SharePoint Blog

Use event-click parsing to increase e-commerce site revenue

2013-05-16T17:00:00Z

This post is brought to you by Runar Olsen, an Architect at Microsoft Search Center of Excellence, and by Andrew Moll and Greg Guillen, Associate Consultants at Microsoft Big Data Center of Excellence.

Your e-commerce site can increase revenue opportunities, and understanding what user behavior led to a purchase can help retain repeat customers and gain new ones. In this post, we explore how you can connect SharePoint with Hadoop and map-reduce analysis in the background to create a web browsing experience that is personalized to the end user's intent and past behavior, thus increasing the success of a sale on your e-commerce site.

We'll use a fictitious e-commerce site, Contoso Electronics, to show how we integrated it with HDInsight Service to provide a Big Data use case for helping end users find results easier on the search result page. We'll also look at how we used HDInsight Service to add functionality to the electronics search result page by doing clickstream analysis on user events.

The Contoso Electronics site is running on SharePoint 2013, using the new cross-site publishing model. The product catalog data is maintained in Dynamics AX and pushed to SharePoint 2013 where it's rendered in a web site format. (The data can also be rendered on tablets and phones.

The new functionality offers a quicker way for people to find what they were looking for. For instance, if a user is searching for the keyword tablet, the search results will display products that other users ended up buying after searching for that term. By analyzing the purchase history and search query patterns of previous users, we are able to provide this information to the new user who just entered the site and searched for a tablet. On the web site it would look like this:

There are a number of streams of user event data we can use. For this analysis, we need the search query log and purchase logs for all users. We can also look within the web server logs, and find query term referrals from web search engines. For example, a user might search for tablet on Bing.com. In the search results, they see a Contoso Electronics product and browse directly to the product to buy it without using the search box on the Contoso Electronics site. Often, e-commerce sites already have web analytics tools in place to collect this data, and the logs can be retrieved from there. For our scenario, we auto-generated several gigabytes of user search and purchase logs for our fictitious site.

Since we have large amounts of unstructured events to parse in log files, we choose to use HDInsight Service to analyze the data. Below is the architecture we settled on for our pilot. The Contoso Electronics web site is running in Azure IaaS, so everything is already in the cloud.

Hadoop analysis

Because the web logs are stored in Azure Storage Vault (ASV), we never have to bring any of the data on-premises-we can keep everything in the cloud. When data is stored in ASV, it is easily accessible by our HDInsight Service via Sqoop, which can take multiple data files from ASV and move them into the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) where mappers/reducers can manipulate it.

Another option is to create a Hive External Table. When data is stored in ASV, it is easily accessible by our HDInsight Service via external Hive tables. External Hive tables allow a metadata wrapper to be layered on top of your unstructured data sitting in ASV, ultimately providing a structured table format that can be exported to a relational database for further business analytics. This provides a cost-effective IaaS method for customers to utilize their HDInsight Service Cluster for analytical purposes, leaving the cheap storage aspect of your data to Azure Storage Vault while still relying on HDInsight to perform the data analytics.

Hadoop Streaming takes 4 inputs: mapper, reducer, input files, and output location. The beauty of this is that your mapper and reducer do not need to be written in Java. Hadoop mappers are natively written in Java, but we wrote ours in C#, and then used Hadoop Streaming to make the necessary adjustments. Not every problem can be solved with MapReduce (M/R) but even fewer can be solved with only one M/R job. This holds true in our example as we have multiple MapReduce jobs. In our example, there are two M/R jobs that are "chained" together, which means that the output of one job is used as the input for the second job.

Our first mapper takes the web logs and pulls out <User ID> and <Event> (purchased, viewed, or queried)

Example:

             userid123       p=itemid123
            userid123       v=itemid123
            userid123       q=surface

From here we have a reducer that organizes the user's session and outputs the sorted data to a file.

