always On.

Ok, So, What’s your take on this new Model..

Having said that, my take on this new approach is what I used to say while designing SharePoint 2010 topologies. Even though you would ideally love to plan for 4-5 tier topology, it may not be possible in real world due to possible hardware funding issues. You are looking at nearly 10 high performing virtual machines or physical hardware, which may be daunting to get through budget approval  process.

Depending on your situation, number of users, and size of farm, you may get away with running traditional three tiered approach as long as they have enough hardware resources like RAM and CPU allocated. With the traditional 3-tier approach, you can run Distributed Cache and Request Management on Web Servers, Central Admin and all the Service applications in Application tier as initial farm design and plan to scale out or add more dedicated servers for specific workloads like Search as needed.

Resources

• Streamlined topologies for SharePoint Server 2013 – http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=37000
• Services on server install worksheet for streamlined SharePoint Server 2013 topologies – http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=37001
• Traditional topologies for SharePoint 2013 – http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30377
• Services on server install worksheet for traditional SharePoint Server 2013 topologies – http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=30367
• Plan service deployment in SharePoint 2013 – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219591(v=office.15).aspx

One of the reasons why I had stayed with Andrea09 theme was real estate it provided me for my content. I have been posting many step by step articles and Andrea09 theme was very useful displaying large screenshots across full width on the browser.

For a while, I felt there was too much going on in the old theme with main blog’s small font content surrounded with lots of links & gray background. Although I may miss wider real estate with new theme, I am expecting new theme will provide me better control over content and presentation with focus more on content than page layout.

Please note that all the content has been same. I may have to revisit some of the old blogs to ensure images are trimmed down to new theme’s width.

Thanks for staying with me while I am making this change. Let me know what you think!!!

Microsoft has introduced SharePoint Pre-requisites installer in SharePoint 2010 and it’s one of those tools that help you prepare SharePoint servers for SharePoint installation either offline or online by directly downloading prerequisites from Microsoft download center.

To get access of Prerequisite Installer logs, simply type cd %temp% and look for the PrerequisiteInstaller.*.log files. SharePoint spits out these logs at C:\Users\<User>\AppData\Local\Temp directory.

Simple tip but hard to remember!!!

Last October I had demonstrated No-code Search solution at SharePoint Fest Chicago to build corporate knowledge center showcasing how you can rollup policy documents from different departments designed as Site Collections from your organizations to centralized location in SharePoint 2010 On-Premises farm. I had promised attendees that I will post detailed blog entry on how to build no-code Policy Center and architecture behind it. Although it took me almost 6 months to complete, I really hope it’s not too late.

Here is the detailed step by step blog entry on how to design policy center. Alternatively you can download 50 page visual case study from sky drive.

Purpose

The goal of this article is to demonstrate step by step no-code solution to build corporate policy center in SharePoint 2010 on-premises environment using SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search, Managed Metadata, and Enterprise Content Type features.

Whole premise of this sample case study is to show case how easily you can build very complex knowledge center or centralized policy center by standardizing policy documents definition using enterprise content type across all departments in organization, allowing business users to tag documents using managed metadata, and surface & rollup policy documents using SharePoint 2010 Enterprise search technologies to the centralized policy center.

Solution Requirements

An Organization would like to build corporate policy center rolling up all the published policies from the different organization departments.

High level architecture and requirements of “Centralized Policy Center” are as following

• Corporate Policy Center conceptually represented as a Centralized solution and hosted on the root site collection. All the department policies made available to the centralized location for employees to consume.
• Policies will be available in a read-only view on the Centralized Policy Center for employees.
• Each department Policy library is hosted at the top level site of department site collection.
• Policies are created by departments and published by members of department steering committee to the policy center. Optionally it can be approved by department steering committee and allow members of departments to publish policies.
• Document-specific Metadata drives policy search as well as the various views & categorization of policies. Some of the metadata are – Effective Date, Department Name, and Applicable To

Final Solution Preview

Final Corporate No-code policy center would look like as below. Although this site or screen is not branded, it provides much cleaner view and allows users to filter policies based on refiners. By default, when user visits this page, it would show all the policies across all the departments. User can use refiners to further filter policies by department or audience it’s applicable to.

Technical Architecture

As many of you know, having decentralized authoring/hosting of Policy documents in different department site collections like HR, Legal, IT and serving those documents as centralized policy center is one of the most common pattern required by Corporate Intranet. Typically in large organizations, corporate SharePoint intranet information architecture consists of various site collections for each departments like HR, IT, Legal, or Finance.

