SharePoint App's

Advantages of using SharePoint App

• Keep custom code off of the SharePoint servers! Administrators spend a lot of their time setting up and maintaining the SharePoint servers in your organization. Apps for SharePoint either run 100% client-side within SharePoint, or separate web application server (hosted or on premise). Either way, apps are isolated from SharePoint so a poorly performing app will not affect your entire SharePoint environment. This also allows Apps to be installed without downtime in SharePoint.
• Give control to site owners to allow them to install the apps they want on their site either from the Microsoft store or your organizations internal App Catalog.
• Keep control by disabling the public Microsoft store or require approval for the apps that site owners want to add to their site.
• Apps are first-class citizens in SharePoint! Apps are given their own permissions to specific SharePoint resources such as lists, documents, sites, search, etc… User security still applies as well. An advantage is that when content is created or modified it shows Modified By <> on behalf of <> allowing administrators and users to see what app is making changes to the content. Separate permissions also allows for the App to be revoked access, without changing the permissions of the users.
• Since Apps are isolated, the SharePoint environment is much easier, and therefore cheaper, to migrate or upgrade when the next version of SharePoint is released.
• Apps are supported in the cloud. SharePoint Online fully supports the new app model, making it a much more viable option for organizations who are considering moving to the cloud.
• Apps can be written in several different ways. This allows developers to use their core strengths to develop their apps. This may be HTML5, JQuery, CSOM, C#, PHP, Java, etc…
• Already have a custom web application and now you need to integrate it into SharePoint? No problem. Create an App Package that points to your existing web application and you’re good to go. Of course, if you want your application to read from or make updates to SharePoint, you’ll need to make some additions to your application. But this doesn’t necessarily mean a complete rewrite.
• Sell your apps! If you or your organization has developed a great reusable app, you can publish it to the Microsoft Office Store and sell it to others. Microsoft handles the billing and delivery of the app, so all you need to do is build it, publish it, and support it.
• The Office Store makes it easy to find and purchase apps that you know have been vetted by Microsoft.

SharePoint 2016 RTM - Deprecated Features

Deprecated Features so far in SP 2016

Feature	Description
SharePoint Foundation	There will not be foundation edition of SharePoint 2016 available going forward. It’s a big change from all the previous versions of SharePoint.
Standalone Installation	No more standalone, instead we will have single server deployment. We need to have SQL Server installed before we go for SP installation.  Read through “MinRole” feature as well on this
Forefront Identity Manager Client	No more FIM, instead we probably need to use Microsoft Identity Manager 2016 or default AC import process. Need to hear more from Microsoft on this update
Excel Services	Excel Services and its related BI features are plugged out. It is now attached to Office 2016 Preview (Excel Online). It is important to understand when we anchor solutions related to BI for our customers
SharePoint BI – default features	Its halted for some reason, hopefully some clarity should be there before we get the final product from Microsoft
Tags & Notes	There feature is completely removed and even non-compatible to older versions as well when we upgrade or migrate. Think through about this when we anchor any migration related projects with customer
Stsadm.exe	Only PowerShell, now developers cannot excuse J

Apps Comparison with SharePoint Features

Future of SharePoint

Wow... all excited to look after the new features available in SP 2016 and introduction made in Ignite sessions. Yup, eagerly waiting to watch what is there in the new version and how is it going to give value to the business as like you :).

Nevertheless the future of SharePoint is more dependent on cloud strategy the companies going to follow and the way service providers tie up with companies to bring SharePoint in cloud. The next growth of SharePoint and its market value is purely depends on how it will be used to solve the business problems with less cost and efficient way without disturbing the existing systems.

Some of the strategic paths that we can think and recommended by various trend setters(CMS, Gartner) are given here,

1. On Premise
Yup ! On-Premise solutions will still rule the SharePoint world. Because most of the customers still looking a complete control and flexible enough to do customization's. Future version of On-Premise SP will have all major features enabled as like cloud option. This is because many customers still reside on older versions of SharePoint On-Prem and not willing to move to cloud.

2. O365 - SP Online
As lot of new features available and the speed MS is rolling out the feature updates in O365 makes customers excited. Current business highly impressed with the cost implications made by O365, yes it is very less compared to On-Prem on either implementation of new solution or maintaining it. As a trend O365-SP Online will continue to be served as a SaaS model and verticals like healthcare, manufacturing will focus on SaaS model greatly. 


