SharePoint Implementations

There are a few main considerations for governance and metrics in SharePoint implementations:

• metrics to gauge maturity, success, adoption, compliance and progress in your program;
• mechanisms for managing content across the full lifecycle including compliance with standards for tagging;
• governance processes and policies to control site and content ownership.

Metrics

Metrics will give you measures of success, adoption, compliance and progress. What is measured can be managed. When no objective ways have been put in place to measure how well a program is functioning, it is not possible to correct or improve it. It is essential to have a way of monitoring how things are going so changes can be made to serve the needs of the program.

Maturity

The first metric to consider is overall maturity and capability. Maturity in the SharePoint space can be considered across multiple dimensions, from the level of intentionality and structure of a process to the formal presence and level of sophistication of governing bodies. 

Consider a maturity model in which each dimension is mapped with a set of capabilities and characteristics that indicate a general level of maturity. Based on the overall characteristics of those processes (reflected in the rating for each dimension), the maturity of the organization’s SharePoint implementation can be measured at the start of a program and throughout its life. As processes are installed, the maturity is increased. That snapshot in time is a good indicator of the state of the program and can be used as a general measure of success.

Because SharePoint success is indicated by the ability to locate information (“findability”) and findability is the result of a combination of factors, it is possible to describe those factors in terms of existing practices and processes as well as benchmark the level of functionality or activity (for example, content quality measures, the presence of a process or the measure of the effectiveness of that process). One governance maturity measure regards whether there are any governing bodies or policies in place. Another might be the participation levels in governance meetings.

Use cases and usability

A second important measure of value includes overall usability based on use cases for specific classes of users. Use cases should be part of every content and information program, and there should be a library to access for testing each use case. Use cases are tasks that are part of day-to-day work processes and support specific business outcomes. At the start of the program, assessing the ability of users to complete their job tasks, which requires the ability to locate content, provides a practical baseline score to compare with later interventions.

User satisfaction is a subjective measure of acceptance. Although subjective, if measured in the same way, before an intervention or redesign and then after the intervention. The results will show a comparative improvement or decrease in perceived usability. The perception can be impacted by more than design. Training and socialization can have a large impact on user satisfaction.

Adoption

One simple metric for adoption is the volume of e-mail containing attachments as compared with those containing links. As users post their files on SharePoint and send links within messages rather than e-mailing attachments, they are clearly demonstrating use of the system. Looking at that metric as a baseline and then periodically on a department-by-department basis as well as company-wide provides a valuable information regarding SharePoint adoption.

Other adoption metrics include the number of collaboration spaces or sites that are set up and actively managed, the numbers of documents uploaded or downloaded, the degree of completeness of metadata, the accuracy of tagging, and the number of documents being reviewed based on defined lifecycles.

It is important to have self-paced tutorials regarding your particular environment and to monitor the number of people who have completed this kind of training. Participation in “lunch-and-learns,” webinars or conference calls on the use of the environment are other engagement metrics that can be tracked.

Socialization includes a narrative of success through sharing stories about the value of knowledge contained in knowledgebases, problems being solved and collaboration that leads to new sales or cost savings. Publicizing new functionality along with examples showing how that functionality can be used in day-to-day work processes will help people see the positive aspects of the program and help to overcome inevitable challenges with any new deployment. Those successes need to be communicated through different mechanisms and by emphasizing themes appropriate to the audience and process. An application for executives may not resonate with line-of-business users.

Alignment with business outcomes

A more challenging but also more powerful approach to metrics is to link the SharePoint functionality to a business process that can be impacted and that can be measured. One example is a proposal process that enables salespeople to sell more when they are able to turn proposals around more quickly, allowing more selling time or reduced cost of highly compensated subject matter experts. Employee self-service knowledgebases can be linked to help desk call volume. Those metrics are more challenging because they require the development of a model that predicts the impact of one action on another or at least an understanding that causality is involved, but they also can be a strong indication of success.

Tagging processes

The amount of content that is correctly tagged provides a useful measure of adoption and compliance. How do you know if content is tagged correctly? Taking a representative sample of content and checking whether tagging is aligned with the intent of the content publishing design will detect inconsistencies or errors in tagging. 

The percentage of content that is tagged at all is an indicator. One organization left a default value that did not apply to any content. The first term in the dropdown was "lark". If users left that value in, they were not paying attention and the quality of tagging was impacted. Measuring the percentage tagged with "lark" allowed for an inverse indicator. When the "lark" index declined, the quality increased. The quality of content can also be measured with crowd-sourced feedback. Up-voting or down-voting content can trigger workflows for review or boosting in ranking.

Change triggers

Metrics tell the organization something: whether something is working or not working. But what action is triggered? A metrics program has to lead to action: a course correction to improve performance. The change cycle can be characterized by conducting interaction analysis to measure the pathway through content and how it is used (such as impressions or reading time). 

If users exit after opening a document, that exit could be because they found their answer or because the content was not relevant. It is only by looking at the next interaction (another search, for example, or a long period of reading the document) can it be determined whether the content was high value or whether it did not provide an answer. Based on this analysis, it is possible to identify a remediation step (create missing content or fix a usability issue, etc.).

Search interactions also provide clues for action. When top searches return no content, the wrong content or too much content, the root cause can be addressed with an appropriate action (improve tagging, create content, tune the ranking algorithm or search experience with best bets, auto-complete, thesaurus entries, etc.).

By reviewing and troubleshooting content interaction metrics, patterns may emerge that point to problems with the publishing process or compliance with tagging guidelines.

Content processes and governance policies

SharePoint governance consists of decision-making bodies and decision-making mechanisms for developing and complying with rules and policies around SharePoint installations. This is the glue that holds SharePoint deployments together. Mechanisms for creating a new team sites and collaboration spaces need to go through a process of review to ensure that redundant sites are not created. Abandoned sites need to be retired or archived. Content needs to be owned and reviewed for relevance. If content is not owned and abandoned sites not actively removed, the installation becomes more and more cluttered.

Without clear guidelines for how and where to post content and ways to apply metadata tags, users will tend to post content haphazardly, and eventually libraries will be cluttered with junk. Over time, people will dump content in SharePoint because they are told they need to post it for sharing but no one will know how to find valuable content. Site administrators must understand the rules of deployment and control how users are utilizing SharePoint to prevent sprawl and keep the system from becoming cluttered with poorly organized content.

Among the chief goals of governance is to prevent SharePoint from becoming a dumping ground by segmenting collaboration spaces from content to be reused and enforcing standards for curation and tagging.

