AADHAAR : Process to update or correct data

The detailed process to update or correct any data such as Name/Address/Gender/Mobile Number etc. can be found here-
https://ssup.uidai.gov.in/ssup-home

Below is the list of valid documents required for data update-
https://ssup.uidai.gov.in/web/guest/document-list

Below is the link to update your data-
https://ssup.uidai.gov.in/web/guest/update

GMAT : 30 Day Plan to score 650

I will be writing my GMAT by the end of August and I target to achieve a score of 650 with 49 in Quant and 30 in Verbal . The plan will contain following action points:

Verbal is all about retention

• In Verbal, retention of already mastered concepts is much more important than mastering any new concept since revising all mastered concepts from start to end takes very long time. So, make condensed notes to revise SC(less than 3 hours), CR(less than 2 hours) and RC(less than 1 hour)
• For CR, master pen-paper approach by redoing problems from OG15 and VR15  and maintaining less than 2 minutes per problems for 90% problems
• For SC, 90% of problems from OG15, VR15 and e-GMAT course must be solvable in less than 2 minutes and reason for all incorrect choices must also be identified within this time 

Quant is all about practice

• For PS, I must understand and come up with final approach to solve 90% of problems from OG15 and QR15 in less than 2 minutes.
• For DS, I must narrow down answer choice to just one for 90% of problems from OG15 and QR15 in less than 3 minutes.

Full-Length Exam to optimize intuitive mechanism

• In real GMAT, there is a trade-off between accuracy and time taken. I must take full-length exam on each weekend to optimize this trade-off metric, to develop an intuitive assessment mechanism which guides on when to switch to next question and to develop skills to accelerate problem solving in situations of time crunch

Hopefully, all the above action items will be completed religiously.

Preparation before GMAT preparation

Before real preparation for GMAT starts there are some important details to collect-

1. Take multiple assessment tests
2. Get a feel of GMAT like how many sections, areas of improvement, scoring sections and time constraints before taking a preparation plan
3. Normal Hours of study per week
4. Preparation plan including holiday plan
5. What all colleges to apply
6. Which coaching to join

IIBA Endorsed Education Providers(EEPs) in Bangalore

Below given are the links of  websites for IIBA EEPs located in Bangalore -

http://adaptiveprocesses.com/index.html
http://www.bavaluebase.com/
http://www.etag.in/
http://www.knowledgehut.com/
http://www.koenig-solutions.com/
http://www.simplilearn.com/
http://www.vellicate-tech.com/
http://www.winprotech.com/

Architectural Changes in SharePoint 2013

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.

UX improvements

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!

 

SharePoint 2013 : What's new and what's changed

In this blog article we will look at the new capabilities of SharePoint 2013; explore what’s new and what’s changed.
Cloud computing is definitely a theme of SharePoint 2013 and will continue to be going forward.
The core architecture of SharePoint 2013 has remained more or less the same as that of SharePoint 2010. However, SharePoint 2013 includes a number of performance improvements at the architectural level such as:

• Shredded storage, whereby versions of the same file are saved as deltas of the original file;
• SharePoint farm-level cross-server caching, whereby the same information is synchronized across every web server and
• A new Workflow Framework that can be hosted on servers on which SharePoint 2013 is not installed.

SharePoint 2013 includes three new service applications:

• Machine Translation,
• Work Management and
• App Management

It also features a number of changed service applications—in particular a unified search service application that has been developed from the ground up, which is the combination of SharePoint Server 2010 enterprise search and Fast Search for SharePoint 2010. This service application is now so crucial to a SharePoint farm that it should be the first service application you should create.
The functionality of two service applications has been redesigned to such an extent that they do not exist as entities: The Web Analytics functionality is now incorporated into search, and Office Web Apps is now a separate product that cannot be installed on the same servers as SharePoint 2013, but needs its own servers if you want to use it
Web Applications and site collections from an architectural perspective are much as they were in SharePoint 2010.
Claims-based authentication is now the default and host-named site collections (HNSC) are now fully supported.
Many of the additional functions that have been added to the SharePoint 2013 services can be configured at the site-collection and site level, giving site collection and site owners more options regarding how they prefer to use SharePoint.
A new application framework has been added to SharePoint 2013 that facilitates the development of applications for Office and SharePoint, both in the cloud and on-premises. Organizations can use the Application Management Service Application to host their own Apps
Catalogs rather than to publish their internal Office and SharePoint Apps to Microsoft’s online market place.
The SharePoint 2013 upgrade process only supports the database attaches and separates the upgrade of the database schema and content from the site collections.

Search
Searching in Microsoft SharePoint 2013 is another area in which Microsoft has made major investments.
The new SharePoint 2013 search architecture consists of six components:

1. Crawl,
2. Content Processing,
3. Analytics Processing,
4. Index,
5. Query Processing, and
6. Search Administration.

Each search service application (SSA) you create will contain these six components as well as four databases:

1. Crawl,
2. Link,
3. Analytics Reporting, and
4. Search Administration.

You can scale out your search topology by placing these components on separate servers.
The index for an SSA is stored in files on the servers that host the SSA’s index component. You can create many index components associated with one SSA, thereby splitting the index across many servers. There are two ways of splitting your index: index partitions and index replicas. The search index for the service application is the aggregation of all index partitions.
You can spread the query load on an index partition by creating index replicas, which provide a level of redundancy.
SharePoint 2013 also includes a new search user interface with new Search Web Parts that can be customized by using Result Types and display templates. The hover card is prevalent throughout the user interface. It displays information about the returned result item, and if your SharePoint 2013 installation is linked to an Office Web App farm, it displays graphical previews of the content of Office documents.
Microsoft has optimized SharePoint 2013, not only in terms of the code deployed but also with regard to optimizing the site for the visitors, for search engines, for performance, for web designers and content authors. The result is a significant improvement in records management and Web Content Management.

