CRUD operations using Share Point 2013 REST API's

Share Point 2013 REST (Representational State Transfer)API can be used to communicate with share point remotely. Its similar like what we learned in CSOM (Client Side Object Modal) share point 2010

To access share point list library data you need to implement REST FUL requests using OData (Open Data Protocol)  standard. Share Point 2013 provides some commands to be used with REST services for performing CRUD operations.

Operation	Command	Description
Read a resource	GET	Read data from share point
Create or update a resource	POST	Write data to share point
Update or insert a resource	PUT	Use PUT and MERGE operations to update existing SharePoint objects.
Delete a resource	DELETE	Use the HTTP DELETE command against the specific endpoint URL to delete the SharePoint object represented by that endpoint.

 
CRUD operation done on list using the REST

Use below JS reference to for REST API 

Hope this will help in enhancing your share point knowledge..!

New Era in Share Point 2013 workflows

In Share point 2013 workflow has changed drastically, it’s very  impacting change,We can say that its now new era for Share Point workflows. You can check more information at Technet.

SharePoint Designer 2013 now includes everything you need to build these new workflows, with some nice improvements over the previous version:

• Visual development tools using a Visio 2013
• New building blocks like App Step, Stage and Loop
•  Ability to call web services  without writing any code

Workflow runs under Windows Azure Workflow. This will take the workflow processing out of share Point and creating a Workflow farm.

The SharePoint farm(s) now have less processing to do. The WAW environment will manage the workload and update SharePoint via web service connections. SharePoint has plenty of loads to manage and SharePoint 2013 introduces multiple features that are, or can be, offloaded to other environments outside of SharePoint.

One more important ability to use WAW for multi- and cross-platform workflow. This will allow developer to host all your .NET workflows, regardless of if they’re SharePoint, for Windows applications, or Web applications. There’s also the ability to reuse the same workflow for multiple platforms.

Workflow Manager capabilities

Workflow Manager brings a new class of workflow to SharePoint Server 2013. Workflows built by using Workflow Manager can take advantage of several new capabilities. These include enterprise features such as:

• High Density and Multi-Tenancy
• Elastic Scale
• Activity / Workflow Artifact Management
• Tracking and Monitoring
• Instance Management
• Fully Declarative Authoring
• REST and Service Bus Messaging
• Managed Service Reliability

Share Point 2010 to 2013 Up Gradation & Custmization Effect

SharePoint 2013 is the next Version of Microsoft’s famous Collaboration and Document Management Software called SharePoint. Below is some information given for up gradation effect of SP 2010 to  2013.

Note :The information is taken from MS Tech Net site.

Up gradation and customization Effect

The following table describes types of customizations and the kind of effect they can have during upgrade.

Category of customization	Types of customizations	Potential effect on upgrade
Visually-affecting	Master pages Themes Web Pages Web Parts Custom JavaScript Custom CSS files	Should not affect database upgrade. For site upgrades: likely to work well in 2010 mode, but need changes to work in 2013 mode. Test carefully in both modes.
Data structure affecting	Content types List types Web templates Site definitions	Can affect database upgrade if content or list type names conflict with new content or list types in the product, or if templates or definitions are missing.
Non-visually affecting	Web services Windows services HTTP handler HTTP module	Might not be compatible with SharePoint 2013. Test carefully to determine effect. Be prepared to remove or replace.

