What are the different ways SharePoint 2013 can be installed and can be used?

There are mainly 3 different ways to install SharePoint 2013

•         SharePoint Foundation
•          SharePoint server
•          Office 365. 

SharePoint foundation

SharePoint foundation is mainly solution for those organizations who are manageable, secure and web collaboration platform. Basic collaboration feature has been provided with SharePoint foundation.

1.          SharePoint foundation is free installer provided by Microsoft and represents mainly the foundation parts of SharePoint.
2.         Features included administration, security , user and Team site collaboration and a number of apps (like document libraries and list )
3.         In short, it provides a basic set of features that enable you to get to both starting using and development for SharePoint.

Main features of SharePoint foundation

1. Effective document and task collaboration: In a central location all the accesses of data has been provided by the team site.
2. Reduces the headache of implementation and deployment resources: For windows server customers, SharePoint foundation server is available as a free download which helps them for their implementation time and cost are greatly reduced.
3. There will be better control on important data in the organization: Features for data such as information management and security has been provided by SharePoint Foundation.
4. Collaboration: you can customize and extend SharePoint foundation web to use for collaboration.

So basically content storage and collaboration are the two basic core features provided by SharePoint Foundation.  It is used for the team and small organization who wants to improve their work with one another in a much secure, easy to use, and collaborative work space.

SharePoint Server

SharePoint server offers lots of rich and advanced features compare to SharePoint foundation, which you can use for your organizations solutions.

Main features of SharePoint server.

1. Web content management: SharePoint server supports web content management system where you can submit the content on the internet.
2. Advance search: Search facility is available with SharePoint server versions offers more flexibility. You can configure customized search results pages with customized search web parts. 
3. Enterprise services: using these services you can build custom solutions quickly and easily.
4. Business Connectivity services: Using this feature you can connect to external source data source and display business data via user profiles, web parts or SharePoint lists.
5. Records Management: SharePoint server provide excellent support for content management which brings uniformity, scalibility, feasibility.
6. Social Networking and computing:  Enhance feature of social networking has been introduced in SharePoint server 2013

Office 365

SharePoint online is the term used when we use SharePoint from office 365. It is third party service and fully based on cloud.  Organizations can use this option as an alternate solution for the on-premise deployment of SharePoint.

Main Features of office 365

·         Licensing of SharePoint online through office 365 based on multiple factors like number of users, the quantity of data you need to store and what are features you required.

·         Rich applications can be developed both as SharePoint-hosted and cloud-hosted apps without investing cost on on-premise SharePoint development.

·         You can develop .Net applications using C# and visual basic and deploy onto SharePoint as .WSP or .Apps . HTML5 and JavaScript lighter weights apps also you can deploy.

·         As a developer you have all rights to customize any of the SharePoint editions so whether it is SharePoint foundation, SharePoint server or office 365 (SharePoint online) 

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Hardware requirements for SharePoint 2013

Hardware requirements for SharePoint 2013

Single Server: Both SharePoint installation and Database resides on the same server.

SharePoint 2013 server software requirements:

1. Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Standard, Enterprise, or Datacenter (64 bit edition)
2. Windows Server 2012 Standard or Datacenter (64 bit edition) Hotfix for Windows Server 2008 R2 for SharePoint parsing process (KB 2554876)
3. Hotfix for IIS7.5 (KB 2708075)
4. Hotfix for WCF process (KB 2726478)
5. Prerequisites will be installed by Microsoft SharePoint Products Preparation Tool
6. Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 (KB 2759112) for .NET 4.5 RTM
7. Windows Server 2012 (KB 2765317) for .NET 4.5 RTM 

Database SharePoint 2013 server software requirements:

1. SQL Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (64 bit edition)
2. Microsoft SQL Server 2012 (64 bit edition)
3. Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1) Standard, Enterprise, or Datacenter (64 bit edition)
4. Windows Server 2012 Standard or Datacenter (64 bit edition)
5. Hotfix for Windows Server 2008 R2 for SharePoint parsing process (KB 2554876)
6. Hotfix for IIS7.5 (KB 2708075)
7. Hotfix for WCF process (KB 2726478)
8. Prerequisites will be installed by Microsoft SharePoint Products Preparation Tool
9. Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 (KB 2759112) for .NET 4.5 RTM
10. Windows Server 2012 (KB 2765317) for .NET 4.5 RTM
11. .NET Framework version 4.5

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Latest SharePoint 2013 Interview Questions and Answers

SharePoint 2013 Interview Questions and Answers :

What is new SharePoint 2013?
Ans: SharePoint 2013 is the next Version of Microsoft’s famous Collaboration and Document Management Software called SharePoint.This Version follows SharePoint 2010 that was released back in May 2010.SharePoint 2013 was released (as Preview and RTM versions) with some new & exciting features such as Real Time Social Feed,Shredded Storage,SharePoint Apps,Cross-site publishing,Out-of-Box PDF support,Minimal Download Strategy and lot more.See SharePoint 2013 Tutorial for Beginners to know more.

