Monthly Archives: September 2014

3 simple steps to create SharePoint 2013 Site Collection

SharePoint Site Collection

It’s a collection of SharePoint sites sharing common features like Content types, Templates, Site columns, permissions, Web Parts etc. In order to understand How SharePoint collection fits to a business scenario? Consider a company (ABC Consulting & Services) having multiple departments (Accounts, Finance, Support, Sales,etc.),  all using SharePoint for different purposes like Team Collaboration, Document sharing, Business Intelligence and others. For better administration, company can create a SharePoint Site collection for each department containing all of its websites. It can be demonstrated with the help of a following structural diagram as below:

Site Vs Site Collection

Creating a Site Collection in SharePoint 2013

Step 1: Open your browser and navigate to Central Administration site Or select “SharePoint 2013 Central Administration” from start menu. Please click “Create site Collections” under Application Management.Create Site Collections

It will navigate to Create Site Collection page. On this page, provide site collection information in simple steps:

  • Select web application.
  • Please provide a logical Title/Name and Description for your site collection.
  • Specify the URL – This URL has 3 parts
    • http://MySPServerName i.e. fixed, for example http://MySPServer.SharePointfordummies.net/
    • “/” or “/sites/ or “/my/personal/” – you can choose one of them from drop down. You can manage these paths at “Define Manage Paths” page.
    • You can enter final part in text box as “MyTeamSite”.

New Site Collection

 

Step 2: Next below on the same page, you need to specify the template for your Site Collection. SharePoint supports a number of templates including Team Site, Business Intelligence, Blog and much more to fulfill different business needs.
Simply choose the experience version as 2013 and “Team Site” template under Collaboration Tab as shown below:Team Site in SharePoint 2013
Step 3: Finally, you need to specify your primary site collection admin here who has to be a specific person or service account. Once you specify all above information, Just click “OK” button on same page and it’s all done.Site Collection Admin

SharePoint will display in progress screen i.e. “Working on it…”.SharePoint 2013 Site Collection

Once it’s complete, your new SharePoint 2013 site collection will be created successfully. SharePoint for dummies simplified the way you create a Site Collection in SharePoint 2013.

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What’s New in SharePoint 2013 for Developers

SharePoint 2013 introduced many interesting features for developers including new development tools as well as enhancements, platform level enhancements, Cloud App Model and off course mobile apps etc. As a developer, one must always be interested especially in new development tools that simplify things, reduces effort and enhances productivity. Previously, we discussed about new and exciting features of SharePoint 2013 for End User.SharePoint 2013 Developer Overview

Here you can find the list of key enhancements for SharePoint 2013 developers:

  • Support for common Web Standards – Programming Model of SharePoint 2013 is based on common web standards including HTML, CSS and JavaScript that makes SharePoint development easy for web developer’s without Microsoft background. Standard web protocols like OData, REST and OAuth are also supported.
  • Platform Enhancements
    • Microsoft introduced RER (Remote Event Receiver) as core platform enhancement in SharePoint 2013 that is easy and straightforward to use.
    • New Client as well as Server APIs.
    • Support for REST (Representational State Transfer) endpoint for web services. So, if we need to access SharePoint data remotely, we can make REST based web requests for all CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) Operations. Please follow for understanding about RESTful services.
    • Client Side Rendering is a new cool feature that allows to render SharePoint elements using JavaScript instead of using server side XSLT.
  • New Development Tools / Development Tools Enhancements
    • Visual Studio 2013
      • ASP.NET MVC Project template for SharePoint Apps.
      • Publishing Manager Tool.
      • Visual Studio Provides RER (Remote Event Receiver) Service by default.
      • Workflow Debugging support for SharePoint online.
      • New SharePoint Phone Application Wizard Template
      • and more..
    • Visual Designer 2013 – Enhanced support for customizing and publishing workflows in SharePoint Designer 2013.
    • “Napa” – a new web based tool for Office 365 development.
    • Updates 2014 – Office development tools for Visual Studio 2013, please follow here for details.
  • SharePoint 2013 Cloud App Model is a model for developing and installing apps having added advantages as:
    • apps are isolated so easier to deploy and maintain.
    • apps are stored on an apps server instead of SharePoint server resulting reduced load on SharePoint Server.
    • apps are ready for cloud.
  • Business Connectivity Services
    • SharePoint 2013 supports OData that provides a way to access data source using a simple URL.
    • Support to subscribe to events from external system.
    • SharePoint 2013 now support to consume external data by creating an App-scoped external Content type.
  • Enterprise Content ManagementSharePoint being primarily an Enterprise Content Management product enhanced many core features in this area as:
    • Managed Metadata
    • e-Discovery
    • Team Folders
  • Search
    • Consolidated Search platform that includes the capabilities of SharePoint 2010 and further enhances it.
    • Rich results framework.
    • Support for KQL (Keyword Query Language) and FQL (Fast Query Language) to build search queries.
  • Social and Collaboration – Social support is key to any application these days. Web 2.0 is considered to be “The Social Web” and SharePoint 2013 has added a lot to social and collaboration features including Communities, Micro-blogging and Interactive feed etc.
  • Mobility Features – Mobile devices get much more support than ever before.
    • In order to target different devices, SharePoint site can be rendered in multiple designs.
    • New Geo-location field type can also be used for mobile application development.
    • We can easily enable push notification service for sending updates to mobile devices.
    • Visual Studio app template.
  • Workflows
    • Just like the new “app” model, Workflow also run in a separate service to SharePoint.
    • Workflow Engine – SharePoint 2013 uses WF 4.0 as compared to SharePoint 2010 that uses WF 3.5 for workflows.
    • Enhanced Workflow Manager Capabilities.
    • Designer and Project Template

Hopefully this SharePoint for dummies post provides developers a good overview of exciting features available for them in this new version and SharePoint developers will enjoy playing around them.

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