The new version of Office 365 was released at February 27. This version includes all 2013 products such as Exchange, Lync, Office and SharePoint. The existing Office 365 tenants, with the 2010 versions, are going to be updated by Microsoft. Microsoft is starting with the oldest Office 365 tenants. Let's say you were one of the first customers after the first Office 365 release, you could be updated pretty soon. Keep an eye out for an
In upcoming articles I am going to discuss the following SharePoint update topics:
For this article I am going to focus at the My Site.
My Site update to SharePoint 2013
In the previous article I talked about updating the site collections to SharePoint 2013. Only the site collection administrators have the option to upgrade each site collection. They also have the option to see a preview of the site collection in 2013 mode. How does this work with the My Site? The information I received from Microsoft is as following:
"Just as the regular site collection, if you want to use a new feature on My Site, you will need to run a site collection upgrade on the My site collection."
Are you the Office 365 administrator? You have the power to update the My Site Host. This results in an immediately update of
all My Sites. This approach is only advised if you instructed all your users about the new and improved My Site. Please don't forget this! Can you imagine being and end-user and starting work on Monday with a whole new My Site you have never seen before or heard of. Believe me, that is going to hurt the adoption of your SharePoint portal.
You can also let every user update his or her personal site:
"Each site owners can upgrade individual personal sites separately."
Internally at Wortell we were worried about the update because of a couple scenario's:
Scenario 1
What happens with the Personal and Shared documents? Looking at the fact that the SP2013 My Site only has one document library.
Scenario 2
The SharePoint 2010 My Site contained additional lists and libraries. What would happen after the update?
A couple of colleagues actually tested the scenario's with a SharePoint On Premises environment. The following happened:
Scenario 1
The Shared and Personal document transferred but were only accessible through the Site Contents menu. This means that the users have to move all their documents to the new SharePoint 2013 document library.
Scenario 2
The new lists and libraries didn't transfer after the update. This meant all content was lost!
Don't be afraid! I got confirmed this won't be the case with Office 365:
"After the service upgrade, the Shared document library, the Personal
document library, my custom document library, and the custom list are
all appear in the Site Contents page. All the documents and list items
have been kept after the service upgrade. See the following picture for
the test result"
That's great news!
Please click
here to view the whole conversation I had with Microsoft staff on the Office 365 forums. I really want to compliment the Office 365 staff for being really helpful!
New features and look and feel
The My Site in 2013 is completely different and contains many new and improved features.
- SkyDrive Pro
- Sites
- Newsfeed
SkyDrive Pro
SkyDrive Pro is the replacement of the My Content section in the SharePoint 2010 My Site. The Shared and Personal documents are replaced by one library. Every user controls this library and decides which users can access certain documents. Click
here for more information.
Sites
The sites tab has multiple functions. You can allow your users to create new sites. Click
here for more information about the self service site creation. Every site you follow is displayed here. You can view this as your personal favorites (comparable to bookmarks in any Internet browser). There are also sites suggested by SharePoint. Click
here to read more.
Newsfeed
This is were it gets tricky. The newsfeed is the new central Social hub of SharePoint 2013. The newsfeed allows you to leave updates, use microblogging features such as hash-tags and even mention colleagues. You can also follow documents and receive updates from community sites. This sounds fantastic but there is one
issue: Yammer. Microsoft acquired Yammer over a year ago and this is going to be the new Social tool for SharePoint and other Microsoft products. Please read the
announcement made at March 19th. There are still a lot of questions and uncertainty. I advise to read Dan Holme's latest blog:
http://sharepointpromag.com/blog/sharepoint-and-yammer-unanswered-questions
Personally, I find it very difficult to give an advise about using SharePoint 2013 Social or start using Yammer. Let's say you are starting with SharePoint Social, what will happen after Microsoft decides its going to be Yammer only? Or you able to migrate your data? Or is everything going to be lost? What's the point of even starting with Social if that's going to be the case! Aaaagh!
Microsoft advise is to go with Yammer but Yammer doesn't have all their data in one central data center. This is the case with Office 365. Do you work in the Netherlands? Your data is in the Office 365 data center. This isn't the case with Yammer. If that's not an issue, than you should go with Yammer.
I hope this article has been useful! Please leave a comment if you have any questions or remarks.
10:51 PM
Jasper Oosterveld
