Active Directory Federation Services

Active Directory Federation Services

Active Directory  Federation Services(ADFS) provides single sign-on (SSO) by using token-based authentication. With SSO, a service will trust the authentication token of a user who has successfully logged on to a disparate but trusted network. As, such the service will grant access without requiring the user to authenticate again.

SSO through AD FS is not mandatory for Office 365, but enterprise customers usually implement it because of the need to desire to leverage existing identity management solutions such as AD.

Different types of user accounts

There are essentially two classes of user accounts:

Ø  Cloud Identity

Ø  Federated Identity

Cloud Identities are user accounts that are created directly in Office 365 through the admin center. The passwords associated with cloud identities are also stored in Office 365. Cloud identities can be managed through the admin center as well as through Windows PowerShell.

Federated Identities refer to user accounts that are maintained outside if Office 365 such as in AD. Federated identities are the most commonly used accounts in an enterprise because most enterprises already have an identity management solution such as AD.

Integrating Active Directory with Office 365

To fully leverage AD in Office 365, follow these general steps:

Ø  Add your domain name to your Office 365 tenant.

Ø  Set up and configure SSO through AD FS

Ø  Install and configure the Directory Sync tool.

Active Directory Federation Services

AD FS is a role in Windows Server. The most prominent and primary reason to use AD FS with Office 365 is that it allows and AD user to seamlessly access office 365 without having to re-supply her credentials again. However, if your organization decides to implement AD FS, the minimum AD FS version required by office 365 is version 2.0; thus, it is often referred to as AD FS 2.0

Single sign-on experience

Ø  Scenario 1: No single sign-on experience

Ø  Scenario 2: User is logged on at work

Ø  Scenario 3: Remote worker on a virtual private network connection

Ø  Scenario 4: Remote worker is not logged on to the corporate network

Steps to Implement SSO using AD FS

Ø  Remediate your AD UPN suffix.

Ø  Install IIS on the server that will host AD FS.

Ø  Protect IIS with an Secure Sockets Layer(SSL) certificate

Ø  Install and configure AD FS 2.0

Office 365 - The Business case for the cloud

The Business case for the cloud

Consumer vs. enterprise

The concepts of consumer and enterprise are important to keep in mind because the cloud has different meanings for different audiences.

A consumer simply might want a convenient way to share files, while an enterprise might need to ensure security and audit trails in addition to the ability to share files. An enterprise might have a strong negative reaction if employees get distracted with non-work related advertising or, worse yet, advertising that might be deemed inappropriate to the mission of the organization.

Office 365

Of all the different types of cloud services, one that stands out very prominently and is clearly designed for the enterprise is the Microsoft cloud known as Office 365.

Now in its third release, Office 365 is the overarching brand name of the Microsoft’s flagship business products offered through the cloud:

·         Office 365 ProPlus      A full version of office

·         Exchange Online         For hosted messaging

·         SharePoint Online      For hosted file sharing and collaboration

·         Lync Online                  For hosted communications

Licensing Overview

There are four core technologies in Office 365; Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and Office ProPlus. As with many Microsoft licensing options, Office 365 provides multiple paths or adoption.

Just like the on-premises versions of the software, there is a standard edition as well as an enterprise edition for Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync. In the online world, these are known as Plan1 and Plan2. Online Plan1 is equivalent to an on-premise standard edition, while Online Plan2 is equivalent to an on-premises enterprise edition. Therefore, Office365 core technologies can be further defined by these plans:

·         Exchange Online

Plan 1, Plan 2

·         SharePoint Online

Plan 1, Plan 2

·         Lync Online

Plan 1, Plan 2

·         Office 365 ProPlus (no different plans)

Office 365 stand-alone purchases

The Plan 1 and Plan 2 categories represent the foundation of the flexible office 365 licensing model. You can purchase any core technology and its associated plan as a stand-alone component.