Why should a Company Migrate to SharePoint 2013?
Ans: Microsoft has added some Incredible features to SharePoint 2013 that can be of huge benefit to all the Companies that use SharePoint on a large scale. Most of the new Features are Introduced for Improving SharePoint Performance (for both Browser and SQL) and to enhance the famous Web Content Management Capabilities.There is an Improvement for all – end users, developers and IT administrators.Check out our free ebook on 101 New and Improved Features in SharePoint 2013.

What is the Licensing Model for SharePoint 2013?
Ans: With SharePoint 2013 Microsoft has Introduced User License Enforcement Capabilities – that means different licenses can be assigned to different users based on Active Directory security groups that are added in.A group of admins for example would need features that are offered by Enterprise license but a group end users on the other hand can work with Standard license and would not need to pay more.By default the User License Enforcement is disabled and must first be enabled to begin assigning, using, and implementing user licensing capabilities.For more details see Introducing the Dual License Model in SharePoint 2013.

What is the new Analytics Processing Component in SharePoint 2013
Ans: The Analytics Processing Component in SharePoint Server 2013 analyzes both the Content and the way users interact with it.The results from the analysis are added to the items in the search index to be used by Search Webparts,Recommendation Reports,Most Popular Items reports and other WebParts.

What analysis are done by Analytics Processing Component in SharePoint 2013
Ans: The Analytics Processing Component runs two main types of analyses: Search analytics and Usage analytics. Search analytics analyzes content in the search index, and usage analytics analyzes the user actions.

What are Device Channels in SharePoint 2013
Ans: With device channels in SharePoint 2013, you can render a single publishing site in multiple ways by using different designs that target different devices for example mobile devices etc.These device channels can each be given a different master page and CSS file to give users a more optimal viewing experience.For more Info see Plan device channels in SharePoint Server 2013

What is Device Channel Panel Control in SharePoint 2013
Ans: Device Channel Panel is a new control that you can include in a page layout to control what content is rendered in which channel. The Device Channel Panel is a container that is mapped to one or more channels.

How does Backward Compatibility works in SharePoint 2013
Ans: In SharePoint 2013 with the new “CompatabilityLevel” parameter of Install -SPSolution cmdlet you can now deploy your .wsp or Solution to either 14 hive or 15 hive or both. For more Info on CompatabilityLevel see SharePoint 2013 – Deploy solutions to 14 and 15 Hive with Install-SPSolution

What’s new with Web Content Management in SharePoint 2013
Ans:For End users and Contributors, some very Interactive features such as Drag and Drop of documents,Convert to PDF(Print to pdf),Quick edit (datasheet view),Document Library Search(Find a File),Get Embed code for documents and Out of box PDF Support etc. has been added in Web Content Management.

How does SharePoint 2013 Improve Performance?
Ans: SharePoint 2013 Introduces Minimal Download Strategy and Distributed Cache Service to Improve Page Load; and Shredded Storage to Improve Storage required for saving files.

What is Minimal Download Strategy?
Ans: Minimal Download Strategy in SharePoint 2013 improves rendering performance when browsing content where large parts of the page do not change providing a more fluid navigation experience. For example when navigating between a site’s home page and Shared Documents page only the Content that has changed between the source and destination page (controls and placeholders in the content area) are downloaded and Url subsequently updated where the chrome is persisted. For more Info on Minimal Download Strategy see Introduction to Minimal Download Strategy in SharePoint 2013

What is Distributed Cache Service?
Ans:The Distributed Cache service provides caching features in SharePoint Server 2013. The microblog features and feeds rely on the Distributed Cache to store data for very fast retrieval across all entities. The Distributed Cache service is built on Windows Server AppFabric, which implements the AppFabric Caching service. Windows Server AppFabric installs with the prerequisites for SharePoint Server 2013.

What is Shredded Storage?
Ans: With Shredded Storage feature enabled, every document and the Changes made to the document, is stored in SQL as multiple “Shredded BLOBS“. Whenever a new Version of a document is Created, only the BLOBs of the document that Corresponds to the Change are saved as opposed to the entire document as a new version.This feature helps to lower down the amount of storage required for saving files.

One more thing- while it does have the capability of reducing the storage footprint significantly vs previous products, Microsoft has stated that the primary goal of the feature is to reduce the amount of communication between the client and SharePoint when performing updates to documents, increasing responsiveness and reducing server/network/disk impact. Storage savings is a byproduct, however smaller files may actually consume more space than if Shredded Storage was not enabled, depending on the configured value of FileWriteChunkSize.