Userid123 q=surface,v=item1,p=item2,q=ipad
Userid321 q=surface,v=product455,v=product966,v=product361,v=product611,v=product877,v=product686,v=product519

The second mapper picks up the data from the first mapper output. From here the mapper adds a value of 1 or 10, depending on if the product was only viewed (1) or bought (10) times.

slr|product544 1
slr|product252 1
slr|product70 10
slr|product252 10

The reducer then takes this data, sorts it, and adds up the values. Therefore a higher number = more products purchased. This data is then exported as a text file to complete the analysis.

The Hadoop portal shows details about the Map Reduce Job that is running on our cluster.

SharePoint integration

After Hadoop has completed its analysis, we have a big text file in this format:
<product id>, [<search query:count>, <search query:count>, ...]

Now you can create a Hive table on top of the text files, giving the data a table format structure which can be exported into any relational data store using SQL Server Integrated Services.

Our source data in the Product Catalog in SharEPoint is of this format:
<product id>, <category>, <price>, <brand>, <weight>, ..., ...

We are now enriching the content of a given product, by adding relevant search queries that lead to the purchase of that given item.
<product id>, <category>, <price>, <brand>, <weight>, ..., <purchasedqueryfor>

There is no overwriting of the existing data, so it can always be updated, independent of our Hadoop data. When the original data changes (for instance, a price update), it will not change the column where we put our output from the analysis conducted above. We used the new RESTful APIs in SharePoint2013 to update the metadata column in the product catalog. (Product Catalog is a SharePoint list.)

On the front page in SharePoint we added a new Content By Search web part, which adds a custom search query:
Purchasedqueryfor:{User SearchTerm}

The result is a set of products that users ended up buying after searching for the given input query term. The web part that was added to the search page is configuration only, and there is no need for any custom code to achieve this.

Increased opportunities

What we've seen in this blog post is a concrete example of how to integrate HDInsight Service with SharePoint 2013 to provide functionality on the search page on the Constoso.com website. By increasing search relevance for customers we are able to provide users with the actual and similar products they are looking for, thus increasing the opportunity for a company to boost revenue through products purchased. In addition, a company can also understand what user views led to a purchase, which can assist with planning market product positioning for future customers.

Audio manufacturer boosts go-to-market speed with centralized web content management

2013-05-14T16:00:00Z

New Jersey-based D&M Group is the parent company of several high-end audio brands such as Denon, Marantz, and Boston Acoustics. With offices in more than 70 countries, D&M Group struggled to manage a geographically dispersed IT environment. To centralize IT management and create a single enterprise platform for all of the D&M Group websites, the company implemented Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013. By migrating and redesigning websites using SharePoint Server 2013, D&M Group reports faster go-to-market speed, enhanced mobile publishing capabilities, and simplified product catalog capabilities. By using SharePoint Server 2013 to develop a single global product catalog, the company can now publish and change products with one-person administration.

See more SharePoint customer stories.

Upgrading to the new SharePoint Online

2013-05-08T17:00:00Z

As we announced on February 27, the new Office 365 service is out of "Preview" and available to try and buy today. We received tons of actionable feedback resulting in new features customers want, improved performance, simple user experiences, more admin controls and the stability they expect. SharePoint Online (SPO) customers will soon be able to self-upgrade to the new SharePoint Online experience - a new user interface, global Office 365 navigation and a whole set of new features and supported scenarios. You can go here to read all about What's new in SharePoint Online-top 10.

This article focuses on the coming upgrade experience for existing SharePoint Online customers. New customers will receive these features without any effort on their part.

What to expect during upgrade

Office 365 customers will be notified approximately four weeks prior to their upgrade and will have the opportunity to postpone for a minimum of two months.
Review What's new in SharePoint Online-top 10 to start planning how your company will take advantage of the new SharePoint Online capabilities soon to be at your fingertips.
Evaluate whether content and sites are old or unused, and if so, consider removing content or even whole site collections that are no longer necessary.

You can learn about all the Office 365 service upgrade options at the broader Office 365 Service Upgrade Center, including what you need to know about Exchange Online, Lync Online and Office client.