Office 365 suites

Some organizations might be interested in multiple technologies. For these organizations, Microsoft provides bundled options known as Office 365 suites. There are different types of suites designed for different types of organizations:

·         Enterprise suites

·         Government suites

·         Education suites

·         Kiosk plans

·         Office 365 Small Business

·         Office 365 Midsize Business

·         Office 365 Home Premium

Office 365 Terminology

There are several new terms that are used in Office 365. You will frequently hear these terms when Office 365 is discussed, so it is important to understand what they mean.

Tenant - An Office 365 subscription is often referred as tenant. The tenant refers to the licensing model, but might also refer to the deployed platform.

Tenant name – The tenant name sometimes referred to as the office 365 domain name, is the onmicrosoft.com name of your tenant.

Vanity domain name – Your true domain name is referred to as the Vanity domain name.

Waves – The wave term is Microsoft’s internal reference to releases of Office 365.

Wave 14 refers to Office 365 with 2010 versions of Exchange, SharePoint, Lync, and Office 365 Professional Plus.

Wave 15 refers to Office 365 with 2013 versions.

Hybrid – Hybrid is frequently used in the context of the different Office 365 services. The term refers to  the implementation of on-premises Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync coexisting and working with the respective online deployments.

Government Community Cloud – Microsoft recently announced a special version of Office 365 called the Government Community Cloud(GCC). The GCC is specifically created for United States government entities. A subscription to the GCC is sometimes referred to as G-tenant.

The GCC was introduced to address very specific government regulatory requirements, such as the need for special auditing or for additional background checks and security clearances of Office 365 personnel. These requirements are unique to government entities and are not required for enterprise customers.

Business case for Office 365

Some of the more significant features for an Office 365 business case:

·         Subscription model

·         Economics of scale

·         Scalability

·         Redundancy

·         Core competency

Trust Center

Microsoft is very serious about security and privacy. Therefore, Microsoft created the Office 365 Trust Center to ensure transparent and efficient communication about the security and privacy of Microsoft cloud services.

The Office 365 Trust Center is the one-stop location for all updated privacy and security issues related to Office 365. The Trust Center has five pillars:

·         Privacy

·         Transparency

·         Security

·         Compliance

·         Service Continuity

Upgrading to SharePoint 2013

UPGRADING TO SHAREPOINT 2013

Upgrade Considerations

Each new version of SharePoint presents a new upgrade experience.

What You Can Upgrade

There are many pieces of SharePoint 2010 you may need to upgrade. Here are some different things you can upgrade

       Content

When upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010, the SharePoint 2007 farm had to be at least at service pack 2 (SP2). This caused some real problems for SharePoint 2007 farms that were unstable.  If there were not already at SP2, upgrading the farm to that, just to immediately upgrade to SharePoint 2010, was painful and risky.

When upgrading from SharePoint 2003 to SharePoint 2007 you had three options: upgrade SharePoint 2003 in place to SharePoint 2007; attach your SharePoint 2003 content databases to a SharePoint 2007 farm and upgrade your content; or do a side-by-side, or gradual upgrade, whereby both SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007 were installed and running on the same hardware. The side-by-side approach was the most popular, but there was an option for almost all upgrade scenarios.

When SharePoint 2010 came out we lost the side-by-side upgrade/ gradual upgrade option. Most SharePoint admin adopted the database upgrade method to get SharePoint 2007 content into SharePoint 2010. It worked well, but it required most companies to buy all new hardware. Then SharePoint 2013 was released.

When SharePoint 2013 came out we lost a second upgrade option, the in-place upgrade. The only option left is the database attach method.

 Service Applications

Since you cannot upgrade your SharePoint 2010 farm, you might assume it’s not possible to upgrade your service applications. For companies making heavy use of service applications, such as Managed Metadata, Search, and User Profile Service, this could be a problem. Those service apps represent a lot of information, and even worse a lot of the SharePoint administrator’s time. All is not lost. There are 6 SharePoint 2010 service applications whose databases can be attached to a SharePoint 2013 farm.

