Our teams recently worked with our partners in SharePoint Product Management to publish two new content offerings that were announced earlier at SharePoint Conference this week.
One of them is a whitepaper called Hybrid SharePoint Environments with Office 365.
Download the whitepaper here: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=27580
For more information, this post "Guidance to Move to the Cloud on Your Terms" on the SharePoint Team blog gives a good overview.
Here is an excerpt:
As of June 28th, 2011, Office 365 introduced the ability to achieve single sign-on (SSO) via Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). Once established, this enables end-users to securely move between on-premises and online boundaries. The “Hybrid SharePoint Environments with Office 365” whitepaper provides step-by-step guidance for extending SharePoint and SharePoint Online beyond SSO – covering best practices for planning your cross-domain information architecture, direction for approaching security and compliance requirements, and insights on the ways branding & navigation play an important role in building a consistent end-user experience. The paper equally weighs a variety of business scenarios providing clear guidance about which deployment approach might make the most sense in your organization.
The other item is the Windows PowerShell Command Builder for SharePoint 2010 Products and Office 365.
This Silverlight application can enable IT pros and power users to visually assemble commands in the browser and then take those commands to their respective products.
Download the getting started guide: http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=27588
This application and more Windows PowerShell resources can be found on the TechNet Resource Center Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Server 2010
Earlier this year, we published operations procedures and resource centers for Records Management and Web Content Management. This week, we completed the Enterprise Content Management operations content and resource centers by publishing the Document Management operations procedures for both MOSS and WSS, and the Document Management resource center.
The Document Management operations procedures include procedures for managing document libraries, managing content types and permissions for a document library, and describe how to configure Information Rights Management settings.
The Document Management resource center lists resources you can use to evaluate, plan, deploy, and operate a document management system using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Here you will also find community resources, case studies, Webcasts and podcasts which provide you with additional resources to help you get the most out of your Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 document management system.
Have you ever wished you could have a say in the way documentation is written here at Microsoft? Well, now’s your chance. We welcome your feedback on the new Managing Documents procedures and the new Document Management resource center and will do our best to make the improvements you suggest. What would we like to know? We’d like to know things like: Is this content useful? Is it detailed enough? Did we leave something out that you feel would be helpful? Did we include something that you feel has no value? We’re also interested in hearing what you like about this content so we can keep doing it. Anything you feel we should know about the Managing Documents content or the Document Management resource center is very important to us. Let us know what you think!
There are three ways that you can provide feedback about the new Managing Documents procedures and the new Document Management resource center:
We look forward to hearing from you and to working with you to make our content the best it can be.
-- Claudia Lake SharePoint IT Pro documentation team
By Brenda Carter, IT Pro Technical Writer, SharePoint Products and Technologies
Last March, Shane Young and I sat down with Dave Coleman at the SharePoint conference in Seattle to review the solution design for Twynham School in the UK. Shane Young is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) who has designed solutions for several schools, including the Boulder Valley School District and Central Michigan University. Typically in these sessions Microsoft experts give design guidance to customers. However, during this session Coleman showed us how it’s done.
Coleman described how he stumbled across the initial version of SharePoint Team Services years ago and has since developed a growing Web presence with each subsequent version of SharePoint Products and Technologies. With his small IT team and a strong partnership with the community at the school, Coleman has produced a world-class IT solution. His team also hosts sites for several feeder schools. Finally, Coleman’s team generously shares their expertise (and templates!) with the other 63+ secondary schools in the area, helping them get up and running with SharePoint quickly.
Young applauds Twynham for their savvy solution and especially for openly sharing their work with the education community: "Colemans' team is saving education providers worldwide countless hours by sharing their lessons learned and helping them start on the right foot." Young emphasizes that starting with a viable design that has been proven in the field can greatly reduce the learning curve.
The purpose of this blog article is to introduce you to Shane Young and the Twynham team and to let them field your questions right here on this blog!