3. Hybrid
Current trend in SharePoint world is Hybrid Model - deployments that combine Office 365 with on-premises SharePoint. SharePoint Online will continue to make it easier to migrate workloads to the cloud — giving customers the best of both worlds. We have already seen seamless hybrid integration between the My Sites of on-premises SharePoint and OneDrive for Business on Office 365, and Microsoft is continually opening up new ways to move content to the cloud faster

SharePoint Portal - User Engagement Tips

We are seeing now many organizations have implemented their internal portals using SharePoint or corporate are thinking in direction to do the same. One of the common challenges faced when we roll out the portal is User Engagement. 

User Engagement 

1. How much your employees love this portal and use it in day to day activities. 
2. Do they have all the needed content in the portal? Is everything cooked up in the home page itself (I mean all the information in single page itself)?
3. First of all, do they visit this site? If it all is it attractive to them?

These are all the common questions which immediately pop up when we want to understand and get tangible outcomes on user engagement in the SharePoint Portal.  There are some simple tips that we can follow throughout the Portal design to improvise the user engagement. Here you go,

Keep it Simple
Simple doesn't mean plain. Do not over complex your portal or information access in the portal and don't think everyone who accesses this portal should be aware of what you have developed. Simple means free of complexity and unnecessary elements, that could clutter your portal which eventually keep the users from engaging with your content. Rather than distracting the users, we want to include features they need and will use. Of course, different organizations need different functionality for their portal, but no matter what those needs are, we should keep portal clean and clutter-free

What is Important

Draw user attention to what is important for your portal or the actual purpose the portal serves. You can avoid all cosmetics stuff and high light only the content that you want to convey to users. Also understand how do you want to arrange your content in the page (like which needs to first, what content need to be placed in the sites, any information that need to be placed in the bottom of the page, any content which needs to be pop-up..etc). Because eye-tracking studies show that users tend to look at web content in a certain order, and by following that order we can present our information in an effective way.

Keep it clean

Either it is internal site or heavy user based public facing site, keep the site clean and simple. Use an appropriate font, color, images as the way we tend to deal with the contents. Don’t put too much of jazzy things when you want to convey an important information to users via portal. “White Space is allowed” – yup, don’t try to occupy every pixel in the page with information; having a desirable white space is still attractive and brings more focus to the content.

Communication

Developing the portal itself is quite easy compared to communicating the need to portal to everyone in organization. Try to create communication channel or plans to bring people to the portal and make innovative marketing to attract the people.

What you develop, it is tangible and measurable only when people use it. All your metrics around the portal is purely dependent on your user engagement.

SharePoint 2013 - Best Practices

Dear folks,

Thought of sharing you couple of best practices that every architect or team lead must be aware when they proposing a solution on SharePoint or when designing the SharePoint solutions. I see most of the successful project implementation ends up with a common problem on -Performance, Reliability issues.. etc.

I tried to list down some of the basic things that we should take care when we play around in SharePoint.

