SharePoint 2013 Team Site Enhancements (First Look)

Today Steve Ballmer unveiled the customer preview of the new Microsoft Office. There really tons of new things to talk about. I start with the:

End User Perspective

Something that we geeks often forget is that SharePoint is a product for end user not for IT-Experts. A little bit of SP history:

• SharePoint 2003 was kind of a prototype.
• With SharePoint 2007 the developers got a professional extension/development model (Features & Solutions).
• With SharePoint 2010 the IT-Pros got the Service Applications
• And finally with SharePoint 2013 it seems the end users can use it ;-)

A first look:

It’s not a big surprise that they are now some Metro tiles on a team site. But there are more important details…

It is now really easy to invite people to a team site. You have only click to “SHARE” and enter the people you would like to invite.

(Under show options you can select a group or permission level. In the beta the default setting is the member group)
And now you can easily “FOLLOW” team sites, documents, persons and tags.
One of the most desired features in SharePoint has been Drag & Drop support. Now we have it:

SP2013 Drag & Drop Demo

(Doesn’t require an ActiveX plugin. I did the demo with Firefox. With IE you need a local Office 2013)
As mentioned before sharing and following a document is as easy as to share the whole site:

You can also share a file with to unauthenticated users in SP Online (nightmare for IT-Pros ;)

Search files in a Document Library.

Notebook

There is now a OneNote Notebook on default Team Site. This is really great to take notes in a very rich way with OneNote Client (Tablets, Audio, Ink…), but you have also as fallback the OneNote WebApp.

Everything is an App

Something that could be a little bit confusing for users is that now everything is an App. Now they don’t add List or Libraries anymore (at least regards naming). Now they add List- and Libraries-Apps.

Site Newsfeed

When you activate a site feature called “Site Feed” you get a Facebook-like Newsfeed on your site. I really like that feature. This has the potential to kill tons of emails. Until now employees (including myself) often use emails for this kind of chatty conversations.

Even this aren’t technical revolutions, I believe SharePoint 2013 will be a major step forward regards end user adoption.
And there is a lot more to discover: Team Mailboxes, Community Sites…