Here are the major approaches of traditional data access methodologies and their limitations in SharePoint 2010. You can also refer my article and presentation – SharePoint 2010 Data Querying Options – Server OM vs. Client OM vs. REST vs. LINQ vs. Search API and ChDevSPUG SP2010 Developer Introductory Presentation on Slideshare

• Server Side APIs
  • SPList, SPQuery, and SPDataQuery
  • LINQ to SharePoint
• Client Side and Remote APIs
  • CSOM and REST APIs
  • SOAP APIs and WCF Services
• Limitations
  • Targeted at List or Library
  • Scoped at the Site or Site Collection
  • 5000 List Items threshold
  • CSOM has slow performance over the network
  • Data Aggregation and Rollup would require complex custom programming

One of the biggest challenges in SharePoint 2010 is rolling up documents across multiple site collection using SharePoint APIs. Many of the OOB SharePoint APIs like SPDataQuery or Content Query Web Part are great rolling up information at the site collection level but things get grim as soon as you have requirements to roll up information across site collections. Although there are third party content query web part available from Lighting Tools to rollup information across site collections, there isn’t much options except Search.

Historically Enterprise Search has been one of the most overlooked feature for SharePoint data access method. Since Search crawls every dark corner of your SharePoint farm, conceptually Search Index has all the data you are looking for across multiple site collections and using Search API seems like no-brainer solution to rollup information across multiple site collections. This article will follow Search philosophy to rollup policies from different department site collections to centralized location as Policy Search center. Unlike SharePoint API options, Search would also allow you to design your solutions with No-Code approach and can rely only on browser customizations.

Some of the major benefits and limitations of Search as Data access method are below:

• Major Benefits
  • Perfect for Data Rollups and Data Aggregations across Cross-farm, Cross-Web Application, or Cross-Site Collection
  • Can query across large data corpuses (because it query against index)
  • Queries are fast even with large data corpuses (because it query against index)
  • Most scalable data access solution out there, All other techniques are mostly SQL-based (because it query against index)
• Major Limitations
  • Content needs to be in the indexed (dependency), Avoid this option if real time data access are requirements
  • Requires advanced search service administration and configuration (dependency)
  • Improve search by tagging with metadata (to be effective)

Policy Center Detailed Architecture

Niks Policy Center is designed with no-code solution methodologies of SharePoint 2010. With the technologies like Enterprise Content Types, Managed Metadata, Document Libraries, Enterprise Search, and Out of box Search web parts, policy center not only allows departments to post policies in secure document libraries defined with enterprise level policy content types but also allows them to tag mandatory information to allow search to roll up policies at the centralized location.

One key thing is to keep in mind that Policies available at the centralized location would be dependent on Search crawl frequency. Plan to configure incremental crawl more frequently in SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Search Administration every few hours to ensure the freshness of policy center documents are available at the centralized location.

Here is the detailed Policy Center Architecture:

Detailed description & data flow described in above diagram for Policy center architecture are as below

• “Company Policy” Content Type defines the structure of department policy document libraries. This content type consists of two managed metadata fields – Policy Department and Applicable To, which would allow users to tag documents with proper categories while uploading policies
• Department Policy Document Libraries designed to use “Company Policy” Content Type which would allow department steering committee to upload policies as policy content type
• Department steering committee will upload Policy documents as “Company Policy” content type and tag policies to specific Department and other metadata
• Enterprise Search crawls department policy document libraries and make policy center data available through search interface
• Enterprise Search crawls “Company Policy” content type associated with policy documents and make it available through search interface, This would allow us to search policies based on Company Policy content type
• Enterprise Search crawls Policy managed metadata from term store associated with the policy documents and make it available through search interface, This would allow us to search policies based on Policy Managed metadata
• Centralized Policy center home page displays list of all the company policies through Search web parts. This page consists of two major search web parts – Core Search Results web part and Refiners web part. Core Search results web part is configured to filter all the policies for “Company Policy” content type. Refiners in the refiner’s web part would further filter search results in Core Results web part based on user selection. E.g. if user selects “Policy Department = HR”, it would further refine Core Search Results with managed metadata = HR

Implementing Solution – High level script to build Policy Center

Here are the high level steps to implement no-code policy center solution using SharePoint 2010 technologies like Enterprise Content Type, Content Type Hub, and Enterprise Search. Please download visual case study from my sky drive for detailed visual step by step guide.

Pre-requisites

• Activate Search Service and Search Service Application
  • Provision Site Collection – Enterprise Search Center at http://sp2010vm/sites/search using Enterprise Search Template
• Activate Managed Metadata Service and Content Type Hub
  • Activate Managed Metadata Service and Managed Metadata Service Application
  • Provision Content Type Hub Site Collection at http://sp2010vm/sites/cthub using Team Site Template to define Enterprise Content Type architecture
  • Configure Managed Metadata Service to use cthub as Content Type Hub