How does Shredded Storage Work?
Ans: Every Document in SharePoint 2013 is now stored as multiple “shredded BLOBS” in the new “DocStreams” data table.Whenever a new Version of a document is created, a new Record is written in this data table that contains only the “Shred BLOB” of the original document that corresponds to the Change, merged with the new Changes.In other words a new Blob with Changes is added as a new row in the table.Each BLOB that gets added Contains a numerical Id that represents the source BLOB.At the end it is the job of BLOB Index to keep the track of Blobs and to create a full file with the Combination of entries that point to the unchanged shreds of the previous version(s) and the entries that point to the newly added Changed shreds.

What is the new Out-of-box PDF Support?
Ans: SharePoint 2013 now offers Out-of-box PDF Support and what that really means is that PDF icon is now natively supported and PDF when opened in SharePoint 2013 will try to open in the Adobe Reader and prompt user to either checkout & open or open the file in PDF directly.

What is Embed Code and How do you get Embed Code for a document?
Ans: SharePoint 2013 provides a support to get “Embed Information” for documents and other digital Content types such as Videos,Audios etc. to be added on any SharePoint Page or in a Microblogging feed.

What are the new “Digital Content types”?
Ans: In SharePoint 2013 Microsoft has introduced a new set of content types called “Digital Asset Content Types” for better use of Audio, Video and Images as Web Content.These content types can be added to any library and can be used as a one of the items files.

How does the new Video Content type work in SharePoint 2013?
Ans: Video Content type added to SharePoint 2013 is a very useful addition for Content Authors.The Improved Asserts Library provides support for Video Content Types and provides various Out-of-Box views like “Thumbnails” and Out-of-Box pages like “Video Page” to View Videos in a very Interactive way.

Videos in SharePoint 2013 are Organized in a manner similar to “document sets”. SharePoint Creates a stub (think of it as a folder) to hold a video and all the related contents, such as user-defined properties, thumbnails, video renditions, and other documents related to the video. You can use the Video Content Type in Asserts Library properties.

What players are Supported for playing SharePoint 2013 Video files.
Ans: SharePoint 2013 supports two Video players – HTML 5 player and a Silverlight player.SharePoint chooses the player automatically, depending on the video format that it encounters in the video set (the collection of files that are related to the video). If the format can’t be played on the HTML 5 player, the SharePoint uses the Silverlight player.

What is “Image Renditions”?
Ans: Image renditions enable you to render a single image in multiple ways. An image can be displayed in various sizes or with different cropping.

What is the new IFrames support in SharePoint 2013?
Ans: SharePoint 2013 was added with the new Out-of-Box Support for IFrames.Admins can now embed dynamic content from other sites, such youtube videos or maps to any SharePoint site by using IFrames. Admins would need to add the Domain for the external site in “HTML Field Security” first.For more Info on IFrames see How to use IFrames in SharePoint 2013 see How to use IFrames in SharePoint 2013

How would you use “Related Items” Column?
Ans: A new Column type “Related Items” has been Introduced in SharePoint 2013 where you can add reference to another Item or a document from any List\Library as a related entity to one of the Item using Related Items column.

What Changes are Introduced in SharePoint 2013 Publishing
Ans: SharePoint Server 2013 has two ways that you can make published Content available to users: author-in-place and cross-site publishing.
Author-in-place – When users use a single site collection to author content and make it available to readers
Cross-site collection publishing –

What is Cross-Site Publishing?
Ans: Cross-Site Publishing is a new Feature in SharePoint Server 2013 that enables you to reuse content across site collections,web applications, and farms.You can use cross-site publishing to Create branded Internet, intranet and extranet publishing sites.

What’s new with Social Capabilities in SharePoint 2013
Ans: In SharePoint 2013 Microsoft has Introduced new Social Capabilities to let users Collaborate Socially in the Company.My Sites have been enhanced Incredibly to Integrate these Social features.Some of the new Features added are Community Sites,Microblogging,Newsfeed\Site feed,Follow people and Follow Sites.

Hope this article will help you for your preparation of SharePoint 2013 Interviews. All the best :)

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How to Generate Random Password

From security point of view we need to create the unique passwords so no one can easily guess it.
To fulfill these features we can make use of Random class and generate the random numbers which is unique.

