SharePoint 15 what is new

I believe everyone know what is SharePoint 15 by this time. But, till few days back I didn't get time to completely go through the technical documentation released few months ago. After read the SharePoint 15 Interop API documentation and some information from my friends and SharePoint team, I am posting some concepts which helps to understand better to my readers.

And the new version of SharePoint 15 will be released the early days of 2013 as far as the information I have and it also called SharePoint 2013 [Year number] and code name or version is [SharePoint 15]. The main areas the SharePoint team is concentrating on the Social Networking and the SharePoint App store just like Apple App store etc. Which is good thinking from SharePoint team to try new things and better concepts like these to make a good reviews in the market.

And there is no documentation about the API, but from the classes and the methods, properties exists in the API, I am documenting the concepts and which all are my personal opinions. You can download the technical preview here SharePoint 15 Interop API Download.

The main things which I identified in the new release are:

• Improvements in the Client Object Model
• SharePoint App Market Place
• Minimal Download Strategy [Technology]
• OAuth 2.0 Authentication
• Ability to integrate or platform for SharePoint education. [You can integrate the Moodle etc directly.]

Client Object Model: The Client Object Model is a great concept which was released with SharePoint 2010 version and it helps to solve many problems we face in SharePoint development. But, the 2010 API version don't have the support to make the search queries through Client Object Model. We used to use JQuery to make queries to SharePoint search WCF calls and get the results. But with SharePoint 15 release we have the Search functionality integrated in Client Object Model. With this new API, we can simply make queries to Search service without writing extra code.

App Market Place: This is the big and new feature in SharePoint 15. From the documentation,

• we see the class named "SPApp". This class helps to install the App to SharePoint App Store.
• And the App store can be accessed through SPAppCatalog class. So, with these new classes you can create an App and install them into SharePoint.
• These apps have their own structure and deployment methods. These are not SharePoint solution packages and are not SharePoint web parts. It has own new format comes with SharePoint 15.
• From the description we have understand that the Apps are scoped to SPWeb object only. Each SPApp can be accessed through SPAppInstance and their scope is restricted to SPWeb only.
• It has its own permissions. OAuth is one of the technique and will discuss later in this post.
• It has its own licensing. The SPWebApplication class has a new property called "IsUserLicensedForEntity" which checks the current logged in user has permissions to access the specific entity.
• Apps can have their own databases.

MDS [Minimal Download Strategy]: I think very less people hear about this. This is one of the most popular technique many social websites and heavy load page websites are using these days. Now, SharePoint is implementing based on it and which is a great advantage. With SharePoint 2010 the page load performance is increased much compared to earlier versions. Now, with this technique the response time and load time will be more faster. The main secret behind MDS is, it uses less bandwidth than regular implementations. But how is it different??? In Microsoft words,

"The minimal download strategy will use a single .aspx file (start.aspx) for your pages, with the actual URL encoded in the text following the hash mark (‘#’). When navigating from page to page, only the changes between two compatible pages will be downloaded. Fewer bytes will be downloaded and the page will appear more quickly."

I hope all devs understood it by seeing the hash mark. :) Yes, it only downloads the content changed from previous page to currently requested page and which obviously improves the performance.

OAuth 2.0 Authentication: I hope the people who worked with Apps knew about OAuth. In real world to access the data through apps which needs your permissions, you have to use the OAuth technique. Now, SharePoint has the built in platform to support OAuth 2.0 authentication which is a good thing. The new namespace which has this OAuth implementations is "Microsoft.SharePoint.IdentityModel.OAuth2"

SharePoint Education: We know SharePoint is also widely using in educational institutions, schools, universities. So, to make their life happy, SharePoint also has a new application/templates for SharePoint education. I believe they have some built-in support for popular free e-learning platform like Moodle etc. We have to wait till next year to get more details.

Other than these, I heard from friends, bloggers below are some new features which are releasing with new version. But, there are no such information I have found over internet.

• Versioning of SharePoint sites?
• More information from search API
• SAP integration
• Ability to merge documents?
• Metro interface

Stay tuned to my series of posts on this. I will post as soon as I hear any new concepts and information about SharePoint 15. Please share with me if you know any information about it through comments.