Following Feature in SharePoint 2013

SharePoint 2013's Following Feature keeps you connected to the things that you care about the most.

There are four things that you can follow: People, Documents, Sites, and #Tags.

The vision for this release was that when you follow any of these four items, three things would happen:

1. You'd have a rich, aggregated view where you could easily access the set of followed things and see additional information about those things.
2. You'd promote serendipitous discovery of new people and content through the posting of a "User is now following Item" post to all of your followers (if your privacy is set accordingly).
3. You'd see future updates about what you followed in the Following view of your Newsfeed.

Read more from source: http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog/Pages/BlogPost.aspx?pID=1060

Don’t miss the Virtual Launch Event for the New Office 365 for Business

Join us at our Virtual Launch Event on February 27th as we celebrate the availability of a major new release coming to Office 365 for businesses.  If you are exploring cloud offerings, you do not want to miss this event. You’ll hear from Kurt DelBene, President of the Microsoft Office Division, about Microsoft’s vision for productivity, enterprise social and the cloud. We’ll demo new features in enterprise social and show how we’ve transformed the full Office experience you know into an always up-to-date service. Finally, you’ll hear real world stories from our customers about their move to the cloud. We’ll also answer questions via live chat as we go.

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/blog/Pages/BlogPost.aspx?pID=1061

Continuous Crawl in SharePoint 2013

The "Continuous Crawl" is a type of crawl that aims to maintain the index as current as possible. Its operation is simple: once activated, it will launch the crawl at regular intervals. The major difference with incremental crawl is that the crawl can run in parallel, and does not expect that the crawl is completed prior to launch.

Important Points:

• "Continuous Crawl" is only available for sources of content type "SharePoint Sites"
• By default, a new crawl is run every 15 minutes, but the SharePoint administrator can change this interval using the PowerShell cmdlet Set-SPEnterpriseSearchCrawlContentSource,
• Once started, a "Continuous Crawl" can’t be paused or stopped, you can just disable it.

Assume a crawl starts and will take at least 50 minutes,

• After 10 minutes of crawling an item already crawled is hereby amended, and requires a new crawl.
• Crawl "BETA" is launched,
• The crawl "BETA" starts in (15-10) minutes,
• Therefore this item will not need to wait 5 minutes (instead of 50 minutes) to be integrated into the index.

Read more at the below link:
Source: Gokan Ozcifci; https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/sites/itpro/Pages/What-is-Continuous-Crawl-in-SharePoint-2013.aspx

Office 2013 Retail to be Licensed per PC! (This is new)

With the launch of Office 2013 Microsoft has seen fit to upgrade the terms of the license agreement, and it’s not in favor of the end user. It seems installing a copy of the latest version of Microsoft’s Office suite of apps ties it to a single machine. For life.

What does that mean in real terms? It means if your machine dies or you upgrade to a new computer you cannot take a copy of Office 2013 with you to new hardware. You will need to purchase another copy, which again will be tied to the machine it is installed upon forever.


http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/retail-copies-of-office-2013-are-tied-to-a-single-computer-forever-20130213

*UPDATE*

Office 2013 and Office 365 installations and transferability

Here's how our Office 2010 and Office 2013 licenses compare:  

*An exception is granted when the software is on a PC that is replaced under warranty.

It is important to note that Office 2013 suites have consistent rights and restrictions regarding transferability as the equivalent Office 2010 PKC, which was chosen by a majority of Office 2010 customers worldwide.

We think this new lineup offers unmatched choice and value for students, families and everyone in between.