Consider that every element of SharePoint has a lifecycle and that this lifecycle has to be managed. Those elements range from design components that are created based on the needs of users and rigorous use cases (including taxonomies, metadata structures, content models, library design, site structures and navigational models), to the sites themselves that are created according to a policy and process and disposed of at the end of their life, to the content within sites that needs to be vetted, edited and approved for broad consumption. All of those are managed through policies, intentional decision-making and compliance mechanisms developed by a governance group.

SharePoint governance needs to be a part of the overall information governance program of the enterprise. It is part of content and data governance with particular nuances based on how the technology functions. In fact, many tools are designed into the core functionality of SharePoint to help with governance operationalization. The overarching principle is to consider the audience and the breadth of audience the content is designed to reach.

One analogy is that of an office structure. The lobby, which has a wide audience, limits what can be displayed. The lobby environment is visible to all, so it needs to be managed rigorously. But walking into a cubicle in the office building will reveal the personality of its inhabitant: personal photos, papers on the desk, individual and idiosyncratic organizing principles. A messy desk perhaps. A shared work area might be someplace between the orderliness of the lobby and the messiness of the individual workspace.

Those gradations are the local, personal and departmental level spans of control analogously managed in SharePoint. Information that has an enterprise span needs to be carefully managed and controlled. In a collaboration space, things can be a little more chaotic. In fact, the one thing to keep in mind is that content has a different value depending on the context and span and will increase in value as it is edited, vetted, tagged and organized for specific audiences and processes.

Segment the high-value content by promoting it from a collaboration space to a shared location and apply the tags that will tell the organization that it is important. Separate the wheat from the chaff. Manage high-value content and differentiate it from interim deliverables and draft work in process. Throw away the junk or take it out of the search results so they are not cluttered with low-value information.

Many people complain that they can’t find their content in SharePoint and they want search to work like Google. The answer is to put the same work into managing and processing content as search engine optimization departments do for web content, and the search engine will return the results that you are looking for.

SharePoint requires an intentional approach to design, deployment, socialization, maintenance and ongoing decision-making. The rules are simple: there is no magic. They need to be applied consistently and intentionally to get the most from the technology.

SharePoint Beyond the Firewall: Put Your Content to Work

SharePoint is undoubtedly one of the most important and widespread enterprise productivity tools, used by an estimated 67% of medium-to-large organizations, according to research firm AIIM. Many companies are heavily invested in SharePoint, and for good reason: it’s a highly adaptable solution that can be effective for content management and file sharing across a range of use cases. But SharePoint does have its limitations.

Where SharePoint struggles is when content needs to be securely shared outside the firewall, and consumed by remote workers, partners, or suppliers. Extending SharePoint for external needs introduces IT challenges, including content protection and security, user governance and support, and initial and on-going infrastructure and license costs.

This creates a challenge for organizations with sizable SharePoint investments and large populations of users. Rather than replacing SharePoint, it’s more practical to build on existing investments to provide secure, external collaboration and document sharing, without adding unnecessary complexity and cost to IT infrastructure, or putting sensitive or regulated content at risk.

According to AIIM, security and control are the top concerns of SharePoint administrators since it is routinely used to manage highly sensitive and regulated content: 51% of users share financial documents, 48% legal and contractual documents, and 36% board of directors and executive communications.

Leverage Your SharePoint Investment for External Document Sharing

As companies start sharing sensitive documents with collaboration partners, they need to maintain tight access control. SharePoint control over document access is not as well defined as many large enterprises might want. Attributes to consider for secure, seamless content sharing that complements your SharePoint investment include:

• Secure, policy-based document-sharing control.
• Agile response, and easy set-up and adoption.
• Low, up-front investment.
• Ability to leverage existing systems without adding new complexity.
• Provisioning and support for a community of external users.
• Cloud-based solutions are now meeting all of these demands to unburden the in-house IT infrastructure, but still allow internal users to continue using the familiar SharePoint-based platform and applications, with little or no change or added overhead.

Maintaining Control Over the Content Lifecycle

Externalizing SharePoint is one thing. Having control over the content once it’s left the firewall is another. For comprehensive control, you’ll want to consider tools with the following:

• Access rights for external partners. Given the large number of potential collaboration partners and the number of documents to share, you’ll need granular and dynamic document administration.
• Encryption. As soon as SharePoint documents pass beyond a firewall, they need to be encrypted and remain encrypted both as they move over the internet and while they are at rest within the external document sharing application. Seamless encryption means hackers can’t access the data within a document at any stage.
• Virus protection. Avoid picking up file-based viruses that could penetrate your network while content is in motion, and shared and accessed from various geolocations and devices.
• Information Rights Management (IRM). IRM services let IT departments provide secure document access to any device—PC, smartphone, tablet—while dynamically managing content rights even after a document has been distributed. Such systems have the ability to let users view without downloading documents, and prevent printing or screen capture. Ideally, IRM should be plug-in free so that it is frictionless to users. Finally, digital watermarking identifies a document as confidential and also embeds in the document the name of the person doing the download. This helps ensure that the user will be extra careful not to lose or leak the document.
• Monitoring and auditing. Know which people are looking at what documents, for how long, and create audit reports from this information. This verifies compliance with data privacy and other relevant regulations, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

These security, compliance, and information governance capabilities should be accessible without requiring additional SharePoint software customization, or introducing a new user interface.

Galaxy Consulting has over 15 years experience in SharePoint implementations and management. Please contact us for a free consultation.

Yammer and SharePoint

Enterprise social network vendor Yammer was a large and fast growing player when Microsoft acquired it in late 2012. Yammer has users in more than 150 countries, and the interface is localized into more than 20 languages.

At its core, Yammer is a micro-blogging service for employees to provide short status updates. Whereas Twitter asks, “What’s happening?” Yammer asks, “What are you working on?”

Over the years, Yammer’s functional services have expanded a bit to include the ability to express praise for co-workers, create polls, share documents and provision smaller discussion groups. In practice, however, some of those supplementary services aren’t as rich or well-integrated into SharePoint as you might find in competing products.

And you can find a lot of competing products: from collaboration suites that offer tightly integrated social networking services to supplemental “social layer” offerings that compete directly with Yammer.

For this reason, it would be good to ask this question: Is Yammer truly the best social layer for your enterprise?

When Microsoft acquired Yammer shortly before releasing SharePoint 2013, the deal sent shock waves through the marketplace. Soon Microsoft started recommending that you hide SharePoint’s native social services in SharePoint and use Yammer instead.