Design Data Source Architecture – Policy Content Type

• Create Content Site Collections – Three site collections based on team site – HR, Legal, IT
• Add New Terms in Term Store – New Group – Corporate, New Term Sets – Department and Employee Groups
• Define Enterprise Content Type in Content Type Hub
  • Create Content Type – Company Policy in the Content Type Hub
  • Add Columns
    • Title (Required)
    • Description (Optional)
    • Effective Date (Optional – Date and Time)
    • Policy Type (Required – Choice – Corporate, Department)
    • Policy Department (Required – Managed Metadata – Department)
    • Applicable To (Optional – Managed Metadata – Employee Groups)
• Publish Content Type from the Content Type Hub – Company Policy Content Type
• Consume Content Types from Content Type Hub in three main site collections – HR, Legal, and IT
• Run timer job – Content Type Hub, Content Type Hub Subscriber to publish content types right away
• Create new document library – Policies and Apply Company Content Type as Content Type in all three site collections
• Upload Sample Policies on all three site collections document libraries

Design Data Query Architecture – Search for Policies

• Crawl Content from Search – Full Crawl on the default content source
• Verify searching Policies from the Search Index from Search Center
  • Using word – policies, it should return everything including policy documents & document libraries
  • Using content type – ContentType:”Company Policy” – it should return all the policies, no doc libraries
  • Using content type and search – ContentType:”Company Policy” AND Site:”sp2010vm/sites/IT” – it should return only IT policies
• Ensure Crawl Properties are included in the Index
  • Effective Date (found 1)
    • ows_Effective_x0020_Date(Date and Time), No Mapping
  • Policy Type (Found 1)
    • ows_Policy_x0020_Type(Text), No Mapping
  • Policy Department (Found 3)
    • ows_Policy_x0020_Department(Text), No Mapping
    • ows_taxId_Policy_x0020_Department(Text), owstaxIdPolicyx0020Department
    • Policy Department(Text), No Mapping
  • Applicable To (Found 3)
    • Applicable To(Text), No Mapping
    • ows_Applicable_x0020_To, No Mapping
    • ows_taxId_Applicable_x0020_To(Text), owstaxIdApplicablex0020To
• Run Full crawl on default content source to populate crawl properties and default managed properties
• Create Managed Properties for Custom Columns and map managed metadata properties to text crawled properties – Select all the check boxes – Allow this property to be used in scopes, Reduce storage requirements for text properties by using a hash for comparison, and Add managed property to custom results set retrieved on each query
  • EffectiveDate – ows_Effective_x0020_Date, Date Time
  • PolicyType – ows_Policy_x0020_Type, Text
  • PolicyDepartment – ows_Policy_x0020_Department, Text, Multiple Values
  • ApplicableTo – ows_Applicable_x0020_To, Text, Multiple Values
• Run Full Crawl on default content source to populate managed properties
• Verify searching Policies from the Search Index by managed properties – ApplicableTo:”Contractors” or PolicyDepartment:IT, it should return results

Design final Solution – Centralized Policy Center

• Configure Corporate Policy Center to demonstrate rollup across multiple site collections
  • Policy Center view is made of 4 search web parts – Refiner Panel, Search Statistics, Search Core Results, and Search Paging Web Parts.
  • Add Refiner Panel and configure properties to return specific categories
  • Add Search Statistics Web Part – No Settings changed
  • Add Core Results Web Part and configure properties with updated XSL for simplified UI – Set Append to Text Query – ContentType:”Company Policy”
  • Add Search Paging Web Part – No Settings changed

Enjoy!!!!!

This article was long due. May be couple years ago. There are hundreds of articles out there describing how to configure managed metadata service and content type hub but I am yet to see complete end to end article describing whole process with least privileged setup. In general, this whole process is straightforward but if you have never configured managed metadata in SharePoint 2010, it may seem daunting at first. That’s where this article comes in. First, foremost its reference for me. Every time I need to configure managed metadata service, I had to stop for a second to build configuration check list. Second, it does provide additional insight on what really happens under the hood when you configure Managed Metadata Service for IT Pros.

Here are the high level steps you need to follow to configure Managed Metadata Service and Content Type Hub in your SharePoint 2010 On-Premises farm. This article also applies to SharePoint 2013 On-premises farm as well. Alternatively you can download 26 pages step by step visual guide from my Sky Drive folder.

Step 1 – Prepare the Service Accounts for the Managed Metadata Service Application

For the Least Privileged Setup, create service application domain user account (e.g. Niks\sp_serviceapps). Majority of the service applications along with Managed Metadata Service Application will run under this account identity. Ensure “User cannot change password” and “Password never expires” are checked.

Log in to the server as a farm account (e.g. Niks\sp_farm). Visit the Central Admin and register the “Niks\sp_serviceapps” as managed account. Managed Metadata and other SharePoint Service Applications requires Service Application pool configured as Managed Account in the central administration.