Test, upgrade, enjoy

The new SharePoint Online experience awaits you. Please take time to review the available documentation and the suggested steps to ensure a seamless transition for your company. Make sure you build in the right amount of time to test the new capabilities and look and feel before committing to it.

You are more in control than ever during your upgrade experience. With a little effort, existing customers will be able to quickly determine the method that provides the right level of testing, allowing you to quickly move to the latest Office 365 has to offer. Let us know via the Office 365 Community forums how you are doing and what we can do to help.

Visit Office 365 Community to read the complete blog post - including best practices for upgrade and some known issues.

Thanks,
The SharePoint Team

Webinar: A beginner's guide to SharePoint Online

2013-05-03T18:08:00Z

Office 365 for business allows small and large companies to use the power of SharePoint Online. In this week’s webinar, you’ll learn some of the basics and we'll answer your questions.

What you will learn at Tuesday's webinar

Logging on the first time
What’s that there? A look around
Where can I put my stuff?
Sites: for your company and your customer

References for this webinar

Office 365 for business (includes SharePoint)
Video training courses for SharePoint
What is SharePoint? (article)
Get started with Office 365 business (video)
Start using SharePoint sites, SkyDrive Pro, and Newsfeeds (video & links)
Set up Office 365 for your business (site)
What’s new with SharePoint, a top 10 (blog post)
New SharePoint mobile offerings (blog post)
Sample SharePoint consumer site
SharePoint Online for small businesses (index of articles)
SharePoint Online for midsize/enterprise (index of articles)

Go to http://aka.ms/offweb for more information on how to join the series.

--Doug Thomas

Dialysis services provider adopts business portal to visualize SAP data

2013-04-22T17:00:00Z

Headquartered in Bad Homburg, Germany, Fresenius Medical Care is one of the world's leading providers of products and services for individuals undergoing dialysis treatments. The company runs a network of more than 3,000 dialysis clinics around the world and treats more than 250,000 patients each year.

The company had been using Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 since 2010. In April 2012, the Fresenius Medical Care Global Manufacturing Operations adopted SharePoint 2013 with a long-term vision to migrate all SharePoint 2010 dashboards and use SharePoint 2013 as the central collaboration and social system.

The company sought a collaboration solution that would interoperate easily with Microsoft Office applications, streamline permissions management, and provide access to corporate resources from any browser or device. Fresenius Medical Care wanted also to improve document management. "We were using IBM Lotus Notes and Lotus Quickr to share documents, but it lacked document control features," says Helge Hoehn, Senior Expert SharePoint and Project Manager at Fresenius Netcare, the IT service provider for Fresenius Medical Care. "We needed easier ways for teams to collaborate."

To test importing production data from the SAP BW, the company conducted a pilot program with SharePoint 2013. The pilot was designed to deliver highly secure business intelligence reports to the company's executive team. After it installed the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system on a virtual machine, the company migrated its SharePoint 2010 dashboards to SharePoint 2013 in a virtual environment and tested the site.

By adopting SharePoint 2013, Fresenius Medical Care Global Manufacturing Operations provides executives with dynamic data visualizations, gives employees access from almost anywhere, increases productivity, and solves permissions challenges. "SharePoint 2013 is one of the best business solutions I've ever encountered," says Hoehn. "It's easy to work with and it interoperates well with other Microsoft technologies. You can use it to manage various business needs, from collaboration to business intelligence."

Learn more about how Fresenius Medical Care uses SharePoint 2013

United Airlines reduces web content administration from months to hours with enterprise solution

2013-04-17T17:00:00Z

Based in Chicago, Illinois, United is one of the largest airlines in the world. To improve enterprise content management (ECM), United wanted to build communities around the products and services it delivers to customers. The airline initially deployed Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and subsequently migrated to SharePoint Server 2010, which United developed into an enterprise platform for ECM and e-discovery, co-locating approximately 1 terabyte of content for the enterprise. In 2012, the airline deployed SharePoint Server 2013 for a variety of projects-including a service catalog that 87,000 employees rely on to search for and order products from the IT department. By using SharePoint Server 2013, United has also simplified content management-the amount of time required to enter a new item into the catalog has plummeted from two months to a few hours.