Microsoft now promotes Yammer as a social layer over all your Microsoft systems, especially Office 365. Yammer usage can explode within an enterprise that heretofore offered no micro-blogging services, let alone any enterprise social network. People happily check in and often find new or long-lost colleagues in the first few days and weeks.

Yammer boasts a huge customer community. Customers get access to the quite sizable Yammer Community Network, where licensees share their successes, problems, questions and tips with the community as a whole. A small but growing apps marketplace rounds out the picture of a vibrant ecosystem around Yammer.

Smaller departments use Yammer to stay in touch, but enterprise-wide conversations typically decrease. Usage also drops off when employees struggle to place the service within the regular flow of their daily work. Yammer becomes yet another place you have to go, rather than a service you exploit as part of your regular workflow.

In a mobile environment, Yammer and SharePoint usage entails at least two separate native clients.

Yammer has key application: social questions and answers. When a user starts to type a question, Yammer uses a real-time search to auto-suggest already asked questions. That is useful and helps to eliminate duplication in content.

However, there are no ratings for answers and the original questioner cannot declare an authoritative answer. Search is not really ideal, so as answers build, they become harder to leverage, especially given the scarcity of curation services. Yammer works less for knowledge management and more for really simple, quick responses to simple questions.

Another Yammer key social application: communities of practice. Groups are either public or private. You might also have separate groups in Exchange and SharePoint (via Delve), as well as Communities in SharePoint.

There is single sign-on to Yammer with Office 365.

Larger enterprises find Yammer better suited as a supplement to formal collaboration and social networking efforts rather than as the center. Its simplistic handling of files and limited search facilities limit Yammer’s ability to serve as much more than a simple micro-blogging service.

If you are looking for pure micro-blogging services to communicate across your enterprise and are not looking for ready-to-use applications tailored for specific goals and processes, Yammer offers an obvious alternative to consider, especially for those whose SharePoint plans rest primarily on the Office 365 edition.

Galaxy Consulting has experience with all versions of SharePoint and with Yammer. Please contact us today for a free consultation.

What is New in SharePoint 2016?

Microsoft releases a new version of SharePoint every three years. SharePoint 2016 public Beta version is available. The full version is expected in Spring 2016. Here is what is new in SharePoint 2016 version.

SharePoint 2016’s main goal is to bring the best of Office 365 Cloud technology to on-premises solutions. In this truly effective Hybrid model, organizations will be able to have the best of the Cloud, whilst keeping all their important information and data stored on-premises.

SharePoint Server 2016 has been designed to reduce the emphasis on IT and streamline administrative tasks, so that IT professionals can concentrate on core competencies and mitigate costs. Tasks that may have taken hours to complete in the past have become simple and efficient processes that allow IT to focus less on day-to-day management and more on innovation.

Main Focus

User Experiences

• Mobile experiences
• Personalized insights
• People-centric file storage and collaboration

Infrastructure

• Improved performance and reliability
• Hybrid cloud with global reach
• Support and monitoring tools

Compliance

• New data protection and monitoring tools
• Improved reporting and analytics
• Trusted platform

MinRoles

You can now install just the role that you want on particular SharePoint 2016 servers. This will only install what’s required there, and it will make sure that all servers that belong to each role are compliant. You will also be able to convert servers to run new roles if needed. You can look at the services running on the SharePoint 2016 server and see if they are compliant.

Downtime for Updates

Downtime previously required to update SharePoint servers has been removed.

Mobile and touch

Making decisions faster and keeping in contact are critical capabilities for increasing effectiveness in any organization. The ability for end users to access information while on the go is now a workplace necessity. In addition to a consistent cross-screen experience, SharePoint Server 2016 provides the latest technologies and standards for mobile push and information synchronization. With deep investment in HTML5, SharePoint 2016 provides capabilities that enable device-specific targeting of content. This helps to ensure that users have access to the information they need, regardless of the screen they choose to access it on.

SharePoint 2016 further empowers users by delivering a consistent experience across screens, whether using a browser on the desktop or a mobile device. Through this rich experience, users can easily transition from one client to another without having to sacrifice features.

App Launcher

The App Launcher provides a new navigation experience where all your apps are easily available from the top navigation bar. You can quickly launch your application, browse sites and access your personal files.

Improved Controls

Based on SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, SharePoint 2016 document libraries inherit the improved control surface for working with content, simplifying the user experience for content creation, sharing and management.

Content Sharing

SharePoint 2016 improves the sharing experience by making it more natural for users to share sites and files. You can just click the "Share" button at the top right corner of every page, enter the names of people you want to share with, and press Enter. The people you just shared with will get an email invitation with a link to the site.

SharePoint still uses powerful concepts like permission levels, groups and inheritance to provide this experience. Part of sharing is also understanding who can see something. If you want to find out who already has access to a particular site, you can go to the "Settings" menu in top right corner, click "Shared with", and you will see the names and pictures of people who have access to the site.

Large File Support

SharePoint 2016 provides support for uploading files up to 10GB.

Compliance Tools

Preventing data loss is non-negotiable, and over-exposure to information can have legal and compliance implications. SharePoint 2016 provides a broad array of features and capabilities designed to make certain that sensitive information remains that way, and to ensure that the right people have access to the right information at the right time.

New In-Place Hold Policy and Document Deletion Centers will allow you to manage time-based, organization-wide in-place hold policies to preserve items in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business for a fixed period of time, in addition to managing policies that can delete documents after a specified period of time.

Cloud Hybrid Search

Cloud hybrid search offers users the ability to seamlessly discover relevant information across on-premises and Office 365 content. With the cloud hybrid search solution, you index all your crawled content, including on-premises content, in your search index in Office 365. When users query your search index in Office 365, they get unified search results from both on-premises and Office 365 cloud services with combined search relevancy ranking.

Cloud hybrid search provides some key benefits to customers of both SharePoint 2013 and early adopters of SharePoint 2016 IT preview, such as:

• the ability to reduce your on-premises search footprint;
• the option to crawl in-market and legacy versions of SharePoint, such as 2007, 2010 and 2013, without requiring upgrade of those versions;
• avoiding the cost of sustaining large indexes, as it is hosted in Office 365.

With this new hybrid configuration, this same experience will also allow users to leverage the power of Office Graph to discover relevant information in Delve, regardless of where information is stored. You will not only be able to get back to all the content you need via Delve, but also discover new information in the new Delve profile experiences and even have the ability to organize content in Boards for easy sharing and access.

