​Enterprise social network vendor Yammer was a large and fast growing player when Microsoft acquired it in late 2012. Yammer has users in more than 150 countries, and the interface is localized into more than 20 languages. 

At its core, Yammer is a micro-blogging service for employees to provide short status updates. Whereas Twitter asks, “What’s happening?” Yammer asks, “What are you working on?”

Over the years, Yammer’s functional services have expanded a bit to include the ability to express praise for co-workers, create polls, share documents and provision smaller discussion groups. In practice, however, some of those supplementary services aren’t as rich or well-integrated into SharePoint as you might find in competing products.

And you can find a lot of competing products: from collaboration suites that offer tightly integrated social networking services to supplemental “social layer” offerings that compete directly with Yammer.

For this reason, it would be good to ask this question: Is Yammer truly the best social layer for your enterprise?

When Microsoft acquired Yammer shortly before releasing SharePoint 2013, the deal sent shock waves through the marketplace. Soon Microsoft started recommending that you hide SharePoint’s native social services in SharePoint and use Yammer instead. 

Microsoft now promotes Yammer as a social layer over all your Microsoft systems, especially Office 365. Yammer usage can explode within an enterprise that heretofore offered no micro-blogging services, let alone any enterprise social network. People happily check in and often find new or long-lost colleagues in the first few days and weeks.

Yammer boasts a huge customer community. Customers get access to the quite sizable Yammer Community Network, where licensees share their successes, problems, questions and tips with the community as a whole. A small but growing apps marketplace rounds out the picture of a vibrant ecosystem around Yammer.

Smaller departments use Yammer to stay in touch, but enterprise-wide conversations typically decrease. Usage also drops off when employees struggle to place the service within the regular flow of their daily work. Yammer becomes yet another place you have to go, rather than a service you exploit as part of your regular workflow.

In a mobile environment, Yammer and SharePoint usage entails at least two separate native clients.

Yammer has key application: social questions and answers. When a user starts to type a question, Yammer uses a real-time search to auto-suggest already asked questions. That is useful and helps to eliminate duplication in content. 

However, there are no ratings for answers and the original questioner cannot declare an authoritative answer. Search is not really ideal, so as answers build, they become harder to leverage, especially given the scarcity of curation services. Yammer works less for knowledge management and more for really simple, quick responses to simple questions.

Another Yammer key social application: communities of practice. Groups are either public or private. You might also have separate groups in Exchange and SharePoint (via Delve), as well as Communities in SharePoint.

There is single sign-on to Yammer with Office 365.

Larger enterprises find Yammer better suited as a supplement to formal collaboration and social networking efforts rather than as the center. Its simplistic handling of files and limited search facilities limit Yammer’s ability to serve as much more than a simple micro-blogging service.

If you are looking for pure micro-blogging services to communicate across your enterprise and are not looking for ready-to-use applications tailored for specific goals and processes, Yammer offers an obvious alternative to consider, especially for those whose SharePoint plans rest primarily on the Office 365 edition.

Galaxy Consulting has experience with all versions of SharePoint and with Yammer. Please contact us today for a free consultation.

conceptClassifier for SharePoint is the enterprise automatic semantic metadata generation and taxonomy management solution. It is based on an open architecture with all APIs based on XML and Web Services. conceptClassifier for SharePoint supports all versions of SharePoint, SharePoint Online, Office 365, and OneDrive for Business.

Incorporating industry recognized Smart Content Framework™ and intelligent metadata enabled solutions, conceptClassifier for SharePoint provides a complete solution to manage unstructured and semi-structured data regardless of where it resides.

Utilizing unique compound term processing technology, conceptClassifier for SharePoint natively integrates with SharePoint and solves a variety of business challenges through concept identification capabilities.

Key Features

• Tag content across the enterprise with conceptual metadata leveraging valuable legacy data.
• Classify consistent meaningful conceptual metadata to enterprise content, preventing incorrect meta tagging.
• Migrate tagged and classified content intelligently to locations both within and outside of SharePoint.
• Retrieve precise information from across the enterprise when and how it is needed.
• Protect sensitive information from exposure with intelligent tagging.
• Preserve information in accordance with records guidelines by identifying documents of record and eliminating inconsistent end user tagging.

Components

conceptClassifier

Both automated and manual classification is supported to one or more term sets within the Term Store and across content hubs.

conceptTaxonomyManager

This is an advanced enterprise class, easy-to-use taxonomy and term set development and management tool. It integrates natively with the SharePoint Term Store reading and writing in real-time ensuring that the taxonomy/term set definition is maintained in only one place, the SharePoint Term Store. Designed for use by Subject Matter Experts, the Term Store and/or taxonomy is easily developed, tested, and refined.