ü  Business Connectivity Services

ü  Managed Metadata

ü  Performance Point

ü  Secure Store

ü  User Profile Service

ü  Search

      Customizations

Customizations are bane of any upgrade. The new SharePoint App model was the recommended way for users to add functionality to SharePoint 2013, and that sandbox solutions were just deemphasized. Regardless of the official word, SharePoint 2010 sandbox solutions work just fine in SharePoint 2013. If their functionality can be done thru a SharePoint app, you should consider it.onality can be done thru a SharePoint app, you should consider it.

What You Can’t Upgrade

Although the upgrade options are very good, there are a few things that cannot be upgraded.

Content

If your content or service application database is from SharePoint 2010 RTM or later, you can attach it to SharePoint 2013.

 Service applications

In SharePoint 2010 the Office Web Apps were installed on top of SharePoint 2010 and installed as service applications. In SharePoint 2013 the Office Web Apps are no longer installed on a SharePoint server, and are no longer service applications. Because of this architecture change, they cannot be upgraded. If the office Web Apps are installed and your SharePoint 2013 farm is connected to your Office Web Apps server, your upgraded content will automatically take advantage of it.

The PowerPoint Broadcast site template offered in the SharePoint 2010 OWAs has no equivalent in the 2013 OWAs, so if you have that site in SharePoint 2010 you’ll need to delete it. You can do so in SharePoint 2010 before you upgrade, or in SharePoint 2013 after you attach your database.

FAST Search Center Sites

In SharePoint 2003 the bulk of the FAST functionality was added to SharePoint’s search, and the FAST product was eliminated. Because of that, SharePoint 2013 has no need to upgrade a SharePoint 2010 FAST Search Center site. Its own Search Center is more than capable. Like the PowerPoint Broadcast site, you can delete these before or after you attach the content database to your SharePoint 2013 farm.

Don’t Upgrade Crap
Unused farms or sandbox solutions should be removed in SharePoint 2010 before moving databases to SharePoint 2013.

PowerShell command in your SharePoint 2010 farm to list any installed third-party solutions:

 Get-SPSolution

You can also get this information in Central Administration by clicking System settings -> Manage farm solutions.

Upgrade Content

While there are several steps to successfully upgrade content from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013, the process is relatively straightforward.

Creating the Web Application

Recall that our only option when upgrading content to SharePoint 2013 is to attach a SharePoint 2010 content database to a SharePoint 2013 web application. Therefore, the first step is to create a web application in your SharePoint 2013 farm. This can be the web application in which the data will permanently reside, or a temporary web app used only for upgrading. This flexibility is important is your SharePoint 2010 web application use classic-mode authentication (CBA), rather than claims-based authentication.

In SharePoint 2010, CBA was an option, but a lot of farms continued to use classic-mode authentication as they had in previous versions of SharePoint.

In SharePoint 2013 functionality, claims are an integral part of SharePoint; and it is necessary for most new SharePoint 2013 functionality to work. If your SharePoint 2010 environment uses classic-mode authentication, it will have to be converted to Claims to get the most out of SharePoint 2013. This conversion can be done either in SharePoint 2010 before the upgrade, or in SharePoint 2013 after the upgrade.

Testing the Content Database

There are several steps to attaching your SharePoint 2010 content database to your SharePoint 2013.

 Restoring the Database in SQL Server

When you’re doing the upgrade, you’ll need to shut down all your SharePoint 2010 servers and they do full backups of all your SharePoint 2010 databases.

      Running Test-SPContentDatabase

Now that the databases are restored and configured correctly, you can start testing them to see how nicely they’ll play with SharePoint 2013. When upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010, you had a great way to access the challenges that ahead of you: the preupgrade-check operation in STSADM.EXE. It would inventory your SharePoint 2007 environment and point you to any problems you might have before you upgraded. Unfortunately, this tool is not available when upgrading to SharePoint 2013, but there is a suitable replacement in Test-SPContentDatabase.