You will have to use the Office 365 Search for this to work. If SharePoint 2016 On-Premises users query against their On-Premises Search service, it will continue to give them local results only.

However, once available, this will allow users to fully embrace experiences like Delve in Office 365 and more to come in the future.

OneDrive Redirection

With SharePoint 2016, you can redirect your My Sites to your Office 365 subscription’s OneDrive for Business host. In other words, if a user clicks on OneDrive, he will be redirected to his Office 365 My Site and no longer to his On-Premises. Although you can use document libraries in on-premises SharePoint, Microsoft's larger strategy pushes users to use OneDrive to manage files across all devices. This creates the ability to integrate that OneDrive cloud storage into your on-premises SharePoint.

Follow Sites

Now users can click on “Follow” both On-Premises and on their Office 365 and see them all in one place under the “Sites” app in the App Launcher.

Site Folders

The OneDrive for Business area aims to bring users to one place to help them work with their files regardless of where they are. You will also be able to navigate your Sites and their libraries from there.

conceptClassifier for SharePoint

conceptClassifier for SharePoint is the enterprise automatic semantic metadata generation and taxonomy management solution. It is based on an open architecture with all APIs based on XML and Web Services. conceptClassifier for SharePoint supports all versions of SharePoint, SharePoint Online, Office 365, and OneDrive for Business.

Incorporating industry recognized Smart Content Framework™ and intelligent metadata enabled solutions, conceptClassifier for SharePoint provides a complete solution to manage unstructured and semi-structured data regardless of where it resides.

Utilizing unique compound term processing technology, conceptClassifier for SharePoint natively integrates with SharePoint and solves a variety of business challenges through concept identification capabilities.

Key Features

• Tag content across the enterprise with conceptual metadata leveraging valuable legacy data.
• Classify consistent meaningful conceptual metadata to enterprise content, preventing incorrect meta tagging.
• Migrate tagged and classified content intelligently to locations both within and outside of SharePoint.
• Retrieve precise information from across the enterprise when and how it is needed.
• Protect sensitive information from exposure with intelligent tagging.
• Preserve information in accordance with records guidelines by identifying documents of record and eliminating inconsistent end user tagging.

Components

conceptClassifier

Both automated and manual classification is supported to one or more term sets within the Term Store and across content hubs.

conceptTaxonomyManager

This is an advanced enterprise class, easy-to-use taxonomy and term set development and management tool. It integrates natively with the SharePoint Term Store reading and writing in real-time ensuring that the taxonomy/term set definition is maintained in only one place, the SharePoint Term Store. Designed for use by Subject Matter Experts, the Term Store and/or taxonomy is easily developed, tested, and refined.

Term Set Migration tools are also a component of conceptTaxonomyManager that enable term sets to be developed on one server (e.g. on-premise server) and then migrated to another server (e.g. Office 365 server) in an incremental fashion and preserving all GUIDs. This is a key requirement in migration.

conceptSearch Compound Term Processing Engine

Licensed for the sole use of building and refining the taxonomy/term set, the engine provides automatic semantic metadata generation that extracts multi-word terms or concepts along with keywords and acronyms. conceptSearch is an enterprise search engine and is sold as a separate product.

SharePoint Feature Set

Provides SharePoint integration and an additional multi-value pick-list browse taxonomy control enabling users to combine free text and taxonomy browse searching.

Products

These are base platform and optional products that are needed to solve your particular business process challenge and leverage your SharePoint investment.

Search Engine Integration

This functionality is provided via conceptClassifier for SharePoint to integrate with any Microsoft search engine being used within SharePoint. conceptClassifier for SharePoint also supports integration with most non-SharePoint search engines and can perform on the fly classification with search engines calling the classify API.

Search engine support includes SharePoint, the former FAST products, Solr, Google Search Appliance, Autonomy, and IBM Vivisimo. If the FAST Pipeline Stage is required, this is sold as a separate product.

Intelligent Document Classification

This functionality is provided via conceptClassifier for SharePoint, to classify documents based upon concepts and multi-word terms that form a concept. Automatic and/or manual classification is included.

Content managers with the appropriate security can also classify content in real time. Content can be classified not only from within SharePoint but also from diverse repositories including File Shares, Exchange Public Folders, and websites. All content can be classified on the fly and classified to one or more taxonomies.

Taxonomy Management and Term Store Integration

With the Term Store functionality in SharePoint, organizations can develop a metadata model using out-of-the-box SharePoint capabilities. conceptClassifier for SharePoint provides native integration with the term store and the Managed Metadata Service application, where changes in the term store will be automatically available in the taxonomy component, and any changes in the taxonomy component will be immediately available in the term store.

A compelling advantage is the ability to consistently apply semantic metadata to content and auto-classify it to the Term Store metadata model. This solves the challenges of applying the metadata to a large number of documents and eliminates the need for end users to correctly tag content. Utilizing the taxonomy component, the taxonomies can be tested, validated, and managed, which is not a function provided by SharePoint.

Intelligent Migration

Using conceptClassifier for SharePoint, an intelligent approach to migration can be achieved. As content is migrated, it is analyzed for organizationally defined descriptors and vocabularies, which will automatically classify the content to taxonomies, or optionally the SharePoint Term Store, and automatically apply organizationally defined workflows to process the content to the appropriate repository for review and disposition.

Intelligent Records Management

The ability to intelligently identify, tag, and route documents of record to either a staging library and/or a records management solution is a key component to driving and managing an effective information governance strategy. Taxonomy management, automatic declaration of documents of record, auto-classification, and semantic metadata generation are provided via conceptClassifier for SharePoint and conceptTaxonomyWorkflow.

Data Privacy

Fully customizable to identify unique or industry standard descriptors, content is automatically meta-tagged and classified to the appropriate node(s) in the taxonomy based upon the presence of the descriptors, phrases, or keywords from within the content.

Once tagged and classified the content can be managed in accordance with regulatory or government guidelines. The identification of potential information security exposures includes the proactive identification and protection of unknown privacy exposures before they occur, as well as monitoring in real time organizationally defined vocabulary and descriptors in content as it is created or ingested. Taxonomy, classification, and metadata generation are provided via conceptClassifier for SharePoint.

eDiscovery, Litigation Support, and FOIA Requests

Taxonomy, classification, and metadata generation are provided via conceptClassifier for SharePoint. This is highly useful when relevance, identification of related concepts, vocabulary normalization are required to reduce time and improve quality of search results.

Text Analytics

Taxonomy, classification, and metadata generation are provided via the conceptClassifier for SharePoint. A third party business intelligence or reporting tool is required to view the data in the desired format. This is useful to cleanse the data sources before using text analytics to remove content noise, irrelevant content, and identify any unknown privacy exposures or records that were never processed.

Social Networking

Taxonomy, classification, and metadata generation are provided via conceptClassifier for SharePoint. Integration with social networking tools can be accomplished if the tools are available in .NET or via SharePoint functionality. This is useful to provide structure to social networking applications and provide significantly more granularity in relevant information being retrieved.

Business Process Workflow

conceptTaxonomyWorkflow serves as a strategic tool managing migration activities and content type application across multiple SharePoint and non-SharePoint farms and is platform agnostic. This add-on component delivers value specifically in migration, data privacy, and records management, or in any application or business process that requires workflow capabilities.

conceptTaxonomyWorkflow is required to apply action on a document, optionally automatically apply a content type and route to the appropriate repository for disposition.

An additional add-on product, conceptContentTypeUpdater is deployed at the site collection level, can be used by site administrators, and will change the SharePoint content type based on results from pre-defined workflows and is used only in the SharePoint environment.

Where does conceptClassifier for SharePoint fill the gaps?

• SharePoint has no ability to automatically create and store classification metadata.
• SharePoint has no taxonomy management tools to manage, test, and validate taxonomies based on the Term Store.
• SharePoint has no auto-classification capabilities.
• SharePoint has no ability to generate semantic metadata and surface it to search engines to improve search results.
• SharePoint has no ability to automatically tag content with vocabulary or retention codes for records management.
• SharePoint has no ability to automatically update the content type for records management or privacy protection and route to the appropriate repository.
• SharePoint has no ability to provide intelligent migration capabilities based on the semantic metadata within content, identify previously undeclared documents of record, unidentified privacy exposures, or information that should be archived or deleted.
• SharePoint has no ability to provide granular and structured identification of people, content recommendations, and organizational knowledge assets.

Leveraging Your SharePoint Investment

When evaluating a technology purchase and the on-going investment required to deploy, customize, and maintain, the costs can scale quickly. Because conceptClassifier for SharePoint is an enterprise infrastructure component, you can leverage your investment through:

• Native real-time read/write with the term store.
• Ability to implement workflow and automatic content type updating.
• Reduce IT Staff requirements to support diverse applications.
• Reduce costs associated with the purchase of multiple, stand-alone applications
• Deploy once, utilize multiple times.
• Rapidly integrated with any SharePoint or any .Net application.
• Used by Subject Matter Experts, not IT staff, does not require outside resources to manage and maintain.
• Eliminate unproductive and manual end user tagging and the support required by business units and IT.
• Reduce hardware expansion costs due to scalability and performance features.
• Deployable as an on-premise, cloud, or hybrid solution.

Leveraging Your Business Investment

The real value of your investment includes both technology and the demonstrable ROI that can be generated from improving business processes. conceptClassifier for SharePoint has been deployed to solve individual or multiple challenges including:

• Enables concept based searching regardless of search engine.
• Reduces organizational costs associated with data exposures, remediation, litigation, fines and sanctions.
• Eliminates manual metadata tagging and human inconsistencies that prohibit accurate metadata generation.
• Prevents the portability and electronic transmission of secured assets.
• Assists in the migration of content by identifying records as well as content that should have been archived, contains sensitive information, or should be deleted.
• Protects record integrity throughout the individual document lifecycle.
• Creates virtual centralization through the ability to link disparate on-premise and off-premise content repositories.
• Ensures compliance with industry and government mandates enabling rapid implementation to address regulatory changes.

Benefits

The combination of the Smart Content Framework™, conceptClassifier for SharePoint, and the deployment of intelligent metadata enabled solutions result in a comprehensive and complete approach to SharePoint enterprise metadata management. Specific benefits are:

• Eliminate manual tagging.
• Improve enterprise search.
• Facilitate records management.
• Detect and automatically secure unknown privacy exposures.
• Intelligently migrate content.
• Enhance eDiscovery, litigation support, and FOIA requests.
• Enable text analytics.
• Provide structure to Enterprise 2.0.

SharePoint 2013 Improvements

In this post, I will describe few improved features in SharePoint 2013.

Cross-Site Publishing

SharePoint 2013 has cross-site publishing. In the previous versions of SharePoint, it was not possible to easily share content across sites. Using cross-site publishing, users can separate authoring and publishing into different site collections: authored content goes into an indexable "catalog", and you can then use FAST to index and deliver dynamic content on a loosely coupled front end.

This feature is required for services like personalization, localization, metadata-driven topic pages, etc. An example of its use is a product catalog in an e-commerce environment. It can be used more generally for all dynamic content. Note that cross-site publishing is not available in SharePoint Online.

Here is how it works. First, you designate a list or a library as a "catalog". FAST then indexes that content and makes it available to publishing site collections via a new content search web part (CSWP). There are few good features put into creating and customizing CSWP instances, including some browser-based configurations. Run-time queries should execute faster against the FAST index than against a SharePoint database.

Cross-site publishing feature could significantly improve your content reuse capabilities by enabling you to publish to multiple site collections.

Templates

Creating templates still begins with a master page which is an ASP.NET construction that defines the basic page structure such as headers and footers, navigation, logos, search box, etc. In previous versions, master pages tended to contain a lot of parts by default, and branding a SharePoint publishing site was somewhat tricky.

SharePoint 2013 has new Design Manager module, which is essentially a WYSIWYG master page/page layout builder. Design Manager is essentially an ASP.NET and JavaScript code generator. You upload HTML and CSS files that you create and preview offline. After you add more components in the UI (for example, specialized web parts), Design Manager generates the associated master page. Page layouts get converted to SharePoint specific JavaScript that the platform uses to render the dynamic components on the page.

You can generate and propagate a design package to reuse designs across site collections. There are template snippets that enable you to apply layouts within a design package, but they are not reusable across design packages.

This process is more straight forward than the previous versions, but it still would likely involve a developer.

Contributing Content

SharePoint 2013 enables contributors to add more complex, non-web part elements like embedded code and video that does not have to be based on a specific web part. This feature is called "embed code". Note that if you are using cross-site publishing with its search based delivery, widget behavior may be tricky and could require IT support.

With respect to digital asset management, SharePoint has had the ability to store digital assets. However, once you got past uploading a FLV or PNG file, there was scant recourse to leverage it. SharePoint 2013 brings a new video content type, with automatic and manual thumbnailing.

Creating image renditions capability has also improved. It allows you to contribute a full fidelity image to a library, and then render a derivative of that image when served through a web page.

Other added features include better mobile detection/mobile site development and an improved editing experience.

Metadata and Tagging Services

SharePoint 2013 has solid metadata and tagging services with improved and simplified the term store. However, there is still no versioning, version control or workflow for terms.

Big improvement is that using FAST, you can leverage metadata in the delivery environment much more readily than you could in previous versions. You can use metadata-based navigation structures (as opposed to folder hierarchies), and deploy automated, category pages and link lists based on how items are tagged.

Managed Metadata in SharePoint - Part Two

In part one of this post, I described using metadata in SharePoint. In this part two, I will describe metadata management.

Managed metadata makes it easier for Term Store Administrators to maintain and adapt your metadata as business needs evolve. You can update a term set easily. And, new or updated terms automatically become available when you associate a Managed Metadata column with that term set. For example, if you merge multiple terms into one term, content that is tagged with these terms is automatically updated to reflect this change. You can specify multiple synonyms (or labels) for individual terms. If your site is multilingual, you can also specify multilingual labels for individual terms.

Managing metadata

Managing metadata effectively requires careful thought and planning. Think about the kind of information that you want to manage the content of lists and libraries, and think about the way that the information is used in the organization. You can create term sets of metadata terms for lots of different information.

For example, you might have a single content type for a document. Each document can have metadata that identifies many of the relevant facts about it, such as these examples:

• Document purpose - is it a sales proposal? An engineering specification? A Human Resources procedure?
• Document author, and names of people who changed it
• Date of creation, date of approval, date of most recent modification
• Department responsible for any budgetary implications of the document
• Audience

Activities that are involved with managing metadata:

• Planning and configuring
• Managing terms, term sets, and groups
• Specifying properties for metadata

Planning and configuring managed metadata

Your organization may want to do careful planning before you start to use managed metadata. The amount of planning that you must do depends on how formal your taxonomy is. It also depends on how much control that you want to impose on metadata.

If you want to let users help develop your taxonomy, then you can just have users add keywords to items, and then organize these into term sets as necessary.

If your organization wants to use managed term sets to implement formal taxonomies, then it is important to involve key stakeholders in planning and development. After the key stakeholders in the organization agree upon the required term sets, you can use the Term Store Management Tool to import or create your term sets. You can also use the tool to manage the term sets as users start to work with the metadata. If your web application is configured correctly, and you have the appropriate permissions, you can go to the Term Store Management Tool by following these steps:

1. Select Settings and then choose Site Settings.

2. Select Term store management under Site Administration.

Managing terms, term sets, and groups

The Term Store Management Tool provides a tree control that you can use to perform most tasks. Your user role for this tool determines the tasks that you can perform. To work in the Term Store Management Tool, you must be a Farm Administrator or a Term Store Administrator. Or, you can be a designated Group Manager or Contributor for term sets.

To take actions on an item in the hierarchy, follow these steps:

1. Point to the name of the Managed Metadata Service application, group, term set, or term that you want to change, and then click the arrow that appears.

2. Select the actions that you want from the menu.

For example, if you are a Term Store Administrator or a Group Manager you can create, import, or delete term sets in a group. Term set contributors can create new term sets.

Properties for terms and term sets

At each level of the hierarchy, you can configure specific properties for a group, term set, or term by using the properties pane in the Term Store Management Tool. For example, if you are configuring a term set, you can specify information such as Name, Description, Owner, Contact, and Stakeholders in pane available on the General tab. You can also specify whether you want a term set to be open or closed to new submissions from users. Or, you can choose the Intended Use tab, and specify whether the term set should be available for tagging or site navigation.

Managed Metadata in SharePoint - Part One

Using metadata in SharePoint makes it easier to find content items. Metadata can be managed centrally in SharePoint and can be organized in a way that makes sense in your business. When the content across sites in an organization has consistent metadata, it is easier to find business information and data by using search. Search features such as the refinement panel, which displays on the left-hand side of the search results page, enable users to filter search results based on metadata.

SharePoint metadata management supports a range of approaches to metadata, from formal taxonomies to user-driven folksonomies. You can implement formal taxonomies through managed terms and term sets. You can also use enterprise keywords and social tagging, which enable site users to tag content with keywords that they choose. SharePoint enable organizations to combine the advantages of formal, managed taxonomies with the dynamic benefits of social tagging in customized ways.

Metadata navigation enables users to create views of information dynamically, based on specific metadata fields. Then, users can locate libraries by using folders or by using metadata pivots, and refine the results by using additional key filters.

You can choose how much structure and control to use with metadata, and the scope of control and structure. For example:

• You can apply control globally across sites, or make local to specific sites.
• You can configure term sets to be closed or open to user contributions.
• You can choose to use enterprise keywords and social tagging with managed terms, or not.

The managed metadata features in SharePoint enable you to control how users add metadata to content. For example, by using term sets and managed terms, you can control which terms users can add to content, and who can add new terms. You can also limit enterprise keywords to a specific list by configuring the keywords term set as closed.

When the same terms are used consistently across sites, it is easier to build robust processes or solutions that rely on metadata. Additionally, it is easier for site users to apply metadata consistently to their content.

Metadata Terms

A term is a specific word or phrase that you associated with an item on a SharePoint site. A term has a unique ID and it can have many text labels (synonyms). If you work on a multilingual site, the term can have labels in different languages.

There are two types of terms:

Managed terms are terms that are pre-defined. Term Store administrators organize managed terms into a hierarchical term set.

Enterprise keywords are words or phrases that users add to items on a SharePoint site. The collection of enterprise keywords is known as a keywords set. Typically, users can add any word or phrase to an item as a keyword. This means that you can use enterprise keywords for folksonomy-style tagging. Sometimes, Term Store administrators move enterprise keywords into a specific managed term set. When they are part of a managed term set, keywords become available in the context of that term set.

Term Set

A Term Set is a group of related terms. Terms sets can have different scope, depending on where you create the term set.

Local term sets are created within the context of a site collection, and are available for use (and visible) only to users of that site collection. For example, when you create a term set for a metadata column in a list or library, then the term set is local. It is available only in the site collection that contains this list or library. For example, a media library might have a metadata column that shows the kind of media (diagram, photograph, screen shot, video, etc.). The list of permitted terms is relevant only to this library, and available for use in the library.