Term Set Migration tools are also a component of conceptTaxonomyManager that enable term sets to be developed on one server (e.g. on-premise server) and then migrated to another server (e.g. Office 365 server) in an incremental fashion and preserving all GUIDs. This is a key requirement in migration.

conceptSearch Compound Term Processing Engine

Licensed for the sole use of building and refining the taxonomy/term set, the engine provides automatic semantic metadata generation that extracts multi-word terms or concepts along with keywords and acronyms. conceptSearch is an enterprise search engine and is sold as a separate product.

SharePoint Feature Set

Provides SharePoint integration and an additional multi-value pick-list browse taxonomy control enabling users to combine free text and taxonomy browse searching.

Products

These are base platform and optional products that are needed to solve your particular business process challenge and leverage your SharePoint investment.

Search Engine Integration

This functionality is provided via conceptClassifier for SharePoint to integrate with any Microsoft search engine being used within SharePoint. conceptClassifier for SharePoint also supports integration with most non-SharePoint search engines and can perform on the fly classification with search engines calling the classify API.

Search engine support includes SharePoint, the former FAST products, Solr, Google Search Appliance, Autonomy, and IBM Vivisimo. If the FAST Pipeline Stage is required, this is sold as a separate product.

Intelligent Document Classification

This functionality is provided via conceptClassifier for SharePoint, to classify documents based upon concepts and multi-word terms that form a concept. Automatic and/or manual classification is included.

Content managers with the appropriate security can also classify content in real time. Content can be classified not only from within SharePoint but also from diverse repositories including File Shares, Exchange Public Folders, and websites. All content can be classified on the fly and classified to one or more taxonomies.

Taxonomy Management and Term Store Integration

With the Term Store functionality in SharePoint, organizations can develop a metadata model using out-of-the-box SharePoint capabilities. conceptClassifier for SharePoint provides native integration with the term store and the Managed Metadata Service application, where changes in the term store will be automatically available in the taxonomy component, and any changes in the taxonomy component will be immediately available in the term store.

A compelling advantage is the ability to consistently apply semantic metadata to content and auto-classify it to the Term Store metadata model. This solves the challenges of applying the metadata to a large number of documents and eliminates the need for end users to correctly tag content. Utilizing the taxonomy component, the taxonomies can be tested, validated, and managed, which is not a function provided by SharePoint.

Intelligent Migration

Using conceptClassifier for SharePoint, an intelligent approach to migration can be achieved. As content is migrated, it is analyzed for organizationally defined descriptors and vocabularies, which will automatically classify the content to taxonomies, or optionally the SharePoint Term Store, and automatically apply organizationally defined workflows to process the content to the appropriate repository for review and disposition.

Intelligent Records Management

The ability to intelligently identify, tag, and route documents of record to either a staging library and/or a records management solution is a key component to driving and managing an effective information governance strategy. Taxonomy management, automatic declaration of documents of record, auto-classification, and semantic metadata generation are provided via conceptClassifier for SharePoint and conceptTaxonomyWorkflow.

Data Privacy

Fully customizable to identify unique or industry standard descriptors, content is automatically meta-tagged and classified to the appropriate node(s) in the taxonomy based upon the presence of the descriptors, phrases, or keywords from within the content.

Once tagged and classified the content can be managed in accordance with regulatory or government guidelines. The identification of potential information security exposures includes the proactive identification and protection of unknown privacy exposures before they occur, as well as monitoring in real time organizationally defined vocabulary and descriptors in content as it is created or ingested. Taxonomy, classification, and metadata generation are provided via conceptClassifier for SharePoint.

eDiscovery, Litigation Support, and FOIA Requests

Taxonomy, classification, and metadata generation are provided via conceptClassifier for SharePoint. This is highly useful when relevance, identification of related concepts, vocabulary normalization are required to reduce time and improve quality of search results.

Text Analytics

Taxonomy, classification, and metadata generation are provided via the conceptClassifier for SharePoint. A third party business intelligence or reporting tool is required to view the data in the desired format. This is useful to cleanse the data sources before using text analytics to remove content noise, irrelevant content, and identify any unknown privacy exposures or records that were never processed.

Social Networking

Taxonomy, classification, and metadata generation are provided via conceptClassifier for SharePoint. Integration with social networking tools can be accomplished if the tools are available in .NET or via SharePoint functionality. This is useful to provide structure to social networking applications and provide significantly more granularity in relevant information being retrieved.

Business Process Workflow

conceptTaxonomyWorkflow serves as a strategic tool managing migration activities and content type application across multiple SharePoint and non-SharePoint farms and is platform agnostic. This add-on component delivers value specifically in migration, data privacy, and records management, or in any application or business process that requires workflow capabilities.

conceptTaxonomyWorkflow is required to apply action on a document, optionally automatically apply a content type and route to the appropriate repository for disposition.