Shane Young has over 12 years experience architecting and administering large-scale server farms using Microsoft enterprise technologies. He has architected SharePoint solutions for clients ranging from 20 to 25,000 users. He is the President and lead consultant of www.SharePoint911.com.
Twynham School is a secondary school on the south coast of the UK and is rated among the top 10% of schools nationally. From left to right, the Twynham team includes:
For information about Twynham’s solution architecture as well as the architecture that Coleman recommend for single schools, see the following technical case study resources:
The Twynham IT team also hosts a site to showcase their solution: http://www.twynhamschool.com/supportinglearning/.
Here are some highlights from the Twynham case study:
If you are a medium-size school district or university and are interested in working with me to produce a similar technical case study, let me know! (bcarter@microsoft.com).
Meanwhile, feel free to post questions for Shane Young and the Twynham IT team. Thanks, Brenda
This downloadable guide is aimed at IT pros planning to use content deployment with their enterprise sites using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. The guide takes you through the steps for setting up source and destination site collections, creating a deployment path and job, and then running the job to see how it populates the destination site collection with the content from the source site collection. One important thing to note when it comes to implementing content deployment is that when you first set it up, the destination site collection must be empty. You can create the destination site collection using either the Blank site template, or by using the Stsadm createsite operation to create an empty site.
In addition to the walkthrough, we have also published a set of topics about Administering Web content management that cover publishing and content deployment operations, as well as cache settings and profiles, document conversion, and variations. These topics are intended for IT pros who manage publishing and content deployment for their enterprise sites.
But wait, there's more! We have also launched the Web Content Management Resource Center for SharePoint Server 2007. The center resources for IT pros to use in planning and implementing Web content management solutions. You'll find links to featured content on TechNet, community resources, and other blogs, as well as to videos, Webcasts, and podcasts.
We look forward to hearing from you and to continuing to improve this content in partnership with you!
In SharePoint Server 2010, you can use Profile Synchronization to synchronize user and group profile information that is stored in the SharePoint Server 2010 profile store with profile information that is stored in directory services across the enterprise. This profile information includes hierarchy and group information that can be used to drive functionality such as audiences or hierarchy-driven business processes.
For Beta 2, we published documentation that explains how to configure Profile Synchronization. We recently updated these documents with feedback from you.
This newly updated documentation includes the following tasks:
The updated Profile Synchronization documentation includes improved task requirements and permissions information that should give you all the information you need to get Profile Synchronization up and running in your test environment. We’ve also restructured the documents, separating the set-up tasks from the actual synchronization tasks.
Thanks for your feedback and let us know what you think of the new, improved version of the SharePoint 2010 Profile Synchronization document set!
We'd like to know how you use the posters we have up on TechNet:
Do you print them on a plotter, or in a smaller format?
Would you like them to be available to order in glossy format?
Is there any other way that you'd like us to present them?
Post a comment here, or send us an email.
Thanks!
- Margo
The Microsoft Office Interactive Content Pivot helps you find the SharePoint Server 2013, Project Server 2013, and Office 365 technical content that you’re looking for. The content pivot brings together content from TechNet and Office.com and allows you to filter on a variety of parameters, such as technical subject, job role, and IT lifecycle. Each tile in the pivot represents an article on TechNet or Office.com. Each tile is color-coded by IT lifecycle, and contains the title of the article, which products it applies to, and a summary of the content.
The pivot viewer initially looks like this and currently indexes over 2300 articles:
You can use the filters to narrow down the content set returned, for example by setting Technical Subject to "data, information, and assets", and Job Role to "analysts", you filter the set down to about 50 articles.
You can zoom in to see the titles of the articles displayed. Some tiles have icons on them that tell you if the article contains a specific type of content, such as a video or diagram. The article in the following image has a video.
You can open the article for viewing in another browser window by clicking the View button. You can also create your own pre-filtered list of articles by clicking the Add button on the tiles for the articles that you want, and then choosing Bookmark List from the Actions menu.
