I do not get excited by new tools just because of their gleaming newness. But I have to say that I am definitely interested by the new SharePoint 2013. I was able to get my own playground via Microsoft’s Office 365 Enterprise Preview and Jasper showed us around in a O365UG session last week. And within just a few clicks I saw functionality that we had just been discussing that very day and that required serious work on our current SharePoint Online based on SharePoint 2010:
- Sites you’re following gives me shortcuts to the site that I actually use a lot. The sites that I created were automatically listed here, I can indicate for a site that I want to follow it, and apparently I get suggestions for sites that I may want to follow. I haven’t seen on what basis these suggestions are made. We were just looking for a way to flag sites as favorites that I want to access easily and from which I want to roll up content.
Following sites in SharePoint 2013
- Quick Edit for bulk editing managed metadata: We just had to manually change the properties of over three hundred items one by one, accompanied by a constant stream of “you’ve got to be kidding me…”, because you cannot edit managed metadata in the datasheet. But lo and behold, the new sharepoint has ‘Quick Edit’ (Thanks for pointing this out Jeroen!)
- Embed code, like youtube videos and other snippets. Our current SharePoint Online strips out embedded code. In the new one, there is a button in the ribbon for it. Now we just need to figure out how to include non-secure content into our secure page…
Embedding code in SharePoint 2013
I am looking forward to getting these and other extra tools in our toolbox. Hmmm, when will we get it? We’re on SharePoint Online, where we hope we get upgrades without too much of a hassle…