Here I am going to use one label, one text box and one button:

<form id="form1" runat="server">

    <div>   

    &nbsp;

        <asp:Label ID="lblPass"runat="server"Text="Random Password : "></asp:Label>

&nbsp;&nbsp;

        <asp:TextBox ID="txtRandom"runat="server"></asp:TextBox>

        <asp:Button ID="btnRandomNum"runat="server"onclick="btnRandomNum_Click"

            Text="Generate Password" />

   

    </div>

    </form>

</body>

</html>

In code behind we will write the actual logic on button click event as below:

protected voidbtnRandomNum_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

        {

                    

            //Set password length

            string PasswordLength = "12";           

            //Characters allowed in the new password

            string allowedChars = "";

            allowedChars = "1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0";

            allowedChars += "A,B,C,D,E,F,G,H,I,J,K,L,M,N,O,P,Q,R,S,T,U,V,W,X,Y,Z,";

            allowedChars += "a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,u,v,w,x,y,z,";

            allowedChars += "~,!,@,#,$,%,^,&,*,+,?";

           

            //Create an array

            char[] sep = { ','};

            string[] arr = allowedChars.Split(sep);

            string randomPass = string.Empty;

            string tempPass = string.Empty;                     

            Random rand = new Random();

                      

            for (int i = 0; i < Convert.ToInt32(PasswordLength); i++)

            {

                tempPass = arr[rand.Next(0, arr.Length)];

                randomPass += tempPass;                                                          

                txtRandom.Text = randomPass;

            }

        }

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How to insert value into SharePoint list programmatically?

Inserting value into SharePoint list programmatically:

If we have list already created in SharePoint and want to add / insert value pro grammatically into the list then will use the below code.

Suppose we have a list called UserAccess and it has FirstName, LastName , Email and Status columns and we want to insert value to the list then we can use below code

protectedvoid Page_Load(objectsender, EventArgs e)

{

    SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges(delegate()

    {

       using (SPSite spSite = new   

       SPSite(SPContext.Current.Web.Site.WebApplication.Sites[0].Url))

       {

             spSite.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;

             using(SPWeb spWeb = spSite.OpenWeb())

             {

                 spWeb.AllowUnsafeUpdates = true;

                 SPList spList = spWeb.Lists.TryGetList("UserAccess");

                 varitemId = 0;

                 SPListItemlistItem = null;

                 if(itemId == 0)

                 {

                      listItem = spList.AddItem();

                 }

                 else

                 {

                      listItem = spList.GetItemById(itemId);

                 }

                 listItem["FirstName"] = txtFirstName.Text;

                 listItem["LastName"] = txtLastName.Text;

                 listItem["Email"] = txtEmail.Text;

                 listItem["Status"] = "Pending";

                 listItem.Update();

                 spWeb.AllowUnsafeUpdates = false;

              }

              spSite.AllowUnsafeUpdates = false;

           }

         });

  }

How to insert value into SharePoint list programmatically?

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How to configure Outgoing E-Mail Settings for SharePoint 2010 / 2013 to using Office 365 or GMail Relay

Configuring Outgoing E-Mail Settings for SharePoint 2010 / 2013 to using Office 365 or GMail Relay :

To achieve this configuration - Install SMTP role on one of the Servers in the domain which has access to internet, since we need to connect to smtp.office365.com this is must and need to follow.

Configuration of Outgoing E-Mail Settings for SharePoint 2010 / 2013 to using Office 365 or GMail Relay is used for any Developer, SharePoint Client or User.

They need an SMTP server to send e-mails to Internal or External SharePoint site users from a Workflow, Alerts, Request Site Access, and/or Any custom Apps that use SharePoint Outgoing e-mail setting to send e-mails.

The Steps are simple to follow as follows-

1. Install SMTP Role (Windows Server 2008 and 2012)
2. Configuring SMTP Service to Relying to Office365/Gmail SMTP
3. Testing the SMTP Service Connection
4. Configuring Outgoing E-Mail settings in SharePoint Servers
5. Test Sending an E-mail from SharePoint Site

The detailed steps are also shown in the below screen.

Install SMTP role-

Configuring SMTP Services-

 

Configuring Outgoing E-Mail settings in SharePoint Servers

1. Go to Central Administration -> System Settings –> Configure Outgoing Email Settings
2. Enter the FQDN of the local SMTP server (Mail.Dev.local)
3. Enter the From and Reply-to Address, and Select Character set, click OK to save settings

 

I hope this will be helpful to you to configure Outgoing E-Mail Settings for SharePoint 2010 / 2013 to using Office 365 or GMail Relay :)

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Timer jobs in SharePoint 2010

Timer Jobs

Timer Jobs are very important thing in SharePoint 2010. Timer Jobs are workhorses of SharePoint. Timer Jobs are nothing but a defined XML file which is stored in Configuration database which are executed by Windows Service - "SharePoint Timer".

In SharePoint 2010, the Timer Job is linked under the Monitoring section in Central Administration.
SharePoint 2010 introduces the capabilities to assign a preferred server for running a timer job against specific configuration database.

Whenever you want to deploy your timer job into WebApplication scope, you will get an "Assembly cannot be loaded" loaded exception. This is because of whenever you are trying to deploy a timer, the timer will search for the DLLs from the GAC and not from the Bin of the Web Application. 

Hence, always, the timer job should be deployed on the GlobalAssemblyCache.

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