Try it out! http://www.microsoft.com/resources/Technet/en-us/Office/media/ITProPivotViewer/
- Samantha Robertson, on behalf of the SharePoint, Project, and Office 365 content teams.
In the series "How to change the way search results are displayed in SharePoint Server 2013" I showed you how you can customize the way your search results are displayed by adding custom icons and properties.
When it comes to displaying search results, design and content are indeed very important, however there is one thing that often trumps them both: the order in which search results are displayed.Think of your own behavior when looking at search results. How often do you click to view the second page of search results? Personally, my answer to that question is “hardly ever.” So, when displaying search results, it is important that the results that your users are looking for are displayed as high up in the search results list as possible. In this blog post, I’ll show you how you can use a query rule to change the order in which search results are displayed. To demonstrate how query rules work, I'll use an example from an internal Microsoft Search Center.In this blog post, we’ll learn:
What was the problem again?As you know, Microsoft publishes thousands of articles across TechNet, MSDN and office.com. To assist in the publishing process, we use several SharePoint lists. Each item in a list represents an article or a media file. To make it easy to find information about a particular list item, we created a Search Center that searches across these lists.The following screenshot shows the default order in which search results were displayed in our Search Center. Notice that search results for articles and images were displayed in a mixed order.
When users search for something in this Search Center, they are usually looking for information about an article. So, to make it easier for users to find information about articles, I wanted to change the order of the search results so that images would be displayed at the bottom. To do this, I had to create a query rule.
When using query rules: define before you assign
A query rule is pretty much what the name implies: a rule that can be applied to queries. But before you start to assign rules to your queries, you should define what you want the query rule to do. Basically, you have to define two things: a condition and an action. Simply put, this comes down to defining the following: “when X (condition), do Y (action)”. In my scenario, I knew the action part: Display list items that represent images at the bottom of the search results list. In our lists, we use the site column Content Type to differentiate between the type of articles or media types a list item represents. For example, all images have the value “Art” for Content Type.
Based on this, I was able to define the condition part, so that my final definition was:
When list items are of Content Type “Art”, display these at the end of the search results list. So, with the definition in place, I could start to create the query rule that would make this happen.
How to create a query rule that will change the order in which search results are displayed
Depending on your permission level, you can create a query rule on three levels:
To save space, I will only show you how to create a query rule as a Site collection administrator.
I wanted to change the order of search result, so in the Build Your Query dialog box, I selected the SORTING tab.
From the Sort by menu, I selected Rank.
From the Dynamic ordering section, I selected Add dynamic ordering rule.
From the Change ranking when menu, I selected Manual condition.
Remember, I wanted list items of Content Type Art to be displayed at the end of the search results list. So, in the Manual condition field, I entered ContentType:Art, and selected Demote to bottom.
Now, before we move on, let me break down what I entered:
Put it together, and it matches the definition I had specified: When list items are of Content Type “Art”, display these at the end of the search results list.
Your newly created query rule will be listed on the Manage Query Rules page.
In my scenario, I could see that the Demote Art query rule had been created.
When I now entered a search in the Search Center, I could see that articles were displayed at the top of the search results list, while images were displayed at the bottom. Nice!
How do I know that the query rule’s been applied?
In my scenario, I could easily verify that the query rule I created was being applied. However, if you are uncertain about whether or not your query rule is being applied, the Search Results Web Part will be able to give you an answer.
To verify that a query rule is being applied, here’s what you should do:
In my scenario, I could verify that my query rule was working by looking at the following:
Think twice before applying a query rule
Even though this was a relatively simple query rule, you saw that the effect was quite noticeable. So a word of warning: even though query rules are great for changing the order in which search results are displayed, you should think carefully before applying too many of them. The effects can be quite large, and the more complex query rules you have, the more performance resources each query will require. But, if used with caution, you can make the users of your Search Center very happy customers.