An additional add-on product, conceptContentTypeUpdater is deployed at the site collection level, can be used by site administrators, and will change the SharePoint content type based on results from pre-defined workflows and is used only in the SharePoint environment.

Where does conceptClassifier for SharePoint fill the gaps?

• SharePoint has no ability to automatically create and store classification metadata.
• SharePoint has no taxonomy management tools to manage, test, and validate taxonomies based on the Term Store.
• SharePoint has no auto-classification capabilities.
• SharePoint has no ability to generate semantic metadata and surface it to search engines to improve search results.
• SharePoint has no ability to automatically tag content with vocabulary or retention codes for records management.
• SharePoint has no ability to automatically update the content type for records management or privacy protection and route to the appropriate repository.
• SharePoint has no ability to provide intelligent migration capabilities based on the semantic metadata within content, identify previously undeclared documents of record, unidentified privacy exposures, or information that should be archived or deleted.
• SharePoint has no ability to provide granular and structured identification of people, content recommendations, and organizational knowledge assets.

Leveraging Your SharePoint Investment

When evaluating a technology purchase and the on-going investment required to deploy, customize, and maintain, the costs can scale quickly. Because conceptClassifier for SharePoint is an enterprise infrastructure component, you can leverage your investment through:

• Native real-time read/write with the term store.
• Ability to implement workflow and automatic content type updating.
• Reduce IT Staff requirements to support diverse applications.
• Reduce costs associated with the purchase of multiple, stand-alone applications
• Deploy once, utilize multiple times.
• Rapidly integrated with any SharePoint or any .Net application.
• Used by Subject Matter Experts, not IT staff, does not require outside resources to manage and maintain.
• Eliminate unproductive and manual end user tagging and the support required by business units and IT.
• Reduce hardware expansion costs due to scalability and performance features.
• Deployable as an on-premise, cloud, or hybrid solution.

Leveraging Your Business Investment

The real value of your investment includes both technology and the demonstrable ROI that can be generated from improving business processes. conceptClassifier for SharePoint has been deployed to solve individual or multiple challenges including:

• Enables concept based searching regardless of search engine.
• Reduces organizational costs associated with data exposures, remediation, litigation, fines and sanctions.
• Eliminates manual metadata tagging and human inconsistencies that prohibit accurate metadata generation.
• Prevents the portability and electronic transmission of secured assets.
• Assists in the migration of content by identifying records as well as content that should have been archived, contains sensitive information, or should be deleted.
• Protects record integrity throughout the individual document lifecycle.
• Creates virtual centralization through the ability to link disparate on-premise and off-premise content repositories.
• Ensures compliance with industry and government mandates enabling rapid implementation to address regulatory changes.

Benefits
​
The combination of the Smart Content Framework™, conceptClassifier for SharePoint, and the deployment of intelligent metadata enabled solutions result in a comprehensive and complete approach to SharePoint enterprise metadata management. Specific benefits are:

• Eliminate manual tagging.
• Improve enterprise search.
• Facilitate records management.
• Detect and automatically secure unknown privacy exposures.
• Intelligently migrate content.
• Enhance eDiscovery, litigation support, and FOIA requests.
• Enable text analytics.
• Provide structure to Enterprise 2.0.

Using metadata in SharePoint makes it easier to find content items. Metadata can be managed centrally in SharePoint and can be organized in a way that makes sense in your business. When the content across sites in an organization has consistent metadata, it is easier to find business information and data by using search. Search features such as the refinement panel, which displays on the left-hand side of the search results page, enable users to filter search results based on metadata.

SharePoint metadata management supports a range of approaches to metadata, from formal taxonomies to user-driven folksonomies. You can implement formal taxonomies through managed terms and term sets. You can also use enterprise keywords and social tagging, which enable site users to tag content with keywords that they choose. SharePoint enable organizations to combine the advantages of formal, managed taxonomies with the dynamic benefits of social tagging in customized ways.

Metadata navigation enables users to create views of information dynamically, based on specific metadata fields. Then, users can locate libraries by using folders or by using metadata pivots, and refine the results by using additional key filters.

You can choose how much structure and control to use with metadata, and the scope of control and structure. For example:

• You can apply control globally across sites, or make local to specific sites.
• You can configure term sets to be closed or open to user contributions.
• You can choose to use enterprise keywords and social tagging with managed terms, or not.

The managed metadata features in SharePoint enable you to control how users add metadata to content. For example, by using term sets and managed terms, you can control which terms users can add to content, and who can add new terms. You can also limit enterprise keywords to a specific list by configuring the keywords term set as closed.

When the same terms are used consistently across sites, it is easier to build robust processes or solutions that rely on metadata. Additionally, it is easier for site users to apply metadata consistently to their content.

