SharePoint 2013 New Features

According to recently released documentation, specifically the open specification documentation(http://blogs.msdn.com/b/officeinteroperability/archive/2012/01/30/office-15-technical-preview-open-specification-update.aspx), Microsoft adds several interesting new features to SharePoint Server 15, AKA SharePoint Server 2013.

Discontinued features in SharePoint 2013

Recently the MSDN article is published on discontinued and modified features in SharePoint 2013. This is very important to know as what all are discontinued compared to the previous version for future planning on upgrades or migrations. Below are the main features (according to me) among all the list Microsoft published.

Enterprise Content Management (ECM):

• Barcode: Inserting barcode command is no more available in ribbon. Which means you cannot add the SharePoint generated barcode to Word documents.
• Print labels: Ability to generate, embed a label containing the metadata about office files is no more supported.

I believe the above two features are not so popular and the demand to use these features are less. So, I believe we don’t bother much.

Site Templates:

Document Workspace Template: While you are trying to create a site in SharePoint you are no more see the Document Workspace template. In my view this its not big effect to us.

Meeting Workspace Template: This template also removed from the list of site templates available in SharePoint 2013. I believe this is a bad decision as I am much integrating the meeting workspace with my Outlook client to fix appointments, saving meeting minutes documents and saving the details about the conference codes details etc. in our organization. Not a good idea from Microsoft.

Personalization site template: This is also got removed from list of site templates. I believe no one mind about it.. as no one uses it.

Group work site template: Removed in new version.

Search:

RSS Feed for Search results is no more available. Hurray! I was using this search results data via RSS in some scenarios…

UI:

The Visual Upgrade option is no more available.

BI Related:

• We cannot generate the Visio pivot diagram from SharePoint task list any more.
• Chart web part is no more available. Still you can use the excel services to render charts etc..
• SharePoint KPI and status list are also discontinued..

As we already know most of the discontinued features are less used by any organization. The main reason why they discontinued due to performance related. You can read more details about this topic in office document.

Memory leaks in SharePoint 2013?

I believe yes, there are. As this is the preview version there are possibilities for the memory leaks and other development issues. In the SharePoint 2013 server go to task manager and see what is taking more memory. You should see something like below.



We see the Name of the component which is taking huge memory is "Microsoft Office 2013 component". Yes, this is the reason for memory leaks. When you switched to process view you will find out what is that process. It is noderunner.exe. 


As far as I know this is related to the search service process with new name. Even though our farm is new with very less data the noderunner processes are running and taking huge amount of memory. After good amount of research and read I have found the fix in the technet article here.

Solution:

• We can reduce the performance level of the search service by using the below powershell command.
  view plaincopy to clipboardprint?

  1. Set-SPEnterpriseSearchService -PerformanceLevel Reduced  
• Open the file from the location C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office Servers\15.0\Search\Runtime\1.0\noderunner.exe.config and find the line <noderunnersettings tag. We must set the attribute memoryLimitMegabytes value from 0 to some value which you should like to give. I have given 256, so that it will not grow too much that it should. The tag should look like below.

  <nodeRunnerSettings memoryLimitMegabytes="256" />

Note: This fix is needed only for SharePoint 2013 preview edition as the actual version should fix this issue.

SharePoint Server 2013 capabilities

Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 Preview makes it easy for people to work together. SharePoint Server 2013 Preview enables us to set up web sites to share information with others, manage documents from start to finish, and publish reports to help everyone make better decisions.

SharePoint Server 2013  has the following capabilities:

Sites - Provides a single infrastructure for all your business web sites. Share documents with colleagues, manage projects with partners, and publish information to customers.

Communities - Delivers great collaboration tools—and a single platform to manage them. Make it easy for people to share ideas and work together the way they want.

Composites - Offers tools and components for creating do-it-yourself business solutions. Build no-code solutions to rapidly respond to business needs.

Content - Makes content management easy. Set up compliance measures ”behind the scenes”—with features like document types, retention polices, and automatic content sorting—and then let people work naturally in Microsoft Office.

Insights - Gives everyone access to the information in databases, reports, and business applications. Help people locate the information to make good decisions.

Search - Cuts through the clutter. A unique combination of relevance, refinement, and social cues helps people find the information and contacts they need to get their jobs done.