• For those looking to use Office on multiple devices - Office 365 Home Premium works across up to 5 devices (Windows tablets, PCs or Macs) and can be activated and deactivated across devices.
• For those who only require Office on one device - The Office 2013 software is licensed to one computer for the life of that computer and is non-transferable (consistent with the rights and restrictions of Office 2010 PKC). In the event that a customer buys the Office 2013 software and installs it on a PC that fails under warranty, the customer can contact support to receive an exemption to activate the Office 2013 software on the replacement PC.
• For college and university students - Office 365 University works across 2 devices (Windows tablets, PCs or Macs) and can be activated and deactivated across devices.

http://blogs.office.com/b/office-news/archive/2013/02/19/office-2013-and-office-365-installations-and-transferability.aspx

How to set up a product-centric website in SharePoint 2013

Use SharePoint 2013 to set up a website that is based on product catalog data. We willl show you how to use the cross-site publishing feature, and how you can use SharePoint search features to influence how product data is displayed to visitors on a site.

http://blogs.technet.com/b/tothesharepoint/archive/2013/02/14/how-to-set-up-a-product-centric-web-site-in-sharepoint-2013.aspx

Get the new Office Visio stencil with the cool icons

For SharePoint, these new icons are used in the following:

• Individual topics, such as Create the SharePoint 2013 farm for a database attach upgrade
• Technical diagrams, such as Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 architecture and Business Connectivity Services Hybrid Flow in SharePoint 2013
• White papers, such as Configure a two-way hybrid Search environment with SharePoint Server 2013 and Office 365
• Test lab guides, such as Test Lab Guide: Configure SharePoint Server 2013 in a Three-Tier Farm
• Conceptual videos, such as the Upgrade overview videos for SharePoint 2013

http://blogs.technet.com/b/tothesharepoint/archive/2013/02/13/get-the-new-office-visio-stencil-with-the-cool-icons.aspx

Use the SharePoint Newsfeed App on a Windows Phone

SharePoint Newsfeed App available for Windows Phone

http://blogs.technet.com/b/tothesharepoint/archive/2013/02/07/sharepoint-and-mobile.aspx

Upgrade overview videos for SharePoint 2013

View this series of short overview videos to understand how upgrade works for SharePoint 2013

http://technet.microsoft.com/library/jj938165

SharePoint 2010 Storage Metrics (Storman.aspx) Incorrect

I recently had a customer ask why the site collection owner did not receive a notification that his site collection was near its quota. Naturally, I asked what made him believe he was near his quota and he mentioned he noticed his site collection is consuming 5554 MB and is ~108% over it's quota (5120 MB) by viewing the Storage Metrics for his site collection.

I verified that his site collection was not 5554 MB as stated in Storage Metrics by:

• Looking at the Site Collection Quota page in CA, the site collection quota is set to 5120 MB and the Current storage used is 4002 MB – quite different than what is reported via storman.aspx
• The Site Collection Web Analytics report for the site collection (https://<sitecollection/_layouts/WebAnalytics/Report.aspx?t=StorageTrendsReport&l=sc) shows 4001.95 MB storage used.
• The following PowerShell cmds calculate 4002 MB of storage used:

$site = Get-SPSite https://<sitecollection>
$site.Usage.Storage / 1mb;
$site.Dispose();

I stopped/started the Storage Metrics Processing timer job, ran PowerShell script to recalculate storage used, both to no avail:

$URL = "https://<sitecollection>"
$Site = Get-SPSite -identity $URL
$Site.RecalculateStorageUsed()

I then performed a backup / restore of the site collection and then an export/import... and voila! The import function recalculates the StorageMetrics table and *temporarily* resolves this issue. However, this issue will continue to reappear (see explanation below) until the solution is deployed. So... what's the actual problem and solution?

It appears that when a user checks out a document in a document library SharePoint is updating TotalSize field in StorageMetrics table to add the document size from the existing value when a document is checked- out and you would think they would deduct the file size from the TotalSize field in the StorageMetrics Table, once it is checked back in. Now either SharePoint is not deducting the document size upon check-in, or there is no function to account for documents which never get checked back in. Regardless, if you delete all content from a folder within a library with check-in/out enabled, then run the Storage Metrics Processing Job, check /_layouts/Storman.aspx you will see that the folders still hold a value of the former content, although that content is deleted.

The problem with exporting/importing sites is that you loose some functionaility such as workflow associations, etc. However, this discovery did lead me to the solution, which is found in the August 2012 CU. See the following article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2687339