Additional resources
Changing the ranking of search results in SharePoint 2013Manage query rules in SharePoint Server 2013
An easy way to help users search for information in SharePoint is to create query suggestions. Query suggestions are words that appear under the search box as users type a query.
SharePoint automatically creates a query suggestion when users have clicked a search result for a query at least six times. For example, if users have entered the query word “coffee” and then clicked on a search result six times, then “coffee” automatically becomes a query suggestion.
You can also create query spelling suggestions manually. In this blog post I’ll use a simple example to show how you can do that. In this blog post I’ll explain:
How to create a query suggestions file
Now that you have your query suggestions file, the next step is to import it to SharePoint.
How to import a query suggestions file to SharePoint Online
IMPORTANT: When you import query suggestions, existing query suggestions will be overwritten. If you haven’t previously imported any query suggestions, you have nothing to worry about. Automatically created query suggestions will not be overwritten when you import new ones. However, if you want to import additional query suggestions, you should export the existing query suggestions file, update it, and then re-import it.
How to import a query suggestions file to SharePoint Server 2013
How to verify that your query suggestions are workingIMPORTANT: After you have uploaded your query suggestions file, it might take a few hours before your query suggestions are displayed. To verify that your query suggestions are working correctly, in a search box, type two letters of a phrase from your query suggestions file. The query suggestions appear under the search box.
Microsoft test lab guides are deliberately written to be independent of how you actually put them together. For example, you can use physical components (computers and switches/hubs), virtual components (virtual machines and virtual networks/switches), or a combination. For virtual components, you can use the virtualization technology of your choice.
Because more of you are now using Hyper-V in Windows Server 2012 as your virtualization technology, there is new guidance on how to set up various test lab environments using Hyper-V Server 2012.
For SharePoint Server 2013, the new Hosting the SharePoint Server 2013 three-tier test lab with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V article includes diagrams, guidance, and step-by-step procedures that take you through building out the SharePoint Server 2013 three-tier farm test lab environment on a single Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V server.
This article tells you how to turn the conceptual three-tier farm test lab, which looks like this:
into a virtual switch and a set of virtual machines on a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V server, which looks like this (click on it to see a larger version):
With this new guidance, you can build out this fundamental environment for planning and testing SharePoint Server 2013 features, capabilities, and scenarios, even if you are new to Hyper-V.
For additional test lab guides that use this three-tier farm infrastructure, see SharePoint Server 2013 Test Lab.
For additional information about virtualization for SharePoint 2013, see Plan for on-premises or hosted virtualization in SharePoint 2013.
Enjoy (physically or virtually)!
Joe DaviesPrincipal Writer
The Authentication in SharePoint 2013 Learning Roadmap topic is now available.
Consider the following questions:
For both questions, you can use a Learning Roadmap, which is a topic that provides a methodical approach to building expertise by stepping you through a series of learning goals. You start with the prerequisites and then build on your knowledge and experience in levels corresponding to introductory (level 100), intermediate (level 200), advanced (level 300), and expert (level 400) learning resources.
Each section of a Learning Roadmap contains an ordered list of steps, which you should perform in the recommended order. Each step points to a resource (a Microsoft or third-party topic, white paper, video, book chapter, blog post, etc.) and states a learning goal. When you are comfortable that you meet the knowledge or experience requirements of the learning goal, move on to the next step.
Let's return to our original questions:
Take a look at the Authentication in SharePoint 2013 Learning Roadmap. Does its purpose and structure make sense? Are there other technologies of SharePoint that need Learning Roadmaps? Let us know what you think by leaving a comment on this blog post.
Just like the previously published SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2010 claims encoding topic, I published in the TechNet Wiki to invite community participation. If I missed something, feel free to add steps or add resources to an existing step.
For additional Learning Roadmaps for other technologies or Microsoft products, see the Learning Roadmaps Portal Page.
To get started with SharePoint 2013, see the following:
Enjoy!
Audience: Search Admin/ITPro
The search schema is a mechanism in SharePoint search that controls:
What does this mean really? It means that the search schema controls what can be searched for, how it can be searched for and how the results can be presented in your search sites.