Up gradation Practice

• Ensure that the environment is fully functioning before you begin to upgrade.
• An upgrade does not solve problems that already exist in your environment. Therefore, make sure that the environment is fully functioning before you start to upgrade. For example, if you are not using web applications, unextend them before you upgrade. If you want to delete a web application in Internet Information Services (IIS), unextend the web application before you delete it. Otherwise, SharePoint 2013 will try to upgrade the web application even though it does not exist, and the upgrade will fail. If you find and solve problems beforehand, you are more likely to meet the estimated upgrade schedule.
• Perform a trial upgrade on a test farm first.
• Copy your databases to a test environment and perform a trial upgrade. Examine the results to determine the following:
• Whether the service application data was upgraded as expected
•  The appearance of upgraded sites
• The time to allow for post-upgrade troubleshooting
• The time to allow for the upgrade process
•  Try a full search indexing crawl. For more information, see Use a trial upgrade to SharePoint 2013 to find potential issues.
• Plan for capacity.
• Ensure that you have enough disk, processor, and memory capacity to handle upgrade requirements. For more information about system requirements, see System requirements for SharePoint 2013. For more information about how to plan the disk space that is required for upgrade, see Plan for performance during upgrade to SharePoint 2013 and Plan for performance and capacity management in SharePoint Server 2013
• Clean up before you upgrade
• Issues in your environment can affect the success of upgrade, and unnecessary or very large amounts of data can affect upgrade performance for both databases and site collections. If you don't need something in your environment, consider removing it before upgrade. If there are issues detected, try to resolve them before you start to upgrade. For more information, see Clean up an environment before an upgrade to SharePoint 2013.
•  Back up your databases.
•  Perform a full backup of your databases before you upgrade. That way, you can try upgrade again if it fails.
• Optimize your environment before upgrade.
•  Be sure to optimize your SharePoint 2010 Products environment to meet any limits or restrictions, either from your business or governance needs or from the SharePoint 2013 boundaries and limits before upgrade. This will help reduce errors during the upgrade process and prevent broken lists or sites after upgrade. For more information about limits in the product, see Software boundaries and limits for SharePoint 2013. For more information about large lists and how to address the lower limit on site collections, see Clean up an environment before an upgrade to SharePoint 2013.
•  (Optional) Set the original databases to read-only if you want to keep your original environment available while you upgrade.
• If you expect a long outage period while you upgrade, you can set the databases in the original environment to read-only. Users can continue to access the data but cannot change it. For more information, see Upgrade content databases to SharePoint 2013.
•  After upgrade, review the Upgrade Status page and upgrade logs to determine whether you must address issues. Then review the upgraded sites.
• The Upgrade Status page reports on the upgrade progress, and the upgrade logs list any errors or warnings that occurred during the upgrade process. Verify all the sites and test them before you consider the upgrade finished. For more information, see Verify database upgrades in SharePoint 2013 and Review site collections upgraded to SharePoint 2013.
• Defer upgrade for site collections until you can get updated customizations to support 2013 mode.
• If you wait until the customizations are available, you can complete the initial upgrade of database and services without significantly affecting use of the existing sites in 2010 mode.
• Make sure that the appropriate service pack or update is applied to your 2010 environment. If you are using remote blog storage (RBS) in your environment, you must be running Service Pack 1 for SharePoint 2010 Products in your environment before you start the upgrade process.

Share Point 2013 new concepts and features

 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.

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.

Licensing Model
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.

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

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

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.

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.

 Minimal Download Strategy

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. 

The Analytics Processing Component

 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.

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.

Device Channels

 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.

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.

TilesViewWebPart
SharePoint 2013 Introduces a new “Getting Started” WebPart that has “Tiles” to provide an easy access to some of the main links in the Site like – adding lists\libraries,Creating masterpage etc.To Programmatically Create this new WebPart a new abstract base class TilesViewWebPart has been added in SharePoint API.You have to Create a Custom Webpart and Inherit from TilesViewWebpart and Override GetTiles() to Create Custom tiles.

Migrate a Site Collection in SharePoint 2013

1.Backup and Restore SharePoint 2010 Content database in your SharePoint 2013 farm.
2. Run Test-SPContentDatabase cmdlet to identify missing Components along with potential errors and related warnings. Check the upgrade log and deploy any missing components and re-run the cmdlet to verify.
3. Attach the Content database to the desired web application using Mount-SPContentDatabase cmdlet.
4. After successfully mounting the content database to web application, the site should be accessible in 14 mode.
5. Next, to Upgrade the site to 15 Hive, Navigate to SiteUpgrade.aspx page in Site Setting of your site collection.
6. Click on “Upgrade the Site Collection” button.
7. During the upgrade The SiteUpgrade.aspx page shows the progress and provides a link to an upgrade log for troubleshooting purposes.
8. Site Collection Should now be accessible in 15 mode.