Metadata Terms

A term is a specific word or phrase that you associated with an item on a SharePoint site. A term has a unique ID and it can have many text labels (synonyms). If you work on a multilingual site, the term can have labels in different languages.

There are two types of terms:

Managed terms are terms that are pre-defined. Term Store administrators organize managed terms into a hierarchical term set.

Enterprise keywords are words or phrases that users add to items on a SharePoint site. The collection of enterprise keywords is known as a keywords set. Typically, users can add any word or phrase to an item as a keyword. This means that you can use enterprise keywords for folksonomy-style tagging. Sometimes, Term Store administrators move enterprise keywords into a specific managed term set. When they are part of a managed term set, keywords become available in the context of that term set.

Term Set

A Term Set is a group of related terms. Terms sets can have different scope, depending on where you create the term set.

Local term sets are created within the context of a site collection, and are available for use (and visible) only to users of that site collection. For example, when you create a term set for a metadata column in a list or library, then the term set is local. It is available only in the site collection that contains this list or library. For example, a media library might have a metadata column that shows the kind of media (diagram, photograph, screen shot, video, etc.). The list of permitted terms is relevant only to this library, and available for use in the library.

Global term sets are available for use across all sites that subscribe to a specific Managed Metadata Service application. For example, an organization might create a term set that lists names of business units in the organization, such as Human Resources, Marketing, Information Technology, and so on.

In addition, you can configure a term set as closed or open. In a closed term set, users can't add new terms unless they have appropriate permissions. In an open term set, users can add new terms in a column that is mapped to the term set.

Group

Group is a security term. With respect to managed metadata, a group is a set of term sets that share common security requirements. Only users who have contributor permissions for a specific group can manage term sets that belong to the group or create new term sets within it. Organizations should create groups for term sets that will have unique access or security needs.

Term Store Management Tool

The Term Store Management Tool is the tool that people who manage taxonomies use to create or manage term sets and the terms within them. The Term Store Management tool displays all the global term sets and any local term sets available for the site collection from which you access the Term Store Management Tool.

Managed Metadata column

A Managed Metadata column is a special kind of column that you can add to lists or libraries. It enables site users to select terms from a specific term set. A Managed Metadata column can be mapped to an existing term set, or you can create a local term set specifically for the column.

Enterprise Keywords column

The enterprise Keywords column is a column that you can add to content types, lists, or libraries to enable users to tag items with words or phrases that they choose. By default, it is a multi-value column. When users type a word or phrase into the column, SharePoint presents type-ahead suggestions. Type-ahead suggestions might include items from managed term sets and the Keywords term set. Users can select an existing value, or enter a new term.

Social Tags

Social tags are words or phrases that site users can apply to content to help them categorize information in ways that are meaningful to them. Social tagging is useful because it helps site users to improve the discoverability of information on a site. Users can add social tags to information on a SharePoint site and to URLs outside a SharePoint site.

A social tag contains pointers to three types of information:

• A user identity
• An item URL
• A term

When you add a social tag to an item, you can specify whether you want to make your identity and the item URL private. However, the term part of the social tag is always public, because it is stored in the Term Store.

When you create a social tag, you can choose from a set of existing terms or enter something new. If you select an existing term, your social tag contains a pointer to that term.

If, instead, you enter a new term, SharePoint creates a new keyword for it in the keywords term set. The new social tag points to this term. In in this manner, social tags support folksonomy-based tagging. Additionally, when users update an enterprise Keywords or Managed Metadata column, SharePoint can create social tags automatically. These terms then become visible as tags in newsfeeds, tag clouds, or My Site profiles.

List or library owners can enable or disable metadata publishing by updating the Enterprise Metadata and Keywords Settings for a list or library.

In the second part of this post, I will describe managing SharePoint metadata.

The goals of any enterprise content management (ECM) system are to connect an organization's knowledge workers, streamline its business processes, and manage and store its information. 

Microsoft SharePoint has become the leading content management system in today's competitive business landscape as organizations look to foster information transparency and collaboration by providing efficient capture, storage, preservation, management, and delivery of content to end users.

A recent study by the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) found that 53% of organizations currently utilize SharePoint for ECM. SharePoint's growth can be attributed to its ease of use, incorporation of social collaboration features, as well as its distributed management approach, allowing for self-service. With the growing trends of social collaboration and enhancements found in the latest release of SharePoint 2013, Microsoft continues to facilitate collaboration among knowledge workers.

As SharePoint continues to evolve, it is essential to have a solution in place that would achieve the vision of efficiency and collaboration without compromising on security and compliance. The growing usage of SharePoint for ECM is not without risk. AIIM also estimated that 60% of organizations utilizing SharePoint for ECM have yet to incorporate it into their existing governance and compliance strategies. It is imperative that organizations establish effective information governance strategies to support secure collaboration.