See more SharePoint customer stories.

Use cross-site publishing to set up a product-centric website in SharePoint Server 2013

2013-04-12T16:00:00Z

Bella Engen is a Technical Writer on the SharePoint User Content Publishing team, focused on search-driven experiences.

Cross-site publishing is a new publishing method in SharePoint Server 2013 that can help streamline the publishing process in your organization, and at the same time reduce costs associated with maintaining and updating your website.

By combining cross-site publishing with SharePoint search features, you can reduce the number of pages needed to maintain your website, and gain flexibility in how content is presented to your customers.

In a nutshell, cross-site publishing simplifies the authoring experience by separating the process of how content is authored from the process of how content is displayed. SharePoint search features enable you to add user-specific behavior to your website, such as displaying different content to different customer groups, or displaying recommendations based on user behavior.

In a blog series on the SharePoint IT Pro blog, you can learn how you can use SharePoint Server 2013 to set up a website that is based on product catalog data. The blog posts describe the different functionalities that are involved when setting up such a site, and show you step-by-step how the features are configured.

To demonstrate how it all comes together, data from a fictitious company is used. The blog posts use several screenshots and diagrams to explain everything from how the cross-site publishing feature works, to how you can use search features to influence how product data is displayed to visitors on a site.

To give you an idea of what type of site this blog series describes, here are a few screenshots of the final website:

Visit the "How to set up a product-centric website in SharePoint Server 2013" blog series overview page for the complete list of current and upcoming posts.

Yammer on Tour: Catch the working world at its turning point

2013-04-04T16:00:00Z

We're bringing Yammer to a city near you with Yammer on Tour--a free event series that brings together customers, partners and thought leaders for a unique opportunity to hear our vision for enterprise social, network with like-minded peers, and learn directly from customers how to usher in success in today's rapidly changing business environment.

Yammer on Tour features an action-packed half-day agenda including:

Keynotes and appearances by Yammer co-founder Adam Pisoni and customers
Breakout sessions featuring product insights and expert discussions on enterprise social success
Hands-on training and certification
Networking and demos from Yammer and our partners in the expo hall

Join us at Yammer on Tour in the following cities:

New York--April 9: Register today
Chicago--April 16: Register today
Dallas--May 15: Registration opening soon

We look forward to seeing you at one of these events!

What’s new in SharePoint Online–top 10

2013-04-02T16:00:00Z

Mark Kashman (@mkashman) is a SharePoint Senior Product Manager on the SharePoint team, focused on SharePoint Online.

SharePoint Online (SPO) has a gaggle of new innovation and welcome improvements. The premier sharing service is updated with a new, fluid user interface, active personal file sharing, higher storage limits for both personal and team sites, a high-end cloud app development model, and more robust tooling for admins to more easily and effectively control their SPO environment. Everyone benefits from the new SharePoint Online!

Users benefit with new ways to share internally and externally and anonymously, in how they search and discover the right information and people and how they build sites and experiences in a more self-service fashion.
Project managers now have better ways to organize documents, project details and timelines.
Developers are no longer limited on the types of solutions they can deliver to the Office 365 cloud.
IT Professionals can more easily manage sites and permissions on behalf of their entire company.

This article will cover the top 10 new SPO innovations with a pointer at the end to the new SPO service description - home to all SharePoint features across all offerings (online and on-premises).

1. New user interface (UI)

The entire UI across Office 365 on down to SharePoint Online has been reimagined. It's easy on the eyes, easy to navigate and easy to accomplish common tasks. And it's snappy performance will delight! Let's take a look at a few examples of the new UI improvements:

A sample site showing the UI of a rich team site template with an embedded PowerPoint Web App, a rollup Top-Rated Doc list, a KPI chart and the new surrounding navigation and share/follow/sync buttons.

Drag and drop.
Now you can upload documents, pictures, and other types of files to your site by dragging them from your computer to a library on your site, such as Documents or your SkyDrive Pro library.