You can run this cmdlet on either SharePoint 2010 or on SharePoint 2013 before the database is attached.

Test-SPContentDatabase -Name WSS_Content_tk_com -WebApplicaton http://upgrade.contoso.com

 Running Test-SPContentDatabase

When you’re looking at the output of Test-SPContentDatabase you should start at the top, because fixing issues there will oftentimes fix issues downstream.

Additional Parameters

Before attaching this database and upgrading site collections, there is one additional parameter of Test-SPContentDatabase to cover, ShowRowCounts. This parameter gives you the row count for each table in the content database before it reports the issues.

Attaching the Content Database

After you have tested your content databases and fixed as many issues as you can, it’s time to attach the database. Use the PowerShell cmdlet Mount-SPContentDatabase to mount the content database to the web application that will serve its content. The syntax for Mount-SPContentDatabase is similar to Test-SPContentDatabase, and if you aren’t using any of the optional parameters when testing your database, you can usually just press the up arrow in Powershell, replace “test” with “mount” and press Enter. Here is the command used to mount the database that you tested earlier against your upgrade web application:

 Mount-SpContentDatabase -Name wss_content_tk_com -WebApplication http://upgrade.contoso.com

Upgrading Site Collections

After restoring your content database in SQL, testing it against your SharePoint 2013 web application, and mounting it in SharePoint, you’re in home stretch.

Another difference between the upgrading process in SharePoint 2010 versus SharePoint 2013 is that it is no longer scoped at the web level, but at the site collection level. The upgrade process can also be delegated to site collection administrators, or it can be done by farm administrators.

Unlike SharePoint 2010, you don’t have a Visual Upgrade option. A site collection is either in SharePoint 2010 mode or SharePoint 2013 mode. In place of the Visual Upgrade mode available when upgrading too SharePoint 2010, you now have the option to create upgrade evaluation site collections. When creating an eval site, SharePoint 2013 creates a copy of your SharePoint 2010 site collection and appends its path with “-eval”. You should always upgrade the site collection at the root of a web application first. When you do, its eval site is created at http://webapp/sites/root-eval. Then it upgrades the -eval site to SharePoint 2013. You can use this eval site to see how well the upgrade went and to look for issues.

Log into a SharePoint 2010 site collection as a site collection administrator, where you should see a red bar at the top extolling the virtues of upgrading. Clicking the “Start now” option takes you to the upgrade page, where you can click the option to upgrade the site collection or click the Try a Demo Upgrade link on the right to take the upgrade for a test drive.

After a site collection has upgraded, the site collection Upgrade link no longer leads to a page offering to upgrade the site collection.

Throttling and Governance

As the site collection happen immediately, some other throttles have to be put in place to ensure that the farm is not taken down by multiple upgrades happening at the same time. Site collections with less than 10 MB in content and fewer than 10 webs are upgraded in the web application app pool. This is throttled to five app pool upgrades per web app. Site collections that are larger than 10 MB or have more than 10 webs are upgraded via a timer job. You can adjust these values in PowerShell. They are stored in the SiteUpgradeThrottleSettings property of the web application.

(Get-SpWebApplication http://upgrade.contoso.com). SiteUgradeThrottleSettings

Upgrading Service Applications

Content databases are not the only databases that can be upgraded from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013. There is an exclusive club of service applications whose databases can also be upgraded to SharePoint 2013. Here are the members of that club:

ü  Business Connectivity Services

ü  Managed Metadata

ü  Performance Point

ü  Secure Store

ü  User Profile Service

ü  Search

     

Architecture & Capacity Planning - SharePoint 2013

Architecture & Capacity Planning

New features in SharePoint 2013 includes

Ø  An enhanced social experience, including microblogging, enhanced social experience, communities, and the capability to follow people, items and sites.

Ø  More flexibility regarding how web applications consume services through service applications

Ø  The distributed cache service, which helps relieve the workload on SQL, increase performance, and ease the technical networking complexity of multi-SharePoint server farms

Ø  A new request management service that helps to distribute specific workloads.

Applications that have undergone significant change includes

Ø  Office Web Apps

Is now required to be installed on a separate server and is a shared service between SharePoint 2013, Exchange 2013, and Lync 2013

Ø  FAST Search Server

No longer exists as a unique product (or SKU) which can be purchased from Microsoft – it has been fully integrated into SharePoint.

Ø  2013 Workflow

While all the goodness you came to know and love in SharePoint 2013 is still available to you, SharePoint 2013 Workflow contains new capabilities that require the Azure Workflow Manager.

Names, Names, My Kingdom for a consistent name!

The products formally known as the search server, search server express, and FAST search server no longer exist. Search server and search server express have been discontinued as an available product. Fast server technologies have been fully integrated into SharePoint.

SharePoint Foundation

As an administrator, it is easy to think of the product only in terms of the features you readily see in the browser- such as creating team sites and collaborating on content within lists and libraries, or features such as blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, alerts, and easy browser-based customizations.

Yet underneath all that great functionality is where some of the true power of SharePoint is hidden. Here, the foundation provides developers with a great platform on which to build. Out of the box, it handles storage, web presentation, authorization, user management, and has an interface into the Windows Workflow Foundation – and because all this functionality is easily accessible through the object model, APIs, and web services, it can greatly accelerate a developer’s job.

SharePoint Server 2013

SharePoint Server 2013 is considered the premium SharePoint product. Compared to SharePoint Foundation, it offers additional collaboration and social capabilities and extends the use-case scenarios. Its robust tools enable better aggregation and displaying of content, which makes building grandiose thing, such as, portals much simpler, while better enabling end users to create specific line-of-business solutions for their departments. It also introduces additional web content management tools that enable developers to use server as a platform for building Internet-facing websites.

This is achieved by building on the capabilities introduced by SharePoint Foundation. Anytime you install SharePoint server, the Foundation product is installed automatically as well.

Standard and Enterprise

As in the past, SharePoint Server 2013 is available primarily in two flavors, Standard or Enterprise.

Ø  Standard introduces core functionality such as social, search and advanced web and enterprise content management.

Ø  Enterprise focuses primarily on adding functionality through new service application, business intelligence, line-of-business integration, reporting, and Office client services such as Visio and InfoPath Forms services.

This functionality is provided through one of two licensing models: a client access license(CAL) or a subscriber access license (SAL).

License Type	Purchase Location	Purchase Method	Software Assurance
Client Access License (CAL)	Licensing Reseller	Owned	Optional(Extra)
Subscriber Access License (SAL)	Service Provider	Rented	Included

Hosted SharePoint aka SharePoint for Internet Sites (FIS)

Remember that everyone authorized to access the SharePoint server site needs a CAL.

When building an intranet portal, it is easy to count how many employees you have and to purchase a CAL for each one of them; but when you stand up http://www.company.com and make it available to the world, now how many CALs do you need? There are roughly 1.8 billion people on the internet, and potentially every one of them can visit your website. That’s lot of CALs to buy. Luckily, this is where hosted SharePoint comes in to play. It allows unlimited non-employee access to your SharePoint server. The reason why non-employee is emphasized is because this license does not cover any company employees, which has caused a lot of confusion in the past.

If they are employees, then only on licensing vehicle is available to them CAL or SAL. If they are non-employees, then they can use either the per-user model or the per-server model.

When you are licensing SharePoint in the traditional “on-premises” fashion, you require two licenses:

Ø  One license for each user authorized to use SharePoint and one license for each server instance on which SharePoint is running.

Ø  This second license is called, oddly enough, the server license.  You can now use this server license as the licensing vehicle for any “extranet” users of SharePoint.

Search Server Express

This time around Foundation has the great Search architecture as SharePoint server. No need for a product to bridge the gap so no more Search Server.

Fast Search Server 2010

In SharePoint 2013, FAST is now been fully integrated, and no longer available as a standalone product.

SharePoint Online

There are two models to consider with SharePoint Online: shared and dedicated.

Ø  The shared model provides you with a slice of shared farm and enables you to use SharePoint out of the box. Server-deployed code and customizations are not permitted but sandbox solution and the new app deployment /consumption are available to developers.

Ø  The dedicated model enables you to run your own farm, and you can make approved customizations to the server. Any change must be packaged in a solution package and validated by Microsoft before being deployed to the server. All licenses are bought per user.

Additional Server Planning

Windows Server and Required Additional Software

For production deployments, you will be installing 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) standard, Enterprise, or Datacenter, or the 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2012 Standard or Datacenter.

Windows Vista, 7, and 8

Microsoft has introduced the capability to install SharePoint using a standalone install, for development purposes, on certain versions of windows vista x64 and windows 7 or 8 x64.

SQL Server

The 64-bit editions of SQL Server that are supported are the 64-bit edition of Microsoft SQL server 2012 or the 64-bit edition of SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.

E-mail Servers and SMS Options

For SharePoint to send this e-mail, it needs to be configured with an outbound e-mail server. The SMTP server you point SharePoint at needs to allow anonymous relay from SharePoint. Unfortunately, SharePoint cannot be configured to provide authentication information when sending e-mails.

Sending messages via e-mail is not the only way to inform SharePoint users. SharePoint has become so cool that it can even send text messages; and because SharePoint still is not old enough to drive, you don’t even have to worry about its texting and driving. Once the service is configured, users can choose to have alerts sent to e-mail or text message or both.

Hardware Requirements

Web Servers

Application Servers

SQL Servers

Mixing & matching Servers

Ø  One Server

Ø  Two Servers

Ø  Three Servers

Ø  Four or More Servers

Ø  Server Groups

Office Web Applications - SharePoint 2013

THE OFFICE WEB APPLICATIONS FOR SHAREPOINT

Functionality Overview

Office web apps(OWA) is a browser-based add-on to the SharePoint 2013 farm, delivering Office desktop functionality at the server level. With Office Web Apps, users can open and edit Microsoft’s desktop Office products by using Word Web App, Excel Web App, PowerPoint Web App, and OneNote Web App. The Office Web Apps add-on delivers the same rich Microsoft Office environment that exists in the SkyDrive environment to your private SharePoint farms, with on-premises security and control. The user experience has also been enhanced for desktop computers, mobile phones, tablets, and any device supporting browser functionality.

Additional functionality for multiple SharePoint farms, Lync, exchange 2013, and file shares (via open-form URL)

New Office Web Apps functionality is not limited to a single instance of SharePoint 2013; it now supports multiple SharePoint 2013 farms, Lync 2013, Exchange 2013, and even the capability to open files from a URL. This represents a drastic shift in how the Office Web apps functions to provide its service to multiple applications.

Integrating OWA with Exchange 2013

Exchange Server 2013 leverages Office Web Apps 2013 to preview e-mail office file attachments. Office Web Apps also lends this functionality to the Exchange 2013 Outlook web Application.

Using Office Web Apps, you can work with the following file types in Exchange:

Ø  Word documents

Ø  Excel documents

Ø  PowerPoint documents

Integrating OWA with Lync 2013

Office Web Apps 2013 has also been extended to Lync 2013. This enables the standard file types in SharePoint 2013 to have the same functionality in Lync 2013. PowerPoint Broadcast has been removed from SharePoint 2013 and added to Lync 2013. Lync 2013 leverages Office Web Apps 2013 to deliver presentations via the PowerPoint Web App.

Note that Lync 2013 is the engine behind the PowerPoint Broadcast server while the Office Web Apps provides the viewer.

Licensing and Versions

Office Web Apps offers some significant changes from the previous version in the licensing arena.

There are 2 licenses in Office Web Apps this time around:

Ø  The default Office Web Apps mode is View-only, and it is provided free

Ø  The Other mode enabled both viewing and editing, and this mode must be licensed. Users must have the appropriate license, known as WacEdit, before they can edit in the browser.

New features in SharePoint OWA 2013 [Desktop Enhancements]

User Experience Improvements

Full desktop experience closer to the user via any modern browser

PowerPoint Broadcasting

The Broadcasting functionality is no longer part of SharePoint in any way and is instead integrated with Lync Server 2013.

Web App vs. Excel Services

FUNCIONALITY	EXCEL SERVICES	EXCEL WEB APP
Create or edit workbook in browser	No	Yes
Publish workbooks using external data	Yes	Yes, with limitations
Publish a single item via a web part	Yes	Yes
Refresh workbook data	Yes	Yes
Offers business-level intelligence Excel to use PowerPivot and slicers	Yes	No

Change Tracking

New to Office Web Apps 2013 is the capability to open a document that has Track Changes enabled. Not only can you open the document, but you can also edit the document and your changes will be tracked.

Comments

The Comments feature, available in both Word and PowerPoint, enables users to work collaboratively, annotating a document without changing the text, by adding comments or queries to a separate section of the original document.

Co-Authoring

Co-authoring in Office Web Apps is a handy feature that enables multiple authors to work in a single document simultaneously. This prevents people from getting locked out of the most current document or working on an outdated file version. In addition, the co-authoring functionality enables a single document to track all intended changes, preventing a loss of the last known changes.

Embedding

Embedding is a new feature to Office Web Apps. Previously, when you wanted to open or edit a document in SharePoint, you only had that control from a SharePoint document library. Now, with embedding, you can incorporate the Word Web App, the Excel Web App, and the OneNote Web App directly into the page.

Ink Support

Ink support, a feature that enables users to write and draw in documents using a finger, mouse, or stylus, has long been a part of the Microsoft Office suite. The latest version of Office Web Apps enables Ink elements to be viewed, created, and edited reliably in Microsoft Office Word and OneNote documents via the web browser.

Quick Preview

New to Office Web Apps 2013 is the capability to preview supported documents in a preview window directly from SharePoint 2013 search results. This enables users to quickly determine whether they have found the correct file.

Sharing a Document

SharePoint user can send a link for a document to another user, enabling the recipient to leverage Office Web Apps and preview that document. When sharing documents, you also have the option to specify whether the recipient has permission to edit the document, rather than just view it.

Office Web Apps URLs

Fortunately, users no longer need to work with such unwieldy URLs, as the new Office Web Apps 2013 URL format is greatly condensed. This enables users to easily share a URL directly from the browser.

Default Open Behavior for Documents

Office Web Apps 2013 offers farm and site collection administrator control over how a document is opened at the farm or site-collection level. By default, when OWA 2013 is made available to SharePoint 2013, it opens all Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and OneNote files in the browser, as opposed to the desktop client application.

Ø  Farm-level Document Control

Ø  Site Collections and Document Libraries

Mobile Device Support

Office Web Apps 2013 has been developed around the premise that today’s mobile workforce needs the same robust collaborative experience enjoyed by desktop users.

Office Web Apps allows a mobile user on a Windows Phone, iOS, or Android device to view and interact with documents. This functionality is automatically made available by the default install of OWA. It adds things such as touch support and some smarts such as extra zooms and handling of content that would exceed the screen’s real estate.

Ø  PowerPoint Changes

Ø  Enhanced User Experience

Ø  Technologies Used

Ø  Platform and Browser Compatibility