In
this blog let’s get an overview of the architectural changes of SharePoint
2013. This post details the infrastructure improvements and service
applications that are new in SharePoint 2013, as well as those that are
deprecated or changed and the new application model. There are a number of
platform-level improvements and capabilities of which you can take advantage,
such as the following:
Request management
SharePoint
can now recognize the origin of incoming requests; for example, from external
search engines, from different types of browsers, or specific applications. It
can then reduce the priority of certain requests and raise the priority of
others, depending on different criteria. It can look at the packet headers, the
requester’s IP address, or subnet and decide to block that request, redirect it
to another server, SharePoint farm, or web application.
Workflow framework
SharePoint
2013 introduces a new, highly scalable workflow framework that is implemented
by using the Workflow Manager, originally known as Windows Azure Workflow
(WAW). In SharePoint 2013, the Workflow Manager farm is not installed by
default. Therefore, a default installation of SharePoint 2013 can only use the
same workflows that can be used in SharePoint 2010. When the Workflow Manager
is installed, you can run both SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 workflows.
In
SharePoint 2010, workflows run on the servers on which SharePoint is installed;
that is, they run within the SharePoint farm. If your organization is a heavy
user of workflows, this can have a detrimental effect on the performance of
your farm because it is difficult to scale and distribute the SharePoint
workflow components. SharePoint 2013 uses the same mechanism of managing
SharePoint 2010 workflows as SharePoint 2010 and therefore suffers from the
same limitations.
A
Workflow Manager farm can be installed on your SharePoint servers or on any
servers, however, it is not good practice to install it on domain controllers.
With SharePoint 2013, if you are a heavy user of workflows, you should consider
creating a Workflow Manager farm separate from your SharePoint farm. Thus, you
should install Workflow Manager on one or more servers that do not have
SharePoint installed. However, be aware that SharePoint 2010 workflows will
still run on SharePoint 2013 servers in the legacy SharePoint workflow engine,
also known as the SharePoint 2010
workflow
host. Only SharePoint 2013 workflows can make use of the Workflow Manager farm.
Microsoft
has redesigned the SharePoint UX to be clean and simple. If you use a browser
that supports HTML5, you can now drag files to upload them. You can also
perform bulk metadata edits, quickly access document previews and context, and
take advantage of single-click tracking of documents so that you can monitor
your most important work. Microsoft has also made infrastructure changes that
affect the speed at which content pages are rendered in the browser.
Cache service improvements
SharePoint
2013 uses a distributed caching mechanism that spans all of the SharePoint
servers in the farm. Specific SharePoint components are programmed to take
advantage of distributed cache; for example, social feeds, search, and
authentication. Information related to these components is not cached on a per-server
basis; the distributed cache mechanism is able to synchronize the data so that
the same information is available across every web server. When content is
saved in distributed cache, no round trip to the content database is needed for
the second request.
Support for mobile devices
SharePoint
2013 provides improvements in rendering content and location-aware lists that
can aid in mobile application development. Lists are made to be location-aware
by using a new geo-location field. This field cannot be added when you create a
list by using the browser; it must be inserted programmatically, and a new .msi
package, SQLSysClrTypes.msi, must be installed on every SharePoint
server that responds to web requests.
Supported web browsers
SharePoint
2013 supports several commonly used web browsers. Internet Explorer 8, Internet
Explorer 9, and Internet Explorer 10 (when in desktop mode) have full support
for all collaboration actions in SharePoint 2013. Versions of Google Chrome,
Apple Safari, and Mozilla Firefox (and 64-bit versions of Internet Explorer)
offer limited support. Internet Explorer 6 and Internet Explorer 7 are
explicitly not supported.
New service applications
SharePoint
2013 contains three new service applications:
· Machine
Translation
· Work
Management
· App
Management
Of
these three new service applications, only the Machine Translation service
application can be used as a cross-farm service application; that is, it can be
configured to be accessible from multiple SharePoint farms within your
organization. The other two can only be used within a single farm.
The Machine Translation service application
This
connects to the Bing cloud-based translation service by which users can employ
machine translation on sites, files pages, and term sets located in the Managed
Metadata Service (MMS). MTS can be configured by using its management page as
shown below:
The Work Management service application
The
Work Management service application (WMSA) provides functionality to aggregate
tasks. With it, users can view and track their to-do’s and tasks from one
central location: their My Site. Tasks are aggregated from a number of
Microsoft products, including Microsoft Exchange 2013, Microsoft Project Server
2013, and SharePoint 2013.
The
tasks are cached in the user’s My Site with a two-way synchronization so that
they can either be updated in the user’s My Site or updated in the product
where they were originated. Information concerning tasks held in Exchange 2013
is obtained by using the Work Management Synchronize with Exchange timer job,
which runs every 5 minutes.