The most important concepts in search schema are crawled properties and managed properties.
The typical data flow is illustrated by this figure:
So a crawl component reads items from the content database (or other content sources) and sends documents and metadata to the content processing component in the form of crawled properties. A lot of magic then happens inside the content processing component: the text of the item is extracted, language detected, spell-checking applied etc. In addition, the content processing component maps crawled properties to managed properties and outputs a set of name-value pairs of managed properties. As an example, this process includes picking the best crawled property value to index as the author of a document. For e.g. a PowerPoint document this is usually stored inside the document. In other cases the author is found from other crawled properties. This process is defined through the built-in search schema and so-called mappings between crawled properties and managed properties. Some mappings are prioritized, meaning that the first crawled property that actually has a value is picked, while others are not prioritized and the values of all the crawled properties are mapped to managed properties and thus indexed.
The search schema contains a lot of system defined crawled and managed properties, as well as mappings in-between that are required for SharePoint Search to work properly. However, as an on-premises customer or SPO customer you also have the option to tweak the search schema to your liking.
With FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint Search 2010, only power users with the rights of Central Administrator could alter the built-in search schema. However, now in SharePoint 2013, even tenant admins and site collection admins/owners can modify their search schemas.
For SharePoint on-premises installations there are two levels that matter for search schemas: search service application (SSA) level and site collection level. This is illustrated in the schema hierarchy shown below:
When SharePoint 2013 is initially installed there exists only one search schema, which is accessible at the central admin level (aka "SSA level" since the central administrator owns the search service application). As before, the central administrator is free to make a number of changes at this level.
In a similar fashion, the site collection owners may choose to override their search schemas that they otherwise inherit from the SSA level. This structure provides opportunities for companies to create and use the search schema for cross-company standards that enrich company-wide searches while still allowing site collections flexibility.
For SharePoint online (SPO) there are three levels that matter for search schemas: search service application (SSA), tenant and site collection level. This is illustrated in the schema hierarchy shown below:
In SPO, the SSA level is pre-defined (and the same as the default on-premises SSA level search schema). This schema may only be changed by Microsoft. However, new in SharePoint 2013 is the possibility for tenant administrators to modify this centrally defined schema for their tenant. Each tenant administrator inherits from this schema and may choose to override it with various types of changes (described further below).
In a similar fashion, the site collection owners may choose to override their search schemas that they otherwise inherit from the tenant level. This structure provides for opportunities for tenants to create and use the search schema for cross-company standards while still allowing site collections flexibility.
Central administrators have the most freedom for search schema changes. Besides properties that are system defined or read-only and required for SharePoint 2013 to work properly, they can add, remove, change and delete any crawled property, managed property or mapping.
Tenant administrators as well as site collection owners have the ability to:
The combination of the latter two operations is powerful. If your intent is, for example, to make an existing managed property refinable, this is not something you are allowed to do on a site collection level. However, what you should do instead is:
Use the default unused managed properties for step two above.
This is more than enough theory in one blog posting, so let's move over to an example: We would like our site collection search page to use something else for the title of documents. This is just for fun and not considered best practice in any way.
We will go through the following steps to accomplish this:
Prerequisites: You need to have a site collection available to perform this step. If you do not have that, log in as central administrator or tenant administrator and choose create site collection from Central Admin. For this example we will create a site under /sites/botanical, with template "team site".
Next, we log in as the owner of the site collection and create a list by clicking on:
Site contents -> Add an App -> Custom list
We call the list "flowers" and add a custom column of type string called LatinName. Then,we populate the list with a few items to make it look something like this:
Any site by default has a search box. This box appears in the upper right corner of your site like this:
When searching, a result page such as this one appears:
Notice that there are three refiners on the left-hand side: result type, author and modified date. For each result in the result list there is a header with a larger font, then an extract of the text of the item, with the search keyword(s) highlighted, followed by the URL.