There are two new nice features in SharePoint 2013 version that would help you with compliance issues. E-discovery center is a SharePoint site that allows to get more control of your data. It allows to identify, hold, search, and export documents needed for e-discovery. "In Place Hold" feature allows to preserve documents and put hold on them while users continue working on them. These features are available for both on-premises and in-cloud solutions.

2013 SharePoint has been integrated with Yammer which provides many social features. This presents new challenge with compliance. Yammer is planning to integrate more security in future releases. But for now, organizations need to create policies and procedures for these social features. Roles like "Community Manager", "Yambassadors", "Group Administrators" might be introduced.

There are 3rd party tools that could be used with SharePoint for compliance and information governance. They are: Metalogix and AvePoint for Governance and Compliance, CipherPoint and Stealth Software for Encryption and Security; ViewDo Labs and Good Data for Yammer analytics and compliance.

In order to most effectively utilize SharePoint for content management, there are several best practices that must be incorporated into information governance strategies as part of an effective risk management lifecycle. The goal of any comprehensive governance strategy is to mitigate risk, whether this entails downtime, compliance violation or data loss. In order to do so, an effective governance plan must be established that includes the following components:

Develop a plan. When developing your plan, it is necessary for organizations to understand the types of content SharePoint contains before establishing governance procedures. It is important to involve the appropriate business owners and gather any regulatory requirements. These requirements will help to drive information governance policies for content security, information architecture and lifecycle management. 

When determining the best approach to implement and enforce content management and compliance initiatives, chief privacy officers, chief information security officers, compliance managers, records managers, SharePoint administrators, and company executives will all have to work together to establish the most appropriate processes for their organization as well as an action plan for how to execute these processes. During the planning phase, your organization should perform an assessment, set your organization's goals, and establish appropriate compliance and governance requirements based on the results of the assessment to meet the business objectives.

Implement your governance architecture. Once your organization has developed a good understanding of the various content that will be managed through SharePoint, it is time to implement the governance architecture. In this phase, it is important to plan for technical enforcement, monitoring and training for employees that address areas of risk or noncompliance. It is important to note that while SharePoint is known for its content management functionality, there are specific challenges that come with utilizing the platform as a content management system for which your governance architecture must account: content growth and security management.

In order to implement effective content management, organizations should address and plan to manage growth of sites, files, storage, and the overall volume of content. Organizations without a governance strategy often struggle with proliferation of content with no solutions to manage or dispose of it. This is a huge problem with file servers. Over time, file servers grow to the point where they become a bit like the file cabinet collecting dust in the corner of your office. It is easy to add in a new file, but you will not find it later when you need it. The challenge comes from the planning on how to organize and dispose of out-of-date content. 

SharePoint offers the technology to address these challenges, but only if it is enabled as part of your governance plan. Information management policies can be used to automatically delete documents, or you may be using third-party solutions to archive documents, libraries and sites. By default in SharePoint 2013, Shredded Storage is enabled to reduce the overall storage of organizations that are utilizing versioning. Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) can also be enabled in SharePoint or through third-party tools to reduce SharePoint's storage burden on SQL Server.

Tagging and classification plays a key role in information governance. Proper classification can improve content findability. Organizations can utilize SharePoint's extensive document management and classification features, including Content Types and Managed Metadata to tag and classify content. Third-party tools that extend SharePoint's native capabilities can also filter for specified content when applying management policies for storage, deletion, archiving, or preservation. Ultimately, however, the people in your organization will play the biggest role here. As such, your plan should identify who the key data owners are and the areas for which they are responsible. This role is often filled by a "site librarian" or those responsible for risk management in the enterprise.

In order to minimize risk to the organization, it is imperative to ensure information is accessible to the people that should have it, and protected from the people that should not have access. SharePoint has very flexible system of permissions that can accommodate this issue.

Ongoing assessments. In order to ensure that established governance procedures continue to meet your business requirements ongoing assessment is required. Conduct ongoing testing of business solutions, monitoring of system response times, service availability and user activity, as well as assessments to ensure that you have complied with your guidelines and requirements for properly managing the content. The content is essentially your intellectual property, the lifeblood that sustains your organization. 

React and revise as necessary. In order to continue to mitigate risk, respond to evolving requirements, and harden security and access controls, we must take information gathered in your ongoing assessments and use that to make more intelligent management decisions. Continue to assess and react and revise as necessary. With each change, continue to validate that your system meets necessary requirements. 

The risk has never been higher, especially as more data is created along an growing regulatory compliance mandates requiring organizations to ensure that its content is properly managed. 

If you develop a plan, implement a governance architecture that supports that plan, assess the architecture on an ongoing basis, and react and revise as necessary, your organization will have the support and agility necessary to truly use all of the content it possesses to improve business processes, innovation, and competitiveness while lowering total costs.

You may have just finished with upgrading your SharePoint to 2010 version and now we are hearing about SharePoint 2013. What is this all about? And are you going to adopt it or not?

Microsoft releases a major version of SharePoint every three years. SharePoint 2013 is a significant release with many new great features. However, you may find it hard to justify moving on to 2013 release in the near future, unless you can find a business justification for spending the time and money it will take to make the transition.

I am going to highlight new features of SharePoint 2013 to help you with this decision.

Reuse Content Across Multiple Sites

One of the pain points experienced in previous versions of SharePoint was around the fact that content that was created within one site collection could not easily be reused in a separate site collection. Since many organizations required multiple site collections, this limitation created a few cases where duplicate content was required.

With 2013, the concept of Cross-Site publishing has been introduced. When using this feature you can store and manage content in one location and then display the content in other site collections. Using this approach you can display the data in as many places that are needed, while still only managing and maintaining one single point of truth.

Navigation and User Friendly Links

There are new navigation features and the ability to base a navigation structure of an existing term set. This allows organizations to centrally manage their content and to provide meaningful navigation structures within the multiple site collections. You can also create friendlier names when linking to pages and content within SharePoint. 

In previous versions of SharePoint you were required to have longer URLs that contained references to the specific location you were trying to access. Within SharePoint 2013 you can now configure the URL so that it can be more easily referenced.

An example of this would be the following two URLs:

Previous SharePoint versions:
http://www.contoso.com/Pages/Computers.aspx#/ID=453&Source=http%3A%2F1010101

SharePoint 2013 Friendly URL: http://www.contoso.com/Computers/model101

You can see that by removing the required URL parameters for ID and Source you are able to create friendly, memorable URLs for your sites and pages.

Changing Web Parts

There is a need to be able to "gather" and "present" data to users. In previous versions of SharePoint this was done through either the Content Query Web Part or a custom Roll Up solution.

Because of limitations in performance, the Content Query Web Part was restricted in how it could be utilized across organizations. If you had many users who needed to roll up a large amount of content it is likely that you could experience performance issues in using the web part.

SharePoint 2013 adds a new web part that will allow you to provide the same functionality as the Content Query Web Part, but is instead based on the search functionality available within SharePoint. Because this web part is based on search, many of the existing limitations have been reduced.

Design Changes

In SharePoint 2013 there are many new techniques that can be used to aide in the branding and customization of your sites. One of the biggest impacts is the ability to create a SharePoint custom design in any design tool of choice. This means your designers are not limited to only working within SharePoint Designer to build their custom design.

Social Features

The list of new features in Social Enterprise include: micro blogs, activity feeds, community sites, Following, Likes and Reputations.

Community templates have been designed in a way that allows anyone within the organization to join a community and to begin discussions on things relevant to the community. These communities are a great way to share information in a collaborative way, at the same time making intellectual property with the organization available to a larger audience.

In addition to making it easier for people to come together, SharePoint community templates also provide some features that allow for them to be easily managed, including built-in moderation features. This means that you can still maintain a level of control within the discussions that are had over certain sensitive topics.

With the newest microblogging features, users will be able to start threads that include tags of other people and links to relevant content. 

Following adds the ability to "follow" people, sites, documents and topics, with subsequent actions of the followed entity appearing in the user's activity stream. 
By following other users within the organization users will be able to see items within their feeds and follow things that are relevant to them.

My Site

In SharePoint 2013 saving documents into My Sites is going to get a lot easier. There is a single document library, not two as in SharePoint 2010, and the permissions have been simplified, making it easier to share documents with colleagues. My Site document library can be synced with a local drive to enable offline access so you can access your documents even when the server is unavailable.

Mobility

It is easier to access SharePoint content from a mobile device in the 2013 version. Adding to the existing classic view, SharePoint 2013 offers two new views for mobile devices, including a contemporary view for optimized mobile browser experience and a full-screen view which enables the user to have a full desktop view of a SharePoint site on a smartphone device. 

Site Permissions

SharePoint 2013 includes new, simplified sharing based model for site permissions management. 

Themes

SharePoint 2013 will bring richer themes and even the ability to add a background image to the page.

Metro

Microsoft is using the new term "Metro" to describe its new, radical UI design of SharePoint. It is supposed to be easier to use. Microsoft is planning to use Metro as the default UI for SharePoint as well as user tools like Office, Windows, Xbox and mobile devices.

A blog is a Web site that enables you or your organization to quickly share ideas and information. Blogs contain posts that are dated and listed in reverse chronological order. People can comment on your posts, as well as provide links to interesting sites, photos, and related blogs.

Blogs posts can be created quickly, and they often have an informal tone or provide a unique perspective. Although blogs are frequently used for commentary on the Internet, they can be used in several ways in a corporate environment. For example, one of my clients used SharePoint blog for facility maintenance notes.

SharePoint Services provides a blog template that makes creating a blog easy. A blog is a site that contains lists and libraries, such as a list of blog posts, a list of other blogs, and a library for photos. Once you create a blog, you can set up categories, and then customize the blog settings.

When you create a blog, you need to decide whether you want the blog to inherit permissions from the parent site or set up unique permissions manually. In most cases, you should set up unique permissions for the blog to ensure that you can manage its site settings, lists, and libraries independently of its parent site. For example, you might want to grant less restrictive permissions on your blog than on the parent site, such as enabling all authenticated users on your intranet to read and comment on the blog.

Before you start adding content to your blog, you will want to make sure that your site, lists, and libraries are set up the way that you want. For example, you may want to edit the description of a list to help your readers understand its purpose, change permissions for the blog or the Other Blogs list, or track versions of your blog posts so that you can restore a previous version of a post if necessary.

Once you've customized the settings for your blog, then you can set up categories to help you organize your posts. Categories are especially helpful if you create blog posts about different subjects or for different purposes, such as current events, brainstorming for a special project, or a technology or hobby. When posts are organized by categories, people can more easily find the posts that fit their interests by clicking the appropriate category in the Categories list.

To create a blog, you must have permission to create sites. Click "View All Site Content", and then click "Create" on the "All Site Content" page. You can use the "Site Actions" menu to complete this step.

Next set up categories. You can add more categories or edit the category names later. If you don't want to use categories, you can choose "None" for the category when you create a post.

Under "Admin Links", click "All content". Under "Lists", click "Categories". The Categories list appears. If you have not set up categories on the blog before, the list contains category placeholders, such as Category 1 and Category 2. In the "Categories" list, click the "Edit" button to the right of the category placeholder that you want to change. Select the placeholder text, type the new text that you want, and then click OK. Repeat steps 3 through 5 to replace the existing placeholder categories with your own categories. To add additional categories, click "New on the list toolbar, and then type a name for the category in the "Title" box. To delete a category, point to its name, click the arrow that appears, and then click "Delete Item".

Once created, you may want to customize settings for your blog, or for its lists and libraries. In your blog, under "Admin Links", do one of the following:

• to customize the Posts list, click Manage posts;
• to customize the Comments list, click Manage comments;
• to customize the Other Blogs list, click All content. Under Lists, click Other Blogs;
• to customize any other lists or libraries in the blog — such as the Links list or Photos picture library — click All content, and then click the list that you want to change.

On the Settings menu, click "List Settings" or click the settings for the type of library that you are opening, such as "Picture Library Settings". Click the type of setting that you want to change, such as "Versioning" settings or "Permissions" for this list, and then make the appropriate changes. Repeat this procedure for any other settings, lists, or libraries that you want to change.

SharePoint has project management features to manage projects and keep track of project information on a site. You can track team events with a calendar, manage a list of tasks, and log and respond to issues.

A team can use a calendar to track team events, vacations, and conferences, and other events. Team members can connect this calendar to Microsoft Office Outlook 2007, where they can overlay it with their personal calendars to avoid scheduling conflicts. They can copy events back and forth between the calendars.

The team can use tasks lists to manage the work for large projects, such as planning a convention and managing a marketing campaign. Tasks can be set up with a standard list view or as a project tasks list. A project tasks list provides a visual overview, known as a Gantt view, of the tasks and their progress. Templates are available for creating lists in either format — a standard list view or a project tasks list.

The team can use an issue tracking list to track logistical problems that are related to the conference planning, such as registration database issues. A team member logs the issue, and then people record any updates and fixes until the issue is resolved.

Working with lists

When you create a team site, several lists are created for you. These default lists range from a discussion board to a calendar list. You can customize and add items to these lists, create additional lists from templates, and create custom lists with just the settings and columns that you choose.

Lists can include many types of information, ranging from text to dates to pictures. Lists can also include calculations, such as totals or a calculated date, such as a week from today's date.

By using lists, you can do the following:

Track versions - You can track versions of list items, so that you can see which list items have changed, as well as who changed them. If mistakes are made in a newer version, you can restore a previous version of an item.

Require approval - Your organization can specify that approval for a list item is required before it can be viewed by everyone.

Integrate e-mail with a list - If incoming or outgoing e-mail is enabled on your site, some lists can take advantage of e-mail features. Some types of lists, such as calendars and discussions, can be set up so that people can add content to them by sending e-mail. Additionally, Office Outlook 2007 integrates with calendar, tasks, and contacts lists.

Customize permissions - Your organization can specify custom permissions for a list or even a single list item. This feature can be useful, for example, if a specific item contains confidential information.

Create and manage views - Your group can create different views of the same list. The contents of the actual list don't change, but the items are organized or filtered so that people can find the most important or interesting information.

Keep informed about changes - You can subscribe to RSS Feeds of lists and views to see updates to lists in your RSS viewer, such as Outlook 2007. If your organization has set up incoming e-mail, you can receive e-mail alerts when items change.

Manage lists and work offline with lists in Microsoft Office Access 2007 - You can manage lists with database tools and take lists offline with Office Access 2007.

View lists on mobile devices - You can view many lists, such as tasks lists and calendars, and document libraries on mobile devices. To view a mobile list, type /m after the Web address of the site. Mobile views are not available for some list types, such as discussions, and may not display all column types.

Common types of lists for collaboration

The following are some of the more common types of lists your organization can use:

Calendar - Use a calendar for all of your team's events or for specific situations, such as a project calendar or company holidays.

Tasks and project tasks - Use a tasks list to track information about projects and other events for your group. You can assign tasks to people, as well as track the status and percentage complete as the task moves toward completion. A project tasks list displays the tasks with progress bars, known as a Gantt view.

Issue tracking - Use an issue-tracking list to store issues, their status, and resolution. This is a common type of list for tracking support issues or incidents, such as customer service, quality assurance, or technical support.

Discussion boards - Use a discussion board to provide a central place to record and store team discussions that is similar to the format of newsgroups.

Announcements - Use an announcements list to share news and status and to provide reminders.

Contacts - Use a contacts list to store information about people or groups that you work with.

Links - Use a links list as a central location for links to the Web, your company's intranet, and other resources.

Surveys - Use a survey to collect and compile feedback, such as an employee satisfaction survey or a quiz.

Custom - Although you can customize any built-in list, you can start with a custom list and then add just the settings that you want. You can also create a list that is based on a spreadsheet, such as a Microsoft Office Excel 2007 workbook for managing contracts. 

A library is a place on a site where team members can work together to create, update, and manage files. Each library displays a list of files and key information about the files.

Why work with libraries?

Storing your documents in a central location can help your team work on files together, especially if your files tend to be scattered among people's computers or in multiple shared folders on your network.

For example, the Marketing team uses a document library named Marketing Documents for managing its press releases, budget files, contracts, and other types of files. The library stores information that is relevant to the type of file, such as the name of the project that the file is associated with. The Marketing team also uses a slide library to share and reuse slides for presentations.

The Shared Documents library is created automatically when your team creates a new site. You can start using this library right away, customize it, or create other libraries. Your team can also create more specialized libraries, such as slide libraries, picture libraries, and form libraries.

The Marketing team tracks versions in its libraries, so the team has a history of how files have evolved and can restore a previous version if someone makes a mistake. Team members check out documents when they work on them, so that no one else can overwrite their changes.

If you want a workspace where you can coordinate work on a document or a small number of related documents, you can create a Document Workspace site. A Document Workspace site includes a document library in addition to a tasks list, schedules, and a list of workspace members. For storing your team's primary set of documents, which your team uses on a routine basis, use your team's Shared Documents library.

By default, people in the Members group can add files to and edit files in a library. If you don't have permission, contact the person who owns your site or library. If you are a site owner or designer, you can customize the library by changing how the files are displayed and managed.

Some key advantages of working with libraries

The following are some key features of libraries that enable your team to manage its files and work more efficiently. Advanced features for managing content, such as policies on how documents are used and shared, are explained in other topics.

Central location - a library is a central location where your team can update and manage documents. If your team members struggle to keep up with files stored on individual shares or sent in separate e-mail messages, a library can help reduce the chaos.

Checkout - you can check out a file to reserve it for your use so that others cannot change it while you are working on it. If you are using the 2007 Microsoft Office system, you can work with files on your computer, and even take them offline, when you check them out.

Versions - a library can track versions, which provides a version history and enables previous versions to be restored.

Alerts and RSS - you can set up e-mail alerts or subscribe to RSS Feeds so that you are updated on changes to files.

Views - your team can create views that show content in multiple ways that may be especially relevant or meaningful. For example, the Marketing team has views of files grouped by department and contracts that expire this month.

Search - libraries are searchable. For example, you can search on a title or property of a document, such as the document author.

Client integration - If you are running some 2007 Office release programs, such as Microsoft Office Word 2007, you can work with server features directly from the client, such as checking out files, updating server properties, or viewing a version history.

Approval - your library can be set up to require someone to approve files before they are displayed to others. This feature can be helpful if your library contains important guidelines or procedures that need to be final before others see them.

Content types - your team can set up content types for the types of documents it uses most often, such as marketing presentations, budget worksheets, and contracts. The content types include templates as a starting point, for formatting and any boilerplate text and for properties that apply to the documents of that type, such as department name or contract number.

Workflow - your group can apply business processes to its documents, known as workflows, which specify actions that need to be taken in a sequence, such as approving or translating documents.