Dragging and dropping a file from the desktop straight into a document library in the browser.

On-hover. Use this new callout feature with any document in a library or from within search results to see a set of rich commands and contextual information. You can open, share, or follow documents, view a document preview, and use Deep links to jump directly to content inside a document.

On-hover from a document library showing a preview into a Word document using the embedded Word Web App. Note the ability to Share and Follow from the same on-hover card.

Touch. A key investment area across all of the products in the new Office, large touch targets make it easy for you to filter, navigate, and work with documents--increasing accessibility across devices, big and small.
aSyncronous calls. Refresh the content you want to focus on. List and library navigation and filtering means fewer full-page refreshes--less time waiting, more time doing.
Office Web Apps edit. Now available to everyone--even those you invite via External Sharing can edit Office documents on your behalf in the browser. You can know with confidence that your collaborators have the best tools to help you build your business.
Universal Office 365 top navigation. Now you can find your way without having to remember (or bookmark) how to get there. And it's all in a simplified, single browser experience--no pop ups, no feeling lost.

The new Office 365 top navigation makes it simple to navigate from your Outlook email into SkyDrive Pro, your new cloud storage for work.

2. SkyDrive Pro

SkyDrive Pro is cloud storage for employees that is now a core part of SharePoint Online. SkyDrive Pro is intended to meet your usage criteria and provide organizational control. Everyone who has use rights to a Personal Site (what used to be called "My Sites") gets SkyDrive Pro, along with 7GB of personal storage quota--that's increased from 500MB. Personal sites are available within more Office 365 plans than before (review the new Office 365 plan comparison site).

A view of the SkyDrive Pro library within Office 365, when accessed with an Internet browser.

With SkyDrive Pro, employees can:

Sync and share documents
Collaborate on documents with individuals both inside and outside of their organization
Access content and information anywhere and from a multitude of devices

... while admins can:

Control content lifecycle and versioning
Protect against data loss and perform eDiscovery
Manage access permissions

Learn more here today about SkyDrive Pro.

And by the end of June 2013, you will be able to access your SkyDrive Pro in even more places with native mobile client apps for Windows 8 and iOS. SkyDrive Pro access is already embedded within Windows Phone in the Office Hub.

3. Yammer

We are very excited about Yammer! Yammer is becoming the social layer across many Microsoft products. This is most prevelant with SharePoint and CRM today--it's our big bet for enterprise social. Office 365 is our next step - Yammer will be included with a SharePoint Online or Office 365 investment (compare plans). We recently announced more details on what will be available and when.

As you start to see deeper and deeper connections, you'll discover all the Yammer goodness:

Unique adoption model appeals directly to end users and makes it easy for organizations to become social "instantly"
Utilize the power of Groups (internal and external) and Feeds
Create notes and discussions around your files
Use powerful administration tools to help brand, analyze and manage your company's social intellectual property (IP).
Access Yammer across multiple browsers, operating systems and devices
Discover all the features Yammer offers

A view on the Yammer home page. You see the main feed with posts, files and discussions, plus navigation to people and groups.

A note on the SharePoint Newsfeed

In the short term, the SharePoint Newsfeed will continue to be the default social experience in Office 365, but the option to replace it with Yammer will be a valuable first step.

The Newsfeed page provides quick access to the lists of people, documents, sites, and tags you're following. If you're familiar with popular social networking sites, you'll feel right at home using the new microblogging features, which allow you to engage in conversations in your Newsfeed.

A user view of the Newsfeed shows the people Garth is following and their activities within SharePoint.

The most common actions you can perform within the Newsfeed are:

Post information and ideas to the company newsfeed or site newsfeed
@mention colleagues and include #hashtags
"Like" posts, include pictures, videos, links to documents, and web URLs
Learn more on Office.com about all the Newsfeed offers.