Global term sets are available for use across all sites that subscribe to a specific Managed Metadata Service application. For example, an organization might create a term set that lists names of business units in the organization, such as Human Resources, Marketing, Information Technology, and so on.

In addition, you can configure a term set as closed or open. In a closed term set, users can't add new terms unless they have appropriate permissions. In an open term set, users can add new terms in a column that is mapped to the term set.

Group

Group is a security term. With respect to managed metadata, a group is a set of term sets that share common security requirements. Only users who have contributor permissions for a specific group can manage term sets that belong to the group or create new term sets within it. Organizations should create groups for term sets that will have unique access or security needs.

Term Store Management Tool

The Term Store Management Tool is the tool that people who manage taxonomies use to create or manage term sets and the terms within them. The Term Store Management tool displays all the global term sets and any local term sets available for the site collection from which you access the Term Store Management Tool.

Managed Metadata column

A Managed Metadata column is a special kind of column that you can add to lists or libraries. It enables site users to select terms from a specific term set. A Managed Metadata column can be mapped to an existing term set, or you can create a local term set specifically for the column.

Enterprise Keywords column

The enterprise Keywords column is a column that you can add to content types, lists, or libraries to enable users to tag items with words or phrases that they choose. By default, it is a multi-value column. When users type a word or phrase into the column, SharePoint presents type-ahead suggestions. Type-ahead suggestions might include items from managed term sets and the Keywords term set. Users can select an existing value, or enter a new term.

Social Tags

Social tags are words or phrases that site users can apply to content to help them categorize information in ways that are meaningful to them. Social tagging is useful because it helps site users to improve the discoverability of information on a site. Users can add social tags to information on a SharePoint site and to URLs outside a SharePoint site.

A social tag contains pointers to three types of information:

• A user identity
• An item URL
• A term

When you add a social tag to an item, you can specify whether you want to make your identity and the item URL private. However, the term part of the social tag is always public, because it is stored in the Term Store.

When you create a social tag, you can choose from a set of existing terms or enter something new. If you select an existing term, your social tag contains a pointer to that term.

If, instead, you enter a new term, SharePoint creates a new keyword for it in the keywords term set. The new social tag points to this term. In in this manner, social tags support folksonomy-based tagging. Additionally, when users update an enterprise Keywords or Managed Metadata column, SharePoint can create social tags automatically. These terms then become visible as tags in newsfeeds, tag clouds, or My Site profiles.

List or library owners can enable or disable metadata publishing by updating the Enterprise Metadata and Keywords Settings for a list or library.

In the second part of this post, I will describe managing SharePoint metadata.

Information Governance With SharePoint

The goals of any enterprise content management (ECM) system are to connect an organization's knowledge workers, streamline its business processes, and manage and store its information.

Microsoft SharePoint has become the leading content management system in today's competitive business landscape as organizations look to foster information transparency and collaboration by providing efficient capture, storage, preservation, management, and delivery of content to end users.

A recent study by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) found that 53% of organizations currently utilize SharePoint for ECM. SharePoint's growth can be attributed to its ease of use, incorporation of social collaboration features, as well as its distributed management approach, allowing for self-service. With the growing trends of social collaboration and enhancements found in the latest release of SharePoint 2013, Microsoft continues to facilitate collaboration among knowledge workers.

As SharePoint continues to evolve, it is essential to have a solution in place that would achieve the vision of efficiency and collaboration without compromising on security and compliance. The growing usage of SharePoint for ECM is not without risk. AIIM also estimated that 60% of organizations utilizing SharePoint for ECM have yet to incorporate it into their existing governance and compliance strategies. It is imperative that organizations establish effective information governance strategies to support secure collaboration.

There are two new nice features in SharePoint 2013 version that would help you with compliance issues. E-discovery center is a SharePoint site that allows to get more control of your data. It allows to identify, hold, search, and export documents needed for e-discovery. "In Place Hold" feature allows to preserve documents and put hold on them while users continue working on them. These features are available for both on-premises and in-cloud solutions.

2013 SharePoint has been integrated with Yammer which provides many social features. This presents new challenge with compliance. Yammer is planning to integrate more security in future releases. But for now, organizations need to create policies and procedures for these social features. Roles like "Community Manager", "Yambassadors", "Group Administrators" might be introduced.

There are 3rd party tools that could be used with SharePoint for compliance and information governance. They are: Metalogix and AvePoint for Governance and Compliance, CipherPoint and Stealth Software for Encryption and Security; ViewDo Labs and Good Data for Yammer analytics and compliance.

In order to most effectively utilize SharePoint for content management, there are several best practices that must be incorporated into information governance strategies as part of an effective risk management lifecycle. The goal of any comprehensive governance strategy is to mitigate risk, whether this entails downtime, compliance violation or data loss. In order to do so, an effective governance plan must be established that includes the following components:

Develop a plan. When developing your plan, it is necessary for organizations to understand the types of content SharePoint contains before establishing governance procedures. It is important to involve the appropriate business owners and gather any regulatory requirements. These requirements will help to drive information governance policies for content security, information architecture and lifecycle management.

When determining the best approach to implement and enforce content management and compliance initiatives, chief privacy officers, chief information security officers, compliance managers, records managers, SharePoint administrators, and company executives will all have to work together to establish the most appropriate processes for their organization as well as an action plan for how to execute these processes. During the planning phase, your organization should perform an assessment, set your organization's goals, and establish appropriate compliance and governance requirements based on the results of the assessment to meet the business objectives.

Implement your governance architecture. Once your organization has developed a good understanding of the various content that will be managed through SharePoint, it is time to implement the governance architecture. In this phase, it is important to plan for technical enforcement, monitoring and training for employees that address areas of risk or noncompliance. It is important to note that while SharePoint is known for its content management functionality, there are specific challenges that come with utilizing the platform as a content management system for which your governance architecture must account: content growth and security management.

In order to implement effective content management, organizations should address and plan to manage growth of sites, files, storage, and the overall volume of content. Organizations without a governance strategy often struggle with proliferation of content with no solutions to manage or dispose of it. This is a huge problem with file servers. Over time, file servers grow to the point where they become a bit like the file cabinet collecting dust in the corner of your office. It is easy to add in a new file, but you will not find it later when you need it. The challenge comes from the planning on how to organize and dispose of out-of-date content.