Step 2 – Configure the Managed Metadata Service

Log in to the server as a Niks\sp_farm user. To setup Managed Metadata Service Application properly, please ensure that Managed Metadata Service is already activated on the farm. Please note that this step is NOT mandatory but much more preferred approach. If you don’t start Managed Metadata Service prior to provisioning Managed Metadata Service Application, it would start automatically for you.

Visit the Central Administration -> System Settings -> Manage services on server and verify that Managed Metadata Service is started.

To setup new Managed Metadata Service application, Navigate the Central Administration -> Application Management -> Manage Service Applications to create the new Managed Metadata Service Application.

Click New and select “Managed Metadata Service”

On the new Managed Metadata Service Application creation page, enter the service application name, database name, and default windows authentication.

Enter the Application Pool information. Create the new Application Pool – Specify its name – “SharePoint Service Application Pool” and use the “Niks\sp_serviceapps” as Application Pool identity.

In the Content Type Hub Section, Verify that last option – “Add the Service Application in the farm’s default list” is checked. This will associate this service application to all the web application associated with the default proxy group.

Let’s setup Content type Hub later. We will ignore Content Type Hub settings at this moment and click OK to provision new Managed Metadata Service Application.

Step 3 – Verify Managed Metadata Service Application Configuration

You can visit Term Store by double clicking the Managed Metadata Service Application link. If you get the error saying “The Managed Metadata Service or Connection is currently not available. The Application Pool or Managed Metadata Web Service may not have been started. Please Contact your Administrator.” restart the IIS and it should be working fine.

Verify that Term Store is associated with Managed Metadata Service Application you have provisioned earlier. If you want any other users except farm account, you must configure permissions for those users in Term Store Administrators to allow users to manage Term Store and add new term sets or terms.

For advanced SharePoint IT Pro related verification, please see Appendix in downloadable document to understand what happens under the cover when you provision new managed metadata service application.

In general, when SharePoint provisions new Managed Metadata service application, it typically configures various components on the server:

• Central Administration
  • Associate Managed Metadata Service Application with Content Web Application
  • Service Application Pool is configured for Managed Metadata service on the Configure Service Accounts page.
• Active Directory
  • SharePoint Service Account is added to member of IIS_IUSERS and WSS_WPG group
• IIS
  • New Service Application Pool is created
  • New WCF Endpoint for Managed Metadata Service Application is configured.
• SQL Server
  • New Managed Metadata Service Application Database is provisioned
  • SharePoint Service Account is added as Login account on the database Server
  • SharePoint Service  Account is configured with “db_owner” role on the Managed Metadata Service Application database
  • SharePoint Service Account is configured as WSS_Content_Application_Pools role in the SharePoint_Admin and SharePoint_Config database.
  • SharePoint Service Account doesn’t have any access to the content web application database

Step 4 – Provision Content Type Hub Site Collection

It is important to note that you can have only one Site collection as Content Type Hub per Managed Metadata Service Application. There is no specific site template for Content Type Hub. Content Type Hub site collection in SharePoint 2010 are based on standard team site template and requires site collection level “Content Type Syndication Hub” feature activated.

Provision Content Type Hub Site Collection at http://sp2010vm/sites/cthub using Team Site Template from the central administration and activate Site Collection Feature – Content Type Syndication Hub

Step 5 – Configure Managed Metadata Service to use cthub as Content Type Hub

Specify Content Type Hub URL to the Managed Metadata Service Application Properties from the Central Administration. Also, please ensure to check the box next to – Report syndication import errors from Site Collections using this service application.

Update Managed Metadata Service Application connections Properties from the Central Administration to explicitly consume the content type from Hub. Check “Consumes content types from the Content Type Gallery at http://sp2010vm/sites/cthub” on the connection properties.

Step 6 – Verify Content Type Hub Configuration

Define Enterprise Content Type for Policy Document

To ensure custom content types are used across multiple site collections, SharePoint 2010 has introduced new mechanism called Enterprise Content Type. Basically enterprise content types are defined in the content type hub associated with managed metadata service application and publish content type to all site collections in the web application associated with same managed metadata service application.

In our example, we will create content Type – “Company Policy” in the Content Type Hub (http://sp2010vm/sites/cthub/SitePages/Home.aspx), Publish this content type from Content Type Hub, and consume this content type from the root site collection (http://sp2010vm)

To Create Enterprise Content Type, Visit Content Type Hub (in my case – http://sp2010vm/sites/cthub/SitePages/Home.aspx) and create new content type in the Site Collection Content Type Gallery.

Publish Content Type from the Content Type Hub

Once Enterprise Content Types are defined, next step is to publish the content type to the consumer site collections. You can publish the “Company Policy” Content Type by clicking “Manage Publishing for this content type” link from the site content type page in the Content Type Hub.

If you have never published content type, select “Publish” option otherwise ensure “Republish” option is checked before clicking OK.

Consume Content Type from the Content Type Hub

Once Enterprise Content type is published, you can consume “Company Policy” Content Type from consumer site collections.  In our example, visit root site collection – http://sp2010vm and you can import content type by visiting “Content Type Publishing Page” from the Site Collection Administration Settings and by selecting “Refresh all published content types on next update”. Content type publishing requests will be picked up by timer job.

Alternatively, you can force running “Content Type Hub Subscriber” timer job manually to publish content types right away from the central administration.

Once content types are published, Enterprise Content Type – “Company Policy” should be available in the consumer site collection content type gallery.

That’s it as far as Step by Step details of configuring Managed Metadata and Content Type Hub.

***********

Please note that I don’t have any inside news from Microsoft. This is what I feel based on public information available, my research on SP2013 social and Yammer features, and what Microsoft has communicated to public at SPC12

Ever since Microsoft has acquired Yammer in July 2012 (right around when they released SharePoint 2013 Beta), one of the biggest question after SPC12 were as an organization, should we choose Yammer or SharePoint 2013 social for our ESN platform? What Microsoft’s future direction for ESN offerings? What if we make bad choice choosing wrong platform?

Honestly this is big question, there is no right or wrong answer. Both Jeremy Thake and Chris Johnson has expressed their starkly different opinions and both of them are right in given situation. I have just started working on SharePoint 2013 Social Intranet project and going through similar situation where client has to evaluate whether to use SharePoint 2013 Social features or Yammer features or both.

Before we deep dive into why and what you should use, Simplest way I put is – It depends, Since Microsoft has acquired Yammer at the very end stage of their SharePoint 2013 product release cycle, there is no ideal integration at this moment. It is safe to say that map your social business requirements to both products and figure out what you want to use.

Here is what my guidance, philosophy, and approach I would take in current state,

• Use SharePoint 2013 Social features for On-Premises and Use Yammer if you are already in cloud. As an Office 365 customer, Yammer Enterprise is available at no additional cost as of Nov 2012. Regardless of what you choose, Microsoft is committed to bring both products together and hopefully you will end up at the same stage.
• If you have both products or interested in both products, situation is much trickier, plan to clearly define scenarios when to use Yammer groups, SharePoint communities, SharePoint Site feed, and SharePoint Personal news feed. There are so many overlaps in both products. If you are introducing both products in your organization, define the clear use case scenarios for both products. Plan to use OOB integration approaches like Yammer Embed or Yammer web parts for SharePoint to integrate both features. Do not try to build custom solutions to integrate both yammer and SharePoint news feeds. As I am writing this article, Microsoft is committed to release integrated Microblogging feed to integrate Yammer and SharePoint. Of course, if you are SharePoint Online customer, you may get integrated feed patch much more quickly than On-premises customers.

You may ask how you come to this conclusion. I have spent last month building Social features on SharePoint 2013 and listening all the SharePoint 2013 Social and Yammer videos delivered at SPC12. I felt like these resources provided me both current state of Microsoft social platforms and future state of where Microsoft going in ESN market space.

Let’s look at the current state,

As of February 2013, Both Yammer Enterprise and SharePoint 2013 are two different platforms. SharePoint 2013 comes with two different flavors – SharePoint On-Premises and SharePoint Online. Yammer Enterprise is only available as SAAS model but available at no additional cost for the Office 365 and SharePoint online customers. See here for most recent pricing details.

On surface, both SharePoint 2013 On-premises and SharePoint Online are similar products and integrated same way with Yammer with separate microblogging feeds and separate identities but will soon integrated in near future. Unlike SharePoint On-premises, SharePoint Online and Yammer Enterprise will have much frequent update on integrated news feed and similar cloud federated identities down the road making SharePoint Online very compelling solution for seamless experience compared to SharePoint on-premises.

As far as features, both SharePoint 2013 social and Yammer has many different features solving similar business problems. SharePoint 2013 social is focused on two different aspects of corporate social – my view and dedicated community view, Yammer’s main focus seems more like dedicated enterprise level groups, focus groups, knowledge groups, & external networks while SharePoint focusing on personal space and team level communities. Although SharePoint 2013 has unimpressive basic gamification features, Yammer doesn’t have anything in that space. It would be interesting to watch out where Microsoft goes as far as expanding gamification features in their social offering.

Now, let’s look at the future state,

Based on some of the talks, SPC12 sessions, SPC12 key note, and articles I have read, here is what I believe where Microsoft is going with Yammer and SharePoint.

• SPC12 Keynote Transcript: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/Speeches/2012/11-12SharePoint.aspx
• Christophe Fiessinger’s Microsoft Enterprise Social roadmap resources - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/chrisfie/archive/2012/12/20/microsoft-enterprise-social-roadmap-yammer-sharepoint.aspx
• Computer World’s article – http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9233510/Microsoft_addresses_Yammer_integration_plans_at_SharePoint_conference

In near term, here are the major features I am expecting to get released

• Combined Document Management – Sky Drive Pro & Office Web Apps will provide common mechanism to host & collaborate on Yammer documents and SharePoint My Site personal documents. This will definitely allow us much more possibility for tighter Yammer integration with other Microsoft server products like SharePoint, Exchange, and LYNC.
• Yammer Microblog Translation – In Yammer, you will able to translate Microblog entry from one language to another and post reply in another language. This is great in terms of Yammer’s philosophy – Open by default and breaking organization, team, apps, or language silos barrier. One of the awesome features I saw in SPC189 – How Yammer and SharePoint are Approaching Social session was translating microblogs on fly using SharePoint/Azure Machine translation service. This is first feature I have seen where both Yammer and SharePoint/Azure are integrated.
• Unified Federated Identity – This is cloud only feature. At this moment, both Yammer and Office 365 have separate identity. There is no one-to-one mapping of Yammer and Office 365 user profiles and login identity for single sign on or seamless authentication across both products. Microsoft is committed to provide seamless integration of both products. Since Microsoft is packaging Yammer at no additional cost along with Office 365, this is one of the no brainer features Microsoft would implement.
• Aggregated Microblogging Notification feed from Yammer and SharePoint – I am not exactly sure how it would look like, there are obviously three different kind of Microblogging features we have – Yammer Groups, SharePoint Site Feeds, and SharePoint Personal News Feed. Additionally, it’s easy to see these feeds will be integrated very quickly on the SharePoint online being part of Office 365 suite and cloud product.
• Universal Publishing in Yammer – Post a message in news feed and address objects like yammer group, person, document, SharePoint team site, exchange distribution list, exchange email message, CRM opportunity, or any other Yammer objects. I believe this is going to be amazing feature to breakdown different Microsoft product silos barrier.
• Mobility Support – Yammer already have native apps for iPhone and Android mobility platform. Microsoft has just released “SharePoint 2013 News feed” app for Windows Phone platform. Both Yammer and SharePoint 2013 social is committed to native apps for iOS, Android, and Windows mobile & devices platforms in near future.

What would be Yammer’s role in Microsoft’s ESN consumer market space?

Along with all these deep integration features between Yammer and other Microsoft server products, SPC12 Enterprise Social overview session gives us some more insight on how Microsoft envisions single social experience and use Yammer as focal point for their social platforms. Yammer has two technologies which can play key role integrating Yammer and all other Microsoft server products. Open Graph would allow users to push updates from other apps like SharePoint, CRM, and other enterprise products to Yammer feed. Adam Pisoni demonstrated at SPC12 keynote that how you can post updates regarding documents from SharePoint to the Yammer microblogging feed while documents are still hosted in SharePoint and Yammer allows employee to have social conversation about document. Yammer Embed allows organizations to embed Yammer feeds, follows, and likes in any other business apps like SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, or office.

In future, here is what I believe Yammer and SharePoint Social will look like. Again, regardless of what you pick, I believe you will end up at the same stage in future. I would go even one more step further and advice to adopt both technologies if it meets your requirements. If you are adopting SharePoint Social for on-premises, only concern/question I would have is how SharePoint 2013 Social migration would work to the next wave of SharePoint or Yammer.

• Connected Experiences – Obviously, Microsoft didn’t acquired Yammer as their SharePoint social platform. I personally feel NewsGator had better and deep SharePoint integration and have much more similar features like what SharePoint 2013 Social features are. Microsoft have envisioned Yammer as their enterprise social networking tool which would integrate with other server products like Dynamics CRM, LYNC, and Exchange to provide great platform for next generation of social, collaboration, email, instant messaging, voice, and video platforms.
• Dedicated or Integrated Product? – This is where Microsoft hasn’t provided any hints yet. With Yammer’s open by default & cloud only philosophy, it is interesting to see how Yammer Social & SharePoint Social would be integrated. If you ask me, I don’t think Microsoft would ever abandon On-Premises customers. Additionally, there are so many great features in SharePoint 2013 like My Sites, personal news feed, and communities which overlaps with Yammer and for given business case, both products meets business requirements. At this moment, there are clearly two path – Either Integrate Yammer Social with SharePoint as Single product or keep Yammer as dedicated product and use it as social source for other Microsoft enterprise offerings. If you ask me, I would bet for latter but time would tell. Unlike FAST (integrated/replaced with SharePoint as Search) or Pro-clarity (integrated/replace with SharePoint as PerformancePoint & SQL Server Analysis services components) products acquired by Microsoft in past, Yammer seems like continue their investment as dedicated offering and stay as Stand-Alone product like Office Web Apps and provide ESN platform for all Microsoft products like SharePoint, Office, CRM, Skype, LYNC, Exchange etc.