Discovery Center
SharePoint 2013 introduces a new site collection—the Discovery Center, which serves as a portal for managing eDiscovery cases. From this single location, you can discover content in one or more SharePoint farms, in Exchange Server 2013, on file shares, and in Lync 2013 when content is archived to Exchange 2013.

Web Content Management
As far as web content management (WCM) is concerned, there is now a new publishing model involving search-driven content within which you can see content across site collection boundaries and even web application boundaries.
Using Managed Navigation, you can now define the structure of your site, and by tagging the content with the right terms, you can ensure that the content will be published at the right location in your website. Much of this is built about the new features in managed metadata service (MMS) and the new search architecture.

SharePoint and SEO
One of the new capabilities of SharePoint 2013 is the native support for search engine optimization (SEO) of public-facing websites. In this context optimization with SharePoint 2013, Microsoft has not only concentrated on optimizing the code but also optimizing the site for the visitors, the content authors, and provided new tools for the web designer.

Social Capabilities
Social computing is another big investment area in SharePoint Server 2013, which now offers Facebook-like and Twitter-like functionality.
New social functionalities have been added, such as microblogging, the use of #Tags, and @mentions, with which users can mention other people. Users can follow people, content, documents, sites and tags.
The three hubs, Newsfeed, SkyDrive, and Sites, where social activities can be viewed in groups, such as following, likes and mentions.
These hubs are accessed from the global navigation bar.

Business Data Connectivity
In SharePoint 2013, BCS is still implemented as a Business Data Connectivity (BDC) service application.
There is no difference between SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2010 with respect to creating the service application topology. BCS continues to centrally store the definition of the external content—its location, the type of data it is, and the behavior of the data when it is integrated into SharePoint and Office client applications—in the BDC metadata store, which is a SQL Server database
BCS support is made available for OData data sources
BDC Models for OData are created by using Visual Studio 2012 only.
BDC Models can be included in SharePoint Apps.
In SharePoint 2013, BCS has the ability to listen for events that occur in an external system. A developer can use remote event receivers attached to external lists and BDC entities to write code that is triggered when data in the external system has changed. This makes it possible to receive notifications of events that occur in the external systems.

Access Service Applications
SharePoint 2013 provides two Access service applications: the Access service application as provided in SharePoint 2010, and Access 2013 service application.
Access 2013 Services service application hosts Access web apps, which are web-based SharePoint applications; you can quickly build with no-code. Data for these apps is stored in SQL Server 2012 databases and not in SharePoint lists. You create Access web apps by using Access 2013, and you use the browser to enter data.

Business Intelligence
Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 provides a comprehensive set of Business Intelligence (BI) tools that integrate across Microsoft Office applications and other Microsoft technologies.
Excel 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013 include enhanced support for BI.
New BI features in the client application Excel, such as calculated measures and timeline controls are supported by Excel Services.
Excel 2013 also includes an in-memory tabular engine called the xVelocity engine.
Excel Data Models can be used as a basis for PowerPivots, PivotTables, PivotCharts and Power View reports. When you save workbooks that contain these PowerPivots, PivotTables, PivotCharts and Power View reports to SharePoint, you can display them in webpages, because the same in-memory engine can be used in SharePoint 2013.
If you want the full PowerPivot and Power View functionality that users experience in Excel, such as clicking slicers and doing analysis, Excel Services must be connected to an instance of Analysis Services SharePoint Mode. An instance of the Analysis Service SharePoint Mode does not need to be installed on a server where SharePoint is installed; however, the server must be joined to a domain in the same Active Directory forest as the SharePoint farm that contains the Excel Services service application where you will register the Analysis Service instance.
To use features, such as scheduling data refresh, PowerPivot for SharePoint needs to be installed.

Reporting Services on SharePoint
There are two components that integrate SQL Server Reporting Services with SharePoint:

• Reporting Services SharePoint Mode and
• A Reporting Services add-in.

Reporting Services SharePoint Mode—also known as Reporting Service Integrated Mode—is based on a completely new architecture, which is why you will see it in the SharePoint Central Administration website as a service application with a SharePoint Shared Service Application Pool.
The Reporting Services add-in for SharePoint provides features to integrate a SSRS report server with a deployment of SharePoint product. These two components, together with Analysis Services SharePoint Mode and the PowerPivot add-in for SharePoint, can be installed from the SQL Server 2012 SP1 installation medium.
Although these four components must be SQL Server 2012 SP1 components, the instance of SQL Server that is hosting your SharePoint databases does not need to be SQL Server 2012 SP1; it could be SQL Server 2012 or SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1.
Reporting Services SharePoint Mode and Analysis Service SharePoint Mode are installed as service applications and are managed by using the SharePoint Central Administration website or Windows PowerShell.
Thus we see that SharePoint Server 2013 provides a comprehensive solution for connected information work that enables people to transform the way they work while preserving the benefits of structured processes, compliance, and existing IT investments.
 

Some good links to learn SharePoint 2013

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc263199.aspx
Above link contain diagrams that provide visual representations of recommended solutions for SharePoint 2013 in the form of models, which are poster-size documents.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/fp142376.aspx
Above link contains installation and deployment related info and links for SharePoint 2013.

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262957.aspx
Install and configure SharePoint 2013 using above link plus other deployment articles also.