The
WMSA is based on Provider model so that other systems can be integrated in the
future.
The
Central Administration website does not provide any management pages for this
service application.
Any
integration with this service must be done programmatically.
App Management Service
The
App Management Service is used to access SharePoint Apps, which is a new
application architecture for SharePoint 2013.
Deprecated/changed service applications
In
this section let us discuss service applications that have changed or been
deprecated.
Search Service Application
SSA
has been completely re-engineered and is built on functionality from SharePoint
Server 2010 enterprise search and FAST Search for SharePoint 2010. Now FAST
Search does not exist as a stand-alone project.
SharePoint
2013 search uses a single object model for all SharePoint 2013 products. This
means that SharePoint Foundation 2013 and the Standard or Enterprise editions
of SharePoint Server 2013 all have the same underlying search object model.
SharePoint
Search 2013 is not only used to help you locate content or people, it is also
used in other components of SharePoint 2013, including eDiscovery, navigation,
topic pages, and Internet-facing sites. Therefore, it should be one of the
first service applications to be created.
Managed Metadata Service Application
MMS
has become more robust. Tags can now have properties, and you can use these
properties for site-based navigation. You can control how users create tags,
and you can now “pin” terms to prevent accidental duplication of tags. MMS also
includes improvements and additional capabilities in a multilingual
environment, without the need to install language packs.
Office Web Apps
Office
Web Apps is no longer a service application. It is now packaged as a separate
product and installed on its own set of servers (farm). This way, you can
scale, manage, and maintain Office Web Apps as a separate entity without
affecting the installation of the SharePoint farm.
There
is no licensing required for viewing documents in SharePoint 2013. But, if you
want to create or modify documents by using Office Web Apps in SharePoint 2013,
licenses will need to be purchased.
Office
Web Apps needs to be installed on either Windows Server 2008 R2 or Server 2012.
It does not need access to an SQL Server, because it does not create any
databases. Office Web Apps uses a shared XML configuration file called Farm-Settings.xml
for the farm, and then each server in the farm has its own Machine_Name.xml
file. You cannot install Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, Microsoft
Lync,
SQL, or any version of the desktop Office programs on the same servers on which
Office Web Apps is installed.
Web analytics
This
is no longer a separate service application; it is now part of SharePoint’s
search engine. Now, search provides social analytics that also provides
information on what users are doing. You can find the analytic information for
a site in an Excel file named usage.xlsx. This file can be accessed, on
the site settings page, in the Site Administration section, under Popularity
Trends.
SharePoint
2013 does not support the Web Analytics Web Part. When a site is upgraded to
SharePoint 2013, any pages that include the Web Analytics Web Part will render
a message that informs the user that the Web Part is no longer supported.
Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Subscription
Settings Service
This
service provides multitenant functionality or if you plan to use SharePoint
Apps or host-named site collections, you will need to create this service
application.
It
still tracks subscription IDs and settings for service applications that are
deployed in partitioned mode. All service apps in SharePoint 2013 can be
partitioned. However, it still can only be deployed by using Windows
PowerShell.
The User Profile service application
Users
had difficulties with the User Profile service application (UPSA) in SharePoint
Server
2010. Following improvements have been done to resolve these problems:
· Performance
has been optimized.
· Compatibility
with Common Directory Service configurations, including Forefront Identity
Manager (FIM) and generic Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP)
providers.
· Ability
to monitor profile synchronization performance and stability.
· The
User Profile Replication Engine (UPRE) was a separate download in SharePoint
2010. This is now part of SharePoint Server 2013. Using UPRE, you can replicate
user profile information and some social information between multiple farms.
Business Connectivity Service
Improvements
to the Business Connectivity Service (BCS) in SharePoint 2013 include the
following:
· An
additional connection protocol, Open Data (OData), has been included. This is
an industry standard web protocol that is used to query and update data. In
SharePoint 2013, you can now connect to an external data source by using OData.
· Developers
can create event receivers in SharePoint 2013 that are triggered when data in
the external system has changed, as long as the external system provides a
subscription and notifications interface. The application or user needs to
subscribe to the external system for this to work.
· Support
for SharePoint Apps has been added. Business Data Connectivity (BDC)
information can be included within a SharePoint App. The BDC runtime then
creates an External Content Type (ECT) that is scoped at the SharePoint App
level. In SharePoint 2010, ECTs could only be scoped at the service-application
level.
· SharePoint
2013 provides an event listener. This makes it possible for SharePoint users
and custom code to receive notifications of events that occur in the external
system.
· External
list performance improvements and the ability to export an external list to an
Excel spreadsheet.
Access
There
are now two service applications, as described here:
· Access
Services 2010 This
represents the Access service application on SharePoint 2010, by which the
tables in Microsoft Access database are stored as SharePoint lists on the site
that was built from the Access web database site definition.
