I recently deployed a SharePoint 2013 Server with BI and Excel Services and was impressed by how powerful this platform is. We had a very old Sharepoint Services Server that is a water down version of SharePoint. This old SharePoint server use to be the main area where people shared documents but it was really behind the times so we decided to build a new SharePoint 2013 server for our intranet.
I have used SharePoint 2007 in the past and really did not enjoy using it. SharePoint is a large multi-headed beast that is extremely powerful if leveraged correctly. I have seen my fair share of terrible overly complex implementations in the past.
SharePoint 2013 is awesome and when you pair it with an Office Web Apps server it really makes it shine.
Benefits
- Create and Edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote documents
- Excel seems to auto-save while your typing
- Closing out of the document still saves your work, even if you don’t press save.
- Farm setup was really easy; wish more installations were like that..
- Real-time multi-user collaborative editing
- Drag and Drop Uploading
- Features work on iPad no app required… woot!
- PDFs can be converted to Word Documents if you try to edit them (works fairly well)
- A little tweaking and WEBM videos can be uploaded and played back.
- Integration with Outlook dependent on IE
Looking forward to
- More editing of document options in Office Web Apps (for SharePoint)
- In some cases actions are still dependent on IE.. Chrome, Safari please?
- I shouldn’t need to open up .config files to make additional changes to standard setting
- Upload Size, Timeout settings, Blob Cache, specific file types
Some screenshots below
1. Let’s create a word document
2. Hey look, I am typing within Office Web Apps for Sharepoint 2013! No desktop software needed. Okay you don’t get all the features but for quick notes or changes its pretty good. This is all being edited within Google Chrome no Internet Explorer here.
3. Here I am viewing a PDF. It automatiacally brings me into the Word App which can view the PDF File. Notice how it shows .pdf in the upper left hand corner. Let’s convert this PDF to word so I can make some changes to it… yes you can do that.
4. In the upper left hand corner click on “Edit In Word”.
5. The Word Web App will ask you if you would like to “Convert” the PDF document to a word document so you can edit it. This process is very easy and can save your organization a lot of money. For most documents this works very well I was surprised how easy and well the conversion went.
6. After the conversion the file can be edited. I made various changes to it such as; adding text and formatting changes. My job is done.