SharePoint offers the technology to address these challenges, but only if it is enabled as part of your governance plan. Information management policies can be used to automatically delete documents, or you may be using third-party solutions to archive documents, libraries and sites. By default in SharePoint 2013, Shredded Storage is enabled to reduce the overall storage of organizations that are utilizing versioning. Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) can also be enabled in SharePoint or through third-party tools to reduce SharePoint's storage burden on SQL Server.

Tagging and classification plays a key role in information governance. Proper classification can improve content findability. Organizations can utilize SharePoint's extensive document management and classification features, including Content Types and Managed Metadata to tag and classify content. Third-party tools that extend SharePoint's native capabilities can also filter for specified content when applying management policies for storage, deletion, archiving, or preservation. Ultimately, however, the people in your organization will play the biggest role here. As such, your plan should identify who the key data owners are and the areas for which they are responsible. This role is often filled by a "site librarian" or those responsible for risk management in the enterprise.

In order to minimize risk to the organization, it is imperative to ensure information is accessible to the people that should have it, and protected from the people that should not have access. SharePoint has very flexible system of permissions that can accommodate this issue.

Ongoing assessments. In order to ensure that established governance procedures continue to meet your business requirements ongoing assessment is required. Conduct ongoing testing of business solutions, monitoring of system response times, service availability and user activity, as well as assessments to ensure that you have complied with your guidelines and requirements for properly managing the content. The content is essentially your intellectual property, the lifeblood that sustains your organization.

React and revise as necessary. In order to continue to mitigate risk, respond to evolving requirements, and harden security and access controls, we must take information gathered in your ongoing assessments and use that to make more intelligent management decisions. Continue to assess and react and revise as necessary. With each change, continue to validate that your system meets necessary requirements.

The risk has never been higher, especially as more data is created along an growing regulatory compliance mandates requiring organizations to ensure that its content is properly managed.

If you develop a plan, implement a governance architecture that supports that plan, assess the architecture on an ongoing basis, and react and revise as necessary, your organization will have the support and agility necessary to truly use all of the content it possesses to improve business processes, innovation, and competitiveness while lowering total costs.

SharePoint 2013 - Adopt it or Not?

You may have just finished with upgrading your SharePoint to 2010 version and now we are hearing about SharePoint 2013. What is this all about? And are you going to adopt it or not?

Microsoft releases a major version of SharePoint every three years. SharePoint 2013 is a significant release with many new great features. However, you may find it hard to justify moving on to 2013 release in the near future, unless you can find a business justification for spending the time and money it will take to make the transition.

I am going to highlight new features of SharePoint 2013 to help you with this decision.

Reuse Content Across Multiple Sites

One of the pain points experienced in previous versions of SharePoint was around the fact that content that was created within one site collection could not easily be reused in a separate site collection. Since many organizations required multiple site collections, this limitation created a few cases where duplicate content was required.

With 2013, the concept of Cross-Site publishing has been introduced. When using this feature you can store and manage content in one location and then display the content in other site collections. Using this approach you can display the data in as many places that are needed, while still only managing and maintaining one single point of truth.

Navigation and User Friendly Links

There are new navigation features and the ability to base a navigation structure of an existing term set. This allows organizations to centrally manage their content and to provide meaningful navigation structures within the multiple site collections. You can also create friendlier names when linking to pages and content within SharePoint.

In previous versions of SharePoint you were required to have longer URLs that contained references to the specific location you were trying to access. Within SharePoint 2013 you can now configure the URL so that it can be more easily referenced.

An example of this would be the following two URLs:

Previous SharePoint Versions:

http://www.contoso.com/Pages/Computers.aspx#/ID=453&Source=http%3A%2F1010101

SharePoint 2013 Friendly URL: http://www.contoso.com/Computers/model101

You can see that by removing the required URL parameters for ID and Source you are able to create friendly, memorable URLs for your sites and pages.

Changing Web Parts

There is a need to be able to "gather" and "present" data to users. In previous versions of SharePoint this was done through either the Content Query Web Part or a custom Roll Up solution.

Because of limitations in performance, the Content Query Web Part was restricted in how it could be utilized across organizations. If you had many users who needed to roll up a large amount of content it is likely that you could experience performance issues in using the web part.

SharePoint 2013 adds a new web part that will allow you to provide the same functionality as the Content Query Web Part, but is instead based on the search functionality available within SharePoint. Because this web part is based on search, many of the existing limitations have been reduced.

Design Changes

In SharePoint 2013 there are many new techniques that can be used to aide in the branding and customization of your sites. One of the biggest impacts is the ability to create a SharePoint custom design in any design tool of choice. This means your designers are not limited to only working within SharePoint Designer to build their custom design.

Social Features

The list of new features in Social Enterprise include: micro blogs, activity feeds, community sites, Following, Likes and Reputations.

Community templates have been designed in a way that allows anyone within the organization to join a community and to begin discussions on things relevant to the community. These communities are a great way to share information in a collaborative way, at the same time making intellectual property with the organization available to a larger audience.

In addition to making it easier for people to come together, SharePoint community templates also provide some features that allow for them to be easily managed, including built-in moderation features. This means that you can still maintain a level of control within the discussions that are had over certain sensitive topics.

With the newest microblogging features, users will be able to start threads that include tags of other people and links to relevant content.

Following adds the ability to "follow" people, sites, documents and topics, with subsequent actions of the followed entity appearing in the user's activity stream. By following other users within the organization users will be able to see items within their feeds and follow things that are relevant to them.

My Site

In SharePoint 2013 saving documents into My Sites is going to get a lot easier. There is a single document library, not two as in SharePoint 2010, and the permissions have been simplified, making it easier to share documents with colleagues. My Site document library can be synced with a local drive to enable offline access so you can access your documents even when the server is unavailable.

Mobility

It is easier to access SharePoint content from a mobile device in the 2013 version. Adding to the existing classic view, SharePoint 2013 offers two new views for mobile devices, including a contemporary view for optimized mobile browser experience and a full-screen view which enables the user to have a full desktop view of a SharePoint site on a smartphone device.

Site Permissions

SharePoint 2013 includes new, simplified sharing based model for site permissions management.

Themes

SharePoint 2013 will bring richer themes and even the ability to add a background image to the page.

Metro

Microsoft is using the new term "Metro" to describe its new, radical UI design of SharePoint. It is supposed to be easier to use. Microsoft is planning to use Metro as the default UI for SharePoint as well as user tools like Office, Windows, Xbox and mobile devices.