· Access
Services has been completely rebuilt
When Access 2013 databases are published to SharePoint 2013, an Access web app
site is created and data is now stored in a full-fledged SQL Server database,
which is automatically generated in the SQL Server 2012 installation that was
selected by a SharePoint administrator. SharePoint 2013 Access web app will not
have the same limitations that SharePoint 2010 Access web databases had in
terms of numbers of fields and sizes of tables.
· Advanced
users who are familiar with SQL Server will be able to directly connect to this
database for advanced reporting and analysis with familiar tools such as Excel,
Microsoft Power View, and SAP Crystal Reports. Access web app site now has far
more capabilities for rich forms and reports than were provided in SharePoint
2010.
SharePoint development changes
Everything
within SharePoint is now called an app—custom code is an app, a document
library is an app, announcements list is an app, and access databases that you
host within SharePoint are apps.
Developers
now have the option of recomposing anything created in SharePoint 2010 as apps
that can run on a different server or in the cloud, or can run on SharePoint
2013 servers.
The
trend across the Internet with regard to services such as Facebook or LinkedIn
is that when people add apps to those services, they are not adding code to the
Facebook or LinkedIn servers. Apps are registered and published on those
services. The app is run on other servers in the cloud, but they can integrate
deeply with Facebook or LinkedIn.
You
can publish your SharePoint 2013 or Office 2013 apps uniformly whether
your
SharePoint installation is on-premises or in the cloud. SharePoint 2013 has
support for the online SharePoint store, where you can use publically available
apps which you might have to purchase or might be free. Alternatively, you can
have an internal market place or you could use both the public store and an
internal market place.
While
developing a new solution, choices will be between farm solutions and
SharePoint Apps. Sandboxed solutions will still work in SharePoint 2013;
however, there are no improvements that Microsoft has made to them, other than
they are tested for backward compatibility
SharePoint Apps management
Using
or developing SharePoint Apps when SharePoint is hosted in the cloud is
slightly easier than when using or creating them for an on-premises installation
of SharePoint 2013. Microsoft has provided “Napa” Office 365 development tools
with which developers can build apps for Office and/or SharePoint by using a
browser window, with no need to install any other tool such as Microsoft Visual
Studio. Before users can add a SharePoint App to their site and use it,
SharePoint farm administration needs to complete a number of tasks to support
SharePoint Apps in an on-premises installation of SharePoint 2013.
When
you add a SharePoint App, a SharePoint App permission request is displayed,
which you need to accept to use the SharePoint App. SharePoint Apps that have
been added to a site from the Microsoft Online Marketplace then appear on the Your
Apps page, in the Apps You Can Add section, on any site in the
SharePoint farm. They can also be seen on the Site Contents page.
Database improvements
Two
areas in which major improvements have taken place in SharePoint 2013 are the
following:
· Taking
advantage of Microsoft SQL Server functionality.
· Using
shredded storage reduces the size of content databases when storing file
versions and optimizes network traffic by reducing the need to transfer the
entire document at one time.
SQL Server-related improvements
SharePoint
2013 can be used with either the 64-bit edition of Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2
SP1 or Microsoft SQL Server 2012. SQL Server 2012 is Microsoft’s latest
cloud-ready information platform. It extends the functionality found in
Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2.
SharePoint
2013 database improvements include the following:
· All
databases conform to Microsoft SQL Azure compliance criteria.
· Redundant
and unused tables are removed as well as indices to track links.
· The
design reduces Input/Output (IO) operations while browsing document libraries.
· In
SharePoint 2010, when a list contains more columns than can fit in a row in the
content database, multiple rows are used. Such a list is known as a wide list.
The occurrence of these lists is reduced in SharePoint 2013, which uses features
such as sparse columns.
Shredded storage
This
enhancement reduces the amount of data that is saved within the SQL Server
content databases and reduces the amount of network traffic between the
SharePoint web servers and the SQL servers. If a user downloaded a 200-KB
Microsoft Word document from a SharePoint 2010 document library and then
changed just one character in a sentence, the single change between the two
files is not saved; instead, two 200-KB files are saved in the content
database. In SharePoint 2013, only the changes made while editing a file are
stored in the content database. This is known as shredded storage.
As
a result, user can open a previously cached document, even if the SharePoint
server is offline or not available. When a user saves a document to SharePoint,
the document is uploaded to the server in the background; thus it seems as if
the save happens immediately and control of the application is returned to the
user nearly instantaneously, providing a great UX. It is not limited to
Office-formatted files; it will work on any file type, such as PDFs. The SQL
Server is able to manage the changes because the document is now not saved as
one blob. Instead, it’s saved as multiple blobs.
Thus
we see that Microsoft has channeled its efforts in making SharePoint 2013 a
self-service product, heavily encouraging on no-code solutions, using browser
and office applications for business needs..
Enjoy
SharePointing!
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