If you cannot see the list items from step 1 in your list of search results, you probably need to wait for a crawl to pick them up and index them. On most systems this will happen automatically during the next 30 minutes. Do not let that stop you, but move on to the next step and see if that works. If you are central administrator you can trigger the recrawl from Central Administration -> Manage Service Applications-> Search Service Application -> Content Sources -> Local SharePoint sites -> Start Full Crawl.
To change the search schema, open Site Settings from the menu on the upper right:
Then select Search Schema under the Site Collection Administration heading:
This now displays the list of available managed properties on this site collection:
Next, click on the managed property we're about to alter, "Title", to edit it. You will then see all the various attributes for Title, many of which are read-only on a site collection level. Scroll down to the mappings section of the page:
Here a number of crawled properties are mapped in prioritized order. The first of these crawled properties that have a value will be indexed as the value of Title, and it is shown in our search results.
Next, click "add a mapping" and select ows_LatinName from the list of crawled properties. It is possible to type in part of the name to avoid scrolling down the whole long list:
"ows_LatinName" is the crawled property that corresponds to the LatinName column we just created in the Flowers list. Press OK and you are back to editing the Title managed property.
Now you need to press the "Move Up" button several times to make sure that this crawled property is at the top of the list and thus has the highest priority.
Then press "OK" at the end of the page to store the changes to the Title managed property.
Congratulations! You have now created a customized schema for this site collection. This was not possible in SharePoint 2010.
After only altering the schema mappings not much has happened in the search index. This is because the altered mappings take effect as part of the document processing, which only occurs when documents are processed as part of a crawl. To see the effect of our change we need to make sure the list items are recrawled and the items reindexed. We can force a recrawl of our document library like this:
This marks the whole list to be picked up by a continuous crawl, regardless of whether the items have actually changed. The next time a continuous crawl comes and checks your list for changes it will refeed them all.
Warning: If your system is not set up to perform continuous crawls you need to wait for the next recrawl as scheduled by your administrator. Alternatively, if you are central administrator you can trigger the recrawl from Central Administration -> Manage Service Applications-> Search Service Application -> Content Sources -> Local SharePoint sites -> Start Full Crawl.
Crawls are not instant, so we need to wait until a crawl has read our document library and resubmitted the documents to the content processing component. Only then will the index receive the results of our schema changes. If you are testing this with central admin rights you can go to the "manage content sources" page inside the management pages for the search service application and look at the status of the crawl.
Now that documents have been recrawled and reprocessed according to our new schema, we can look at the new search results. Performing a test search in the site collection search box gives us a result set such as the one below:
As you can see, the second item in this list of results is the list item from our list (and the first is the list itself). For this second item we can see that the title now is the Latin name from our list and not the title of the item. Here is how it used to look:
This is certainly a subtle change, but it demonstrates that we have created a custom schema to change how items are indexed and how results are displayed. The custom schema we created only applies to a single site collection, so we have tested the ability to have multiple search schemas in SharePoint 2013! In a later posting we might even use this capability to do something really useful for search.
Other articles with references to schema management:
Hey SharePoint fans,
Take a look at SharePoint 2010 Best Practices (en-US), a recently published and very active TechNet Wiki article that contains a categorized list of links to best practice resources on all manner of subjects relating to SharePoint 2010.
This TechNet Wiki article was created by Margriet Bruggeman and has had over 200 revisions since it was published on March 27. Other SharePoint community experts such as Gokan Ozcifci have added links or helped to categorize them.
Please review this new article to verify that it points to your favorite SharePoint 2010 best practice resources. If not, please sign in with your Windows Live ID and add them.
To get started with SharePoint Server 2010, see the following:
Enjoy.
Joe DaviesPrincipal WriterSharePoint Server Platforms and Infrastructure Writing Team
These are indeed exciting times for the Microsoft Office Division as a whole, and definitely for those of us who work on the technical content.