1. Standard Naming convention across SP Farm. Use standard naming convention as per your governance process or policy for all your accounts, service application, web applications, database name, site collection names..etc. This will really help you when you want to maintain the farm and to do some changes in future easily if needed.
2. Have defined physical infrastructure setup. Really mean, have a dedicated systems as when required (like for Domain Controller, Database server, Web App server, App Server, Office Web Server). Don't mess up multiple server roles in a single server itself. Also see what you can virtualize and what you cannot.
3. Have defined logical setup for your farm elements (Web applications, Service Applications). Don't try to create everything under same roof or don't create everything as an isolated items in SP farm. Analyse and group all the necessary items and create a required structure. Example( All service applications can be pointed to one app pool and all the web applications can be pointed to another app pool. Don't create app pool for each web application unless it is really needed)
4. Follow a proper capacity planning process (model, design, pilot, deploy, monitor & maintain), because capacity planning is not something a one time activity or single solid solution. It is more like an evolution and on going process. Also check for attributes like latency, throughput, data-scale, reliability..etc
5. Be aware of capacity boundaries/limits of SP 2013, both software and hardware boundaries
6. Training - its must for all the folks who uses SharePoint, its not just for the developer/administrator/monitor/security guys. We have to train the potential users of SharePoint to make better use of it. Only when users started using the site we will be able to get real metrics and measures valued properly against your capacity/performance..etc. otherwise everything is just theory, only in papers
7. Avoid GUI based installation process, use powershell script to the maximum extent for all the installation and configuration of SP farm. I am quite sure you will understand the importance of using powershell instead of GUI when you want to setup a proper sharepoint farm.
8. Avoid using Configuration wizard to setup service applications in SP farm. Do it manually or use powershell script to create Service applications.
9. Do not use dynamic memory for Virtual VM's, its a complete performance degradation of SP farm either it is development, test or production environment. 
10. Follow all critical updates, cumulative updates, public updates, service packs, SharePoint Updates from Microsoft, evaluate the updates before apply in production. Make sure things are good on the updates.
11. Keep close eye on your SharePoint farm, monitor it perfectly and detailed
12. Optimize your Search service to greater extent, because it is one of the major performance tied up factor in SharePoint. Try to distribute the search load to couple of servers in the farm and have an optimized search topology.

The detailed list of best practices on individual topics is available here
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/12438.community-best-practices-for-sharepoint-2013.aspx

Developer Courses in MVA Site

100+ developer course available in Microsoft Virtual Academy Portal.
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Topic	Title
Cloud	Azure SQL Database for Business-Critical Cloud Applications
Cloud	Getting Started with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning
Cloud	Microsoft Azure Fundamentals: Platform Overview
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Cloud	Azure Mobile Services and API Management
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Cloud	Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions
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Data	Security, Optimizer and Column Store Index Enhancements
Data	Data Platform Immersion
Data	Big Data & Business Analytics Immersion
Data	Quick Start Challenge: Sharing data-XAML and openFrameworks
Data	Upgrading to Microsoft SQL Server 2014
Data	Implementing Tabular Data Models
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Data	Big Data with the Microsoft Analytics Platform System
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Games & Graphics	Introduction to WebGL 3D with HTML5 and Babylon.js
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Games & Graphics	Developing Games with Marmalade and C++ for Windows and Windows Phone
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Languages	Twenty C# Questions Answered
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Languages	Open Source Questions Answered
Languages	Introduction to Programming with Python
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Languages	PHP for Azure
Languages	CodExist: The Birth of Bot
Languages	Hour of Code with Touch Develop
Mobile	Introduction to Mobile App Development
Mobile	Mobile Web Application Development
Mobile	Creating Windows Phone and Windows Store Games with MonoGame
Mobile	Cross Platform Development with Xamarin and Visual Studio
Mobile	Cross-Platform Development with Visual Studio
Office	Introduction to Office 365 Development
Office	Deep Dive into the Office 365 App Model
Office	Deep Dive: Integrate Office 365 APIs in Mobile Device Apps
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Office	SAP Gateway for Microsoft Office 365
Office	Transform SharePoint Customizations to SharePoint App Model
Office	Shipping Your Office App to the Office Store
Office	Deep Dive: Building Blocks and Services of SharePoint
Tools	Imagine Cup: Building Your Studio Startup
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Tools	Fundamentals of Visual Studio Online
Web	Building Apps with node.js Jump Start
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Web	The Modern Web Platform Jump Start
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Web	Lighting Up Real-Time Web Communications with SignalR
Web	Single Page Applications with jQuery and AngularJS
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Web	Customizing ASP.NET Authentication with Identity
Web	Adding Style with CSS Jump Start
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Web	What's New in ASP.NET 5
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Web	Introduction to AngularJS
Web	Implementing Entity Framework with MVC
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Windows	Programming Kinect for Windows v2 Jump Start
Windows	Developing Universal Windows Apps with HTML and JavaScript Jump Start
Windows	Developing Universal Windows Apps (C#/XAML)
Windows	Quick Start Challenge: Universal App
Windows	Quick Start Challenge: Touch Support using openFrameworks
Windows	Last Stop: Getting Your Windows App to Market
Windows	Universal Windows App Development with Cortana
Windows	Cloud Enable a Windows Presentation Foundation LOB App

Courtesy - MVA, Tim Sneath