Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Improvements and new capabilities in SharePoint 2013

I have already posted about the enhancements in SharePoint 2013 in my previous posting SharePoint 2013 Changes and Enhancements from SharePoint 2010. In continuation to the previous posting here your will get more details about the SharePoint 2013 enhancements.

SharePoint 2013 Architecture:-
In general the model on which SharePoint 2013 is built on is same as the previous version SharePoint 2010 , however there are numerous platform level improvements and new capabilities introduced in the SharePoint 2013
  • Shredded Storage
  • SQL Improvements
  • Cache Service
  • Request Management
  • Themes
  • Sharing

Service applications in SharePoint 2013:-
There are new service applications introduced in SharePoint 2013 and improvements done in existing service applications. Office web app and Web Analytics are no longer a service application. Below is the list of all the service applications in SharePoint 2013

  1. Access Services Web Service Application
  2. App Management Service Application
  3. Business Data Connectivity Service Application
  4. Search Service Application
  5. Excel Services Application
  6. Managed Metadata Service
  7. PerformancePoint Service Application
  8. PowerPoint Conversion Service Application
  9. Secure Store Service Application
  10. Machine Translation Service
  11. Usage and Health Data Collection Service Application
  12. User Profile Service Application
  13. State Service
  14. Visio Graphics Service Application
  15. Security Token Service Application
  16. Application Discovery and Load Balancer Service Application

I will write a separate post about service applications in SharePoint 2013, you need to wait for some time -J


Enterprise Content Management:-
SharePoint 2013 now supports Site-level retention policies with following features:-
  • Compliance levels extended to sites
  • Policies include:
    • Retention policy for sites and Team Mailbox associated with site
    • Project closure and expiration policy

Below screen shots shows the Site Policies screen in SharePoint 2013


Discovery Center is a new feature in SharePoint 2013
  • Designed for managing discovery cases and holds
  • Establishes a portal through which you can access discovery cases to conduct searches, place content on hold, and export content




eDiscovery capablities
  • Support for searching and exporting content from file shares
  • Export discovered content from Exchange and SharePoint


Team folders feature of SharePoint 2013 provides seemless integration of Exchange and SharePoint to provide best of both world and end user flexibility



Web Content Management:-
Following features are introduced in SharePoint 2013 web content management:-
  • Support the tools and workflows designers use
  • Variations & Content Translation
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Cross Site Publishing
  • Video & Embedding :- Now you can embed YouTube videos in SharePoint 2013 sites very easily, below is the screen shot showing video embedding


  • Image renditions :- Wao, this is a great feature, now SharePoint 2013 will take care of image resizing without loos of image quality. Below screen shot shows image rendition feature in SharePoint 2013




  • Clean Urls:- Now you can have a short URL with this feature
  • Metadata navigation


Social:-
Micro-blogging a new feature in SharePoint 2013
  • Share content, links, and media
  • Follow people, sites, content, and conversations

Activity Feeds: - Now we have got very rich activity wall
  • Provides a view into recent activity related to content, links, media, and people



Communities
  • Community sites with self-service administration and moderation
  • Modern community features such as achievements and reputation

Discussions
  • Modern discussion boards





Blogs: - Blog portal was there in SharePoint 2010, however there few modification done in Blog which are
  • Client application integration
  • Categories, comments, and moderation 

Search:-
If something is changed drastically in SharePoint 2013 that is Search. Search is now made very powerful, SharePoint 2013 is now all in one search, now bye bye to Microsoft Search Server and FAST

Here are the Search capabilities in SharePoint 2013:-

  • New Search architecture with one unified search
  • Personalized search results based on search history
  • Rich contextual previews







Business Intelligence:-
Excel BI
ž   Instant analysis through In Memory BI Engine
ž   Power View Add-in
Excel Services
ž   Improved data exploration
ž   Field List and Field Well Support
ž   Calculated Measures and Members
ž   Enhanced Timeline Controls



PerformancePoint Services
ž   Filter enhancements and Filter search
ž   Dashboard migration
ž   Support for Analysis Services Effective User
Visio Services
ž   Refresh data from external sources – BCS and Azure SQL
ž   Supports comments on Visio Drawings
ž   Maximum Cache Size service parameter
ž   Health Analyzer Rules to report on Maximum Cache Size






Mobile:-

Classic and Contemporary views for mobile browsers
Automatic Mobile Browser Redirection
Target different designs based on user agent string
Office Mobile Web Apps
ž   Excel
ž   PowerPoint
ž   Word
Push notifications



In SharePoint 2013 you can define master pages for different mobile devices, it allows you to create device channels and then you can define master pages to each channel.



All above content are referenced from the training material provided by the Microsoft. I will write more blogs on individual features of SharePoint 2013. Meanwhile share your comments on this post and wait for the next blog.

Enjoy SharePointing!!!

Sunday, September 30, 2012

SharePoint 2013 Changes and Enhancements from SharePoint 2010


First thing I would like to say that SharePoint 2013 Rocks!!!  Last week [24th Sept to 28 Sept 2012] I have attended SharePoint 2013 IT Pro training at Microsoft Hyderabad campus. Based on the training, training material and slides I am writing this first blog on SharePoint 2013. This blog will give you the overall picture of changes & modification done in SharePoint 2013 from the SharePoint 2010.
There is drastic change in the user interface of SharePoint 2013 in comparison with SharePoint 2010. I found SharePoint 2013 user interface more interactive and more usable. There are lots of platform level changes done in SharePoint 2013. 

Below are the points where architectural changes & modification has been done in SharePoint 2013 in comparison with SharePoint 2010
  • Shredded Storage
  • SQL Improvements
  • Cache Service
  • Request Management
  • Service Applications
  • Office Web Apps
  • Analytics
  • Social Changes
  • SharePoint 2013 Farm Considerations

Let me brief you about each bullet points of changes/enhancement done in SharePoint 2013:-

Shredded Storage
The goal is to make changes equal to the size of the change, not size of the file

How It Works in SharePoint 2010:
When a file is updated via Cobalt, only the bits that have changed are sent over the wire from the client to the SharePoint WFE.  However, because SharePoint lacks the concept of incremental updates to SQL, so the system was forced to:

a)    pull the entire file to the WFE
b)    merge the changes into it
c)    write the entire file back to SQL

How It Works in SharePoint 2013:
Now in SharePoint 2013 the file is break into pieces and store that in SQL
On update of the file, only the shredded blobs that correspond to the updated bits are touched and stored in SQL, so that means the entire file saved and after the modification only the changes are stored in SQL, so it avoid round tripping entire files to the WFE and back.

SQL Improvements
  • Microsoft has reduced scenarios that might invoke full table scans. There have been lots of improvements around finding docs for link fix-up and alert handling
  • Reduced data redundancy for some features
  • Using advanced indexing features provided by SQL 2008 R2
  • Changes in architecture to support wide lists, i.e. lists where a single item spans multiple rows in the database to hold the data

Cache Service
There is a new distributed cache service in SharePoint 2013 based on Windows Server AppFabric Distributed Caching, It is used in features like authentication token caching and My Site social feeds. SharePoint 2013 uses caching features that cloud-based cache (Windows Azure Cache) does not support at this time, so only local cache hosts can be used
SharePoint ONLY supports the version of caching that it ships – you cannot independently upgrade it.

The config DB keeps track of which machines in the farm are running the cache service, It is all provisioned by SharePoint setup
A new Windows service – the Distributed Cache service – is installed on each server in the farm when SharePoint is installed

Request Management
The purpose of the Request Management feature is to give SharePoint knowledge of and more control over incoming requests, Having knowledge over the nature of incoming requests – for example, the user agent, requested URL, or source IP – allows SharePoint to customize the response to each request, RM is applied per web app, just like throttling is done in SharePoint 2010.

RM is turned off by default

RM – Goals (you can think of RM as replacement of NLB):
RM can route to WFEs with better health, keeping low-health WFEs alive
RM can identify harmful requests and deny them immediately
RM can prioritize requests by throttling lower-priority ones (bots) to serve higher-priority ones (end-users)
RM can send all requests of specific type, like search for example, to specific machines
Isolated traffic can help troubleshoot errors on one machine
RM can send heavy requests to more powerful WFEs


RM Components


RM Routing and Pools
Routing rules route requests and are associated with MachinePools, MachinePools contain servers, servers use weights for routing – static weights and health weights

Static weights are constant for WFEs; health weights change dynamically based on health scores

RM Routing Rules
Routing to a server in a MachinePool is based on matching a routing rule
Routing rules are placed in ExecutionGroups
These are numbered 0 to 2, with 0 the default
Rules are evaluated in each ExecutionGroup
As soon as a match is found no more ExecutionGroups are evaluated
All machines from pools that match any routing rules are union’ed together to determine possible target servers
This means that you create your most important rules in ExecutionGroup 0

There are some important caveats to remember about routing rules
If no rules are matched, then the request will get routed to any available routing target
If you want to route to a subset of machines, make a rule with no criteria and specify the subset of machines you want to routed to

RM – Why Not Throttling?
SharePoint 2010 has throttling but there is room for improvement
Uses a health score system in which WFEs attach their health info to all responses
The drawbacks from this approach were:
It was the clients’ responsibility to honor the health scores
It did not preclude WFE failure
Clients could be shown server busy messages from a poor-health WFE when other better-health WFEs were available

RM Throttling Rules
Routing rules process requests; throttling rules stop requests
It’s much like throttling in SharePoint 2010, only more sophisticated
You create criteria for the throttling rule, and if the criteria is met the request is throttled
The process and PowerShell for creating throttling rules is very similar to routing rules

Criteria's You Can Use for Routing and Throttling
Rules can match on these properties:
Url, UrlReferrer, UserAgent, Host, IP, HttpMethod, SoapAction, CustomHeader,

You can evaluate values using these methods:
StartsWith, EndsWith, Equals, RegEx

RM Routing Weights
RM uses static weights and health weights
Static weights are associated with WFEs so certain ones will always be favored when selecting.
This gives added weight to more powerful WFEs and less to weaker machines
Health weights are used to even out load and keep “sick” WFEs going
Health scores run from 0 to 10 where 0 is the healthiest and therefore will get the most requests; this score is used to derive the health weight
WFEs start with a healthy weight; the Policy Engine health rule updates health weights dynamically – you cannot change it manually

Service Applications
There are a few new service applications in SharePoint 2013:
App Management Service:  allows you to install SharePoint apps from the Office Marketplace or the App Catalog
SharePoint Translation Services:  does simple language translation of Word, PPT, and XLIFF files into HTML
Work Management Service:  provides task aggregation across systems such as SharePoint, Exchange and Project.

Azure Workflow Server is new and not exactly a service app but similar.  Provides an externalized host using REST and OAuth to run workflows.

Office Web Apps is no longer a service application

Web Analytics is no longer a service application

Office Web Apps
WAC is now a separate server product, not a service application
You can create a WAC farm that can support multiple SharePoint farms
You can view files from a number of different data sources, including:
SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, File servers

This allows you to scale and manage WAC separately from other Microsoft server products, as well as share that infrastructure between them
WAC farm version does not need to be in sync with SharePoint farm
You connect your SharePoint farm to the WAC farm using PowerShell
NewSPWOPIBinding

Analytics
New Replacement for Web Analytics Service
The Analytics Platform replaces the Web Analytics service application
Some of the reasons for that included:
There was no concept of item-to-item recommendations based on user behavior, i.e. people who viewed this also viewed foo
Couldn’t promote search results based on an item’s popularity (as determined by # of times an item was viewed)
It required a very powerful SQL box and significant storage and IO
Lists don’t have explicit view counts
The architecture had problems scaling to large numbers

How the New Platform Improves on Analytics
The new Analytics Processing engine aims to solve these issues:
Find relevant information (improve search relevance) – based on views, click thru, etc.
See what others are looking at (“hot” indicators and usage numbers – i.e. what’s popular based on # of views as well as # of unique users to view)
Understand how much content is being used (i.e. viewed) and how it compares to other documents
See discussion thread usage and find the hot topics
Use this popularity info to populate views through the Content by Search (CBS) WebPart
The model is extensible for 3rd parties to build into the platform

Processing and Storing Analytics Data
Data goes through an analysis and reporting process that is contained within the search service application
Things like views and counts are combined with click-thru and other search metrics and pushed into the reporting database
Some data like view counts are also pushed into the index so it can be included in search results, sorted on (i.e. what’s most viewed), etc.
An analytics processing job examines data for clicks, links, tags, etc., as well as the usage data to create the data points used for reporting

Social Changes
Much more detail on social in the presentation on Social features, but worth highlighting:
User Profile Replication Engine
Profile Sync Changes
My Site Data Store Changes






Profile Sync Performance Improvements
Performance improvement goals are to reduce full import time from 2 weeks down to 60 hours for very large directories (i.e. 200K users, 600K groups)
Recent anecdotal evidence:  300K users, less than 7 hours for full import
Some of those improvements included:
Adding indexes to certain user properties that eliminated full table scans
Importing data from BDC in batches rather than one by one
Removing unused provisioning steps
Cleaning up unused historical data
Move resolution of some objects out of SharePoint and into the sync system

New Profile Synchronization Option
Active Directory Direct Import
Active Directory forest with multiple domains, one connection per domain
Selection of OUs from which to import
Import User and Group objects
Simple text-filters written in LDAP syntax
Full and incremental import
You can switch back between FIM and AD Direct

Changes in Social Data Store
The store for social data now is your personal site now – it’s no longer in the social DB
That means that social feeds will now come out of the content DB for My Sites
That gives you much more power to scale social features than SharePoint 2010
Single Social DB could become an I/O bottleneck in 2010
It also means that My Sites are required for
some social features, including feeds

SharePoint 2013 Farm Considerations
Stretched farms are no longer supported in SharePoint 2013
“Stretched” means different data centers with less than 1ms latency
All servers in the farm must be in the same data center now
For 100% fidelity in 100% of features, all content must reside the same farm
Certain social features will have a very slightly degraded experience unless content databases, personal sites and community sites are all together
Still allows for geo-grouped farms with full fidelity
Specific feature differences will be discussed in social deck

All above content has been picked up from the training material provided by the Microsoft. I will write more details blog about each of the topics. Meanwhile share your comments and wait for the next blog.

Enjoy SharePointing!!!

Sunday, June 3, 2012

PowerShell – Understanding pipeline and extending pipeline to more than one line

When writing PowerShell script one command which goes in a long line reduces the readability of the command, this normally happens when you are taking output object of one cmdlet and passing it to another cmdlet. 

You would like to extend a long line command in multi-line to improve the readability:- 

First let me clarify what does pipeline means in PowerShell, as you know object returned by a cmdlet can be stored in a variable for later use or piped to a subsequent cmdlet as input for the subsequent cmdlet. A pipeline is a channel through which the output of a cmdlet can be passed to following cmdlet, the pipeline is represented by pipe char ‘|’

Here is an example of pipeline: - Output of Get-Service cmdlet which is SPTimerV4 service is piped to the next cmdlet Stop-Service which stops the SpTimerV4 service.


Get-Service SPTimerV4 | Stop-Service


Below are the ways how you can extend the pipeline to more than one line to improve readability.

Use Tick Mark (‘): You can use tick mark to break the line and continue the command in next line, PowerShell assumes that the subsequent line is the continuation of the current line.

Example:-

Get-Service –DisplayName *SharePoint* |
Stop-Service


Use Pipe Symbol (|) as last character of the line: When Pipe symbol is the last character of a line, it indicates that the command is not complete so Windows PowerShell continues the command with the subsequent line

Example:-

Get-Service –DisplayName *SharePoint* |
Stop-Service


Use a left curly brace ({): Curly braces are normally used to enclose the structure such as expression or a procedure. A left curly brace suggests that a structure follows.