First off, we hope you like the refreshed look and feel of this blog. Look for more design evolutions as time goes on, and of course, lots of SharePoint IT pro content!
Check out the TechNet home page and feature package that launched today. They cover top-level IT professional content for new Office, Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, and Project and even include an Editor’s note by yours truly.
From the new SharePoint product standpoint, this post highlights a cleaner and more efficient UI experience, pervasive social networking, SkyDrive Pro, SharePoint sites, project management capabilities, innovative search experiences with FAST, and dynamic publishing. And, new Cloud App Model and Marketplace open up a whole new world for developers. Keep a close eye on the main SharePoint Team Blog as there are a lot of great topics coming up.
SharePoint Server 2013 supports users through intuitive tools and solutions that enable them to choose how and when they upgrade. These tools provide programmatic access to centrally-managed compliance policies, and they help to ensure consistency and open collaboration, while allowing IT to focus on innovation.
The SharePoint product teams are committed to help IT Pros lead their organizations in lowering IT costs, managing risk, and managing time more effectively. SharePoint 2013 Preview is a flexible and scalable collaboration platform that will help organizations achieve these goals. And, our technical content is designed to facilitate these objectives.
So, if you aren’t already aware of these resources, you should be:
SharePoint 2013 for IT pros TechCenter
This is the landing place for everything on SharePoint 2013 Preview. Find content organized by IT lifecycles and hone in on the details for installation, upgrade, migration, and services. Highlights include:
System Requirements
Capabilities and features in SharePoint 2013
Architecture design
Plan for social computing and collaboration
Our content teams work on a continuous publishing model, so check back for new content as there are lots more planned, including scenarios.
Evaluation downloads
SharePoint Server 2013 Preview
SharePoint Foundation 2013 Preview
Technical documentation
SharePoint 2013 Preview
Monitor any new or updated content by subscribing to the recently published RSS feed
Training
SharePoint 2013 Preview training for IT pros
Find how-to training and walkthrough videos with this interactive 14-module course about SharePoint Server 2013 Preview. It covers changes and new features for search and social, plus deployment and performance/scalability. It also includes training for Project Server 2013 Preview and Project Online Preview. NOTE: These video lessons are based on an earlier preview version of SharePoint 2013 and Project Server 2013 so you might notice a few discrepancies. Updates to this training are planned.
Forums
SharePoint 2013 Preview for IT Professionals forum
All SharePoint forums
Blogs
Yes, there are many blogs related to SharePoint – but each of these recommended blogs address a particular aspect or audience:
Office Next Blog (updates from product engineering teams)
SharePoint Team Blog (all-up SharePoint blog, including end user content)
SharePoint IT Pro Blog (this one)
Get the Point Blog (for SharePoint end users)
Office IT Pro Blog
Project Team Blog
Because we realize many IT pros also happen to be developers, I am listing some of the resources we have on MSDN for SharePoint developers as well:
SharePoint 2013 new features and capabilities
SharePoint 2013 development overview
SharePoint Developer Blog
SharePoint 2013 Preview for Developers forum
Apps for Office and SharePoint Blog (for developers of the cloud app model)
Apps for Office and SharePoint Forums
Office Developer Blog
We hope you’ll find these resources useful. Feel free to send us content feedback anytime:
ITSPDOCS@microsoft.com (IT professional documentation on TechNet)
DOCTHIS@microsoft.com (Developer documentation on MSDN)
The following Test Lab Guides (TLGs) are now available for SharePoint Server 2013 Preview:
The following figure shows the SharePoint Server 2013 Preview test lab configuration.
The following figure shows the SharePoint Server 2013 Preview TLG stack.
This stack uses the Base Configuration TLG, the Install SQL Server 2012 TLG, and the AD FS 2.0 mini-module. For more information, see Test Lab Guides.
Stay tuned to this blog for additional TLGs for SharePoint Server 2013 Preview.
To get started with SharePoint Server 2013 Preview, see the following: