Windows Phone Mobile apps for SP2013

Yesterday I attended the "Building Windows Phone Mobile apps with SharePoint 2013" sesson, here are a few notes I made:

Extending Social with the CSOM in SharePoint 2013

Here is a short summary from the “How to extend Social in SharePoint 2013” session. The session was a technical introduction to the Client Side Object Model (CSOM) of the Social functions in SP2013 (all of the new functions are also available in the server side model).

With the possibilites of the new CSOM, it is easy to build rich custom end user functionality against the social functions - imagine for example a social feed integrated in to the master page and visible on all pages in your site. The three main parts of Social in SharePoint 2013 are:

User Profiles
Following
Feeds

New namespaces and classes are included in the Client Side Object Model that enables us to program against these parts of the social functions:

UserProfiles – resides in the microsoft.sharepoint.client.userprofiles namespace. The most important class is the PeopleManager. The methods in the PeopleManager that probably will be most frequently used are GetMyProperties(), GetMyPropertiesFor(), SetMyProfilePicture(). Updating user profile properties from CSOM is not possible.

Following – resides in the microsoft.sharepoint.client.social namespace. The most important class is the SocialFollowingManager. The methods in the SocialFollowingManager that probably will be most frequently used are GetFollowers(), GetFollowed(), StopFollowing(), Follow().

Feeds – resides in the microsoft.sharepoint.client.social namespace. The most important class is the SocialFeedManager. The methods in the SocialFeedManager that probably will be most frequently used are CreatePost(), DeletePost(), LikePost(), GetFeed().

Device targeting

In SharePoint 2013, Microsoft has built in new capabilities for targeting different devices. The two main technologies that should be used to target mobile devices are Device Channels and Image renditions.

Search driven publishing

There is a very important new concept in SharePoint 2013 publishing: search driven publishing. This is a concept that breaks down site collection boundaries (get search index content from multiple site collections), allows for flexible and dynamic publishing, separates presentation from storage and eliminates large list thresholds. The existing publishing model in SP2010 still works, but the new search driven capabilities gives you great new possibilities.

Using the Content Search Web Part, Catalogs, Managed Navigation, Refiners, Usage Analytics stored in the search index, etc., gives you a truly search driven publishing web.

Notes on the new WCM functionality of SharePoint 2013

Today I attended the session "Best Practices for designing websites with SharePoint 2013". It was a really interesting session that included good demos of the new design process of SharePoint 2013.

Notes from SPC 2013: The extended client side object model

The client side object model has been extended to cover much more of the object model that is available server side. Examples are publishing, search, taxonomy, the new translation service and more. A new API for Windows Phone Application is also available. The client.svc is extended with REST capabilities using the OData protocol, support for XML, JSON, etc. is included. One great benefit is that we can use REST for building queries against lists instead of CAML queries.

Here are some links with more information:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj163886.aspx

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj164060.aspx

Keynote summary

The first session today was the keynote and includede speakers like Jeff Teper, Jared Spataro, Scott Guthrie. Here are some interesting notes from the session:

• A Windows 8 app for SharePoint social feed was released today
• Skydrive Pro is the new way of storing and sharing files. It replaces the local MySite library of SP2010. Windows 8 app och IOS-app finns för Skydrive
• Lots of talk about the integration with Yammer, but a little difficult to see the benefits. Probably, more deepdive information will be given in other sessions. Some interesting information was given: Yammer is free in Office 365, there is pro version for on-premises installations with more functionality that has a cost which was said to be relatively low.
• Office 365 was promoted heavily
• Scott Guthrie had a really good presenation of the new cloud app model
• There are lots of performance enhancements in SP2013: ex. 40% faster loading of the page in the browser, 50% faster server side, Better picture compression - SP2013 graphics reduced to 25% of the SP2010 graphics
• Upgrading from SP2010 to SP2013 should be very simple, and you have the possibility to run an "evaluation" upgrade for testing.
• Site mailboxes and Exchange integration was mentioned
• The new Web Content Management functionality was mentioned. Details will come in a later post after sessions with more deep dive information
• The new capabilities of Search was briefly explained (fast integration, search web part, search-based navigation, etc).

SharePoint Conference 2012

Today is the first day of the SharePoint Conference 2012. It starts with the keynote at 8:30