No matter which service you select, you can access Yammer or your SharePoint Newsfeed on the go with native client apps:

Visit the Accessing Yammer page to discover how Yammer is where you need it, when you need it.
Learn more about SharePoint Newsfeed and other mobile offerings.
And if you are an on-premises SharePoint customer who cannot use Yammer, please review the guidance toward the end of the "Yammer and SharePoint: Enterprise social roadmap update" blog post.

4. Guest Links

External Sharing just got better. Now you can share sites, folders, and individual documents with the new Guest Links feature that enables users to invite others from inside and outside the company to collaborate on individual Office documents. To share and collaborate, guests enter a username and password, or they can use anonymous co-authoring. In addition, you can control the contributions by the permission level you choose to grant. You might want some users to have Read permission, while others have permission to Write. You can also revoke sharing at any time.

For fun, try out this Guest Link I created - it'll take you to a Word document I put together with one of my favorite cloud jokes. @mkashman if you know the answerJ.

Sharing a single document, showing the new Sharing dialog to invite new users to collaborate. You can also control whether they can view or edit, and whether you require sign-in.

Note: Based on direct customer feedback, we also simplified the new external invitee sign-in experience so your invited external users do not get lost in the process.

5. New and improved Public Website

The public website in SharePoint Online includes a new design and new features for customizing the site and individual pages. Because the website is built on the SharePoint platform, you now get publishing capabilities, more Web parts (social media add-ins, blogging and commenting, new Apps for SharePoint from the Office Store), SEO property options and advanced design options. Now you also can disable the public website so that it's not visible on the Internet until you choose it to be. This is useful when the site is under construction or in rare cases when the website must be taken offline. Simply enable your website when you're ready for it to go back online.

If you want to completely redesign the website from scratch or use a design you already have, you can use the Design Manager. This set of features lets you turn a conventional HTML web page into a SharePoint master page with page layouts, mobile views, cascading style sheets, and more. You can use your own website editing tools (like Adobe DreamWeaver^TM) to do the design work before uploading the files to SharePoint Online's Design Manager--no need to be a SharePoint expert.

Sample website designed and hosted in SharePoint Online - check this sample live now: http://www.contosobistro.com/

To learn more, view the Get Started with your public website video and read the Get started with your public website article.

6. eDiscovery

SharePoint Online brings improved ways to help you protect your business with eDiscovery. From a single eDiscovery management site, you can add sources and create queries to discover content across sites and document libraries, mailboxes and discussions and keep them in-place --in SharePoint Online, in Exchange Online and in Lync Online. For example, you can conduct your legal case or audit with powerful search-driven tools from within the SharePoint Online based eDiscovery Center. You can then preserve all items in-place, retain items that matched the queries, and export items to the industry standard format--the Electronic Discovery Reference Model (EDRM) specification. Each legal case or audit is a collaboration site that includes a document library that you can use to store documents related to the management of the case. For information about working with cases, see Plan and manage eDiscovery cases. When the case is closed, all of the holds associated with the case are released. For information about eDiscovery queries, see Create and run eDiscovery queries.

An eDiscovery site showing query results from SharePoint Online and Exchange Online, plus the on-hover experience on a discovered item.

7. Site Mailbox

When two world-class services come together, you get the benefit of both worlds. Combine SharePoint Online's document management strengths with Exchange Online's powerful email solutions and you get Site Mailboxes - powerful project-based "inboxes" that help teams organize project-related content and email into a single view, while everything is preserved in its original location as documents in SharePoint Online and email in Exchange Online.

You can access Site Mailboxes through Outlook 2013 as well as SharePoint Online. If you don't have Outlook 2013, you can view the same content from the SharePoint Online site that loads in a site-specific Outlook Web App. Only those with permission to the project site can view the Site Mailbox.

A Site Mailbox opened from a SharePoint Online project site.

The same Site Mailbox accessed in Outlook 2013 (Note: "SharePoint Reviewer's Team Site" in Outlook's left-side folder pane is the Site Mailbox).

Learn more about Site Mailboxes on Office.com Help.