On final note & recap, Microsoft is pushing customers to the cloud with introduction of more Yammer-like iterative, 90-day cycle of improvements focused on SharePoint Online compared to 3-year release cycle for SharePoint On-Premises. If you are already using SharePoint Online and Office 365, yammer is great platform for social networking and future identity integration and unified micro blogging feed would be ideal state. But in real world, Office 365 doesn’t meet every customer needs and if you are still require SharePoint 2013 On-premises for rich customizations & deep integration with other enterprise products, SharePoint 2013 social would be great start looking at Yammer in horizon.

That’s it on my two cents on current and future state of Microsoft ESN offerings!!!!

As many of you already know, Microsoft has invested heavily in SharePoint 2013 social features from both Personal level Social platform and Organization level Social platform. User Profiles, My Newsfeed, Following, and Sky Drive Pro are major investments in personal/my social experience while Communities are major investments in group & team focused organization level social platform.

Here are major investments in SharePoint 2013 social and what’s new out there. I am planning to update this article with Social Architecture, What’s under the hood, and new findings as I learn more about SharePoint Social.

User Profiles

• User Profile Privacy settings are simplified to only me or everyone, no longer manager related visibility settings
• Populate user profiles – profile picture, first name, last name, preferred name (required for welcome menu), manager (required for organization chart & following people/colleagues info) and other information as needed

My Sites

• Improved Experience
  • Simplified My site user experience – Unlike SP2010, no longer separate tabs for news feed, my profile, and my site contents
  • Improved Provisioning process and perceived experience – During first time provisioning process, my site allows users to update profile settings while SharePoint setting up the My Site. Better user experience unlike SP2010 where you can’t access My Site until it fully gets provisioned.
• About me
  • Shows activity feed, basic user information, in common users, organization chart
  • By default, In Common & Org Chart web part doesn’t show on your profile but it does show on another user’s profile view.
• Newsfeed
  • Aggregated view of activities from the people, content you are following including sites, documents, and tags
    • Posting – You can post pictures & links including document URLs, Use hash tags & mentions
    • Conversations – replies, like, follow up
    • Five news feeds out of box – Following, Everyone, Mentions, Activities, Likes
    • Anything posted on my site news feed is public by default
    • Any activities or replies marked with follow up, gets added to your tasks list
    • You can target only people you are following by specifying @person in the news feed text box. You can’t target @community in posts directly in news feed web part but you can post news feed on the communities where site feed is enabled
    • You can start new conversation only on your profile, You can’t start conversation or new post on someone else’s wall/profile page like Facebook
  • Architecture
    • All the activities are controlled by privacy settings on user profiles
    • All the activities are stored in the distributed cache along with micro feed list in My Site content database, cached up to 7 days by default in distributed cache, can be changed up to maximum 14 days.
    • Activities stored in micro feed list, it no longer limited to 14 days in SP2010, stores both user generated & system generated activities
• Following
  • Allows you to follow four different actors out of box – people, documents, sites, and tags, this system is sealed and you can’t customize, add, remove additional actors to follow
  • By default, all the manager, subordinates, and siblings in org-structure are added in following people list
  • You can stop following people, documents, sites, and tags
  • In Office 365
    • It doesn’t seem like If you follow site, any new documents or discussions are added into that site will show up on your following news feed
    • It seems like only activities from people you follow shows up in following news feed
• Sky Drive Pro
  • User Personal My Site => My documents & Followed Documents
  • My documents are personal private document library, any documents are added in “Shared with Everyone” folder is public to everyone in organization, alternatively you can share personal documents easily and keep track of access – Sharing hint from my site document libraries, which displays all the users and permissions for specific content.
  • Followed documents shows all the documents you follow & suggest which documents to follow
  • When documents are shared, person can visit user’s my site to get access to their documents.
  • You can drag & drop files form your hard drive on my documents library, it requires Office 2013 for drag & drop feature to work, it seems like it doesn’t work for Windows 7 and IE 9
• Mobility
  • Windows 8 Phone “SharePoint Newsfeed” App allows you to connect to News Feed, User Profile, Following, and Sky Drive Pro documents library

Community Sites

• Three ways to create community sites
  • Either use community portal site collection or use community site template
  • Additionally, there is a feature can be activated on any existing team site. To activate “Community Site” Site level feature, you must activate “SharePoint Server Standard” Site Collection level feature.
• Differences between Community and Community Portal Site Template
  • Community Portal Site Collection level Site Template is aggregator of the communities in your environment. It has pre-configured Search driven, Popular Communities web part. There are no Community features activated on the Community Portal site template by default. This is optional but you should have at least 1 Site Collection which can be served as home for Communities from where users can see popular communities and subscribe any communities they want to.
    • Community Portal is added to promoted sites automatically
    • In Office 365 Preview, All the functionality driven by search (e.g. popular community sites) works only for users who are explicitly added as visitors or members of the communities. Adding “All Users” group doesn’t show communities when user visits community portal.
  • Community Site Template is either at the Site or Site Collection level
    • Community Site template provides all the community features like discussion boards, moderations, reputations, and badges.
    • Each community site has about page to describe community purpose.
• How Community Site differs than Standard Team Site Template?
  • Community Site SharePoint Security groups differs than SharePoint Team Site security groups -  Members Security group in Community Site have Contribute permission level like SP2010 team site whereas SP2013 team site members have Edit permission, Please note that Edit is new permission level in SP2013
  • New Security group called Moderators added in Community Site with Moderate permission level
  • Only Site Owners and Site Moderators can see Community Administration toolbox – It is special web part with quick links for community management
• Pre-requisites for Community Features
  • For Office 365 and SharePoint online environment, all the plumbing work is pre-configured for the communities’ features to work.
  • For on-premises environments – Although not required, it is important to configure Search, Managed Metadata, and User Profile services for communities for full feature set.
• Community Site Architecture – Four Internal SharePoint Lists
  • Categories – Defines discussion categories
  • Discussions List – Hosts all the discussions
  • Community Members – People who follow community
  • Badges – List of all the badges
• Major Features of Discussion boards
  • MS Forums like discussion boards – Discussions/conversations, likes, ratings, featured post, moderations
  • Posting
    • People can post notes or questions
    • People can specify category
    • People can choose best reply on their own posts
    • People can Use both mentions and hashtag in posts
    • People can post both videos and documents including images, by default, any videos or images posted directly in discussion boards get stored in site assets directory. Plan to have dedicated document library to host all the discussion attachments. To redirect all the attachments to the document library, you must break the Site Assets library permission inheritance and ensure only site owners and site moderators have Site Assets permission. If user don’t have permission to document library, it won’t show up on attachment upload screen. One of the biggest concerns of posting attachments is if you ever delete the post, it would still retain the documents or videos attached to the post. There might be potential cleanup required. Having dedicated document library for posting would really help cleaning up.
  • Conversations
    • People can like or reply, report abuse to moderator (this is not enabled by default)
  • Moderation
    • Moderators can choose best reply or edit the post on behalf original poster, mark as featured post, moderate abuses by either editing or deleting posts etc.
    • Moderation of abuses or report abuses to moderator is not enabled by default. Administrators can enable from the community settings page.
  • Limitations
    • You can’t target posts to the community, you can target/mention on people in the posts, you can’t mention SharePoint security group in your posts
    • All the replies/conversations in discussion board are aligned at one level. Replies are not grouped along with same post or questions in threaded view
    • If Moderator ever updates replies or edit any post, there is no visual indication that moderator has added any remarks or changed reply.
• Gamification Features – Badges, Reputations based on points
  • Reputations depends on posting, replying, and liking in discussions
  • Leaving the community hides someone from members list but retains their reputations point in case they rejoin and wanted to restore their score
  • Reputations are based on each community, not at the portal level by design, there is no aggregation of reputations score across communities – which makes sense since someone might be more expert on one community, not others
  • Limitations
    • Admins don’t have control on how reputations scored can be adjusted. In future versions/updates, MS will allow moderators to give members credit for other activities and increase reputations score
    • You can’t customize pictures for Achievement level, You can add Level 1-5 text
    • You can add custom badges through Community Tools but you can’t attach any images.
• Site Feed
  • Instead of having discussions on the site home page, you can have site news feed. You must activate the feature and export the site feed.dwp web part and reimport on the home page.
  • Limitations
    • You can’s target @community in posts in news feed web part, you can target only people you are following
    • One major limitations of having news feed instead of discussion lists on community site is all posts, replies, and likes on the news feed doesn’t count towards achievement/reputations points and top contributors web part.
• How to implement Community Features?
  • Create a Site Collection based on Community Portal Template
    • Aggregation of all the communities via Popular Communities Web Part
  • Create a Site Collection or Sub Sites based on Community Site Template
    • Create Categories, Badges, and Change Community Settings like Reputations Points as needed
    • Configure Security Groups – Member, Moderators, Visitors
    • Configure dedicated Document Library for Posts attachments, Break the security for Site Assets document library

Resources

• What’s new in social computing in SharePoint Server 2013 -http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219766.aspx
• Overview of community in SP2013 – http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219805.aspx and http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219489.aspx
• Understanding Communities in SP2013 by Susan Hanley – http://www.networkworld.com/community/blog/10-key-things-you-need-know-about-sharepoint-2013-community-sites-0 and http://www.sharepointedutech.com/2012/11/26/spc169-building-vibrant-communities-in-sharepoint-2013/
• Current State of Social Collaboration by Jereme Thake – http://www.jeremythake.com/2013/01/the-current-state-of-sharepoint-2013-social-collaboration/