8. Enterprise search

Quickly identify if you've found the right person or document before investing time "searching beyond the search results." Users can move their cursor over a search result, and with on-hover, they can get a deep, rich look into the item without opening it. The on-hover displays a person's contact card and/or a document preview by using the embedded Office Web Apps (for example, scroll through a Word document or click through slides in a PowerPoint deck). You will also see Deep Links within the on-hover card based on your search keywords - these take you directly to corresponding pages and slides deep inside your content.

At the core architectural layer, SharePoint Online search has greatly improved the relevancy of search results. What you get back is more assurance of finding what you are looking for. And SharePoint Online search is more programmable that ever. You can control the user's experience with powerful metadata-driven results and filtering options. Plus the overall Search center is extensible to your business preferred layout and design.

The more you use the system, Search powers tailored suggestions for people, sites and content you may also be interested in.

Rich search experience with refiners, on-hover preview, deep links and more.

Hybrid search
Gone are the days of CRI--content repository isolation. Users working across Office 365 and on-premises environments will be able to obtain search results that include content from both locations. A hybrid SharePoint environment is composed of a SharePoint Server, typically deployed on-premises, and the newest version of Microsoft Office 365 Enterprise which includes the new SharePoint Online. A hybrid environment may be configured to provide one of several levels of interoperability, depending on the purpose - whether it's one direction or bi-directional in which an on-premises SharePoint Server 2013 farm and SharePoint Online access search results information from each other. And as mentioned above, the search experience is extensible--in relation to hybrid search, you can design the look and feel around the source of where content lives.

The above graphic shows a programmatic result block an admin can configure to distinguish results coming from both SharePoint Online and/or SharePoint on-premises.

Learn more about all the new Search offerings in SharePoint.

Read about the breadth of hybrid scenarios between SharePoint Online and SharePoint on-premises, plus a number of new hybrid whitepapers.

9. Cloud app model (CAM)

Hello app, nice to meet you. It's so nice that now you can run where apps scale best--on services like Windows Azure. Sandbox Solutions, site collection level custom applications, still apply, but you are no longer limited to them. Now you can build or buy powerful solutions that enable richer scenarios "beyond the sandbox."

The Cloud App Model in SharePoint Online enables you to build apps for SharePoint by using familiar tools and a rich set of features. For the developer and IT Pro audiences, SharePoint Online in Office 365 now includes this new programming model for the development, installation, management, and use of apps. Users can discover and download apps from the SharePoint Store, or from their organization's own Corporate Catalog. The SharePoint Online admin can use the settings in the SharePoint admin center to manage the App Catalog, get apps from the SharePoint Store, manage licenses for apps purchased from the SharePoint Store, and monitor apps in use.

App for SharePoint programming model

Visit http://dev.office.com/ to further explore the new Cloud app model.

To get started exploring third-party apps, visit the Office Store and review the Apps for SharePoint.

10. PowerShell for SPO

What's better than doing one thing at a time? That's right: bulk operations. Now, in SharePoint Online, you can chew Chewing gum, walk, AND script with PowerShell all at the same time!

SharePoint Online Administrators now can use Windows PowerShell to manage their subscription. Connect to SharePoint Online from your desktop and remotely create new site collections, perform upgrade activities, add and remove SharePoint Online users and groups, repair sites, and recycle bin management. These kinds of management tasks can be scripted, automated and performed in bulk to save you time and minimize errors caused by common repetition mistakes. For more information, see Introduction to the SharePoint Online Management Shell.

The SharePoint Online Management Shell showing results from a Get-SPOSite cmdlet executed against a SharePoint Online tenancy.

To make the new SharePoint Online Management Shell more accessible to power users - people not fluent in deep IT management - we've developed a Web-based companion tool called the Windows PowerShell Command Builder Tool. It helps you quickly understand and use Windows PowerShell cmdlets designed for SharePoint Online. If you want to create a site, use the Command Builder tool to create a cmdlet, and you can create a site from the command line, instead of stepping through several pages in the user Interface.

The Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Command Builder showing an example command being generated to perform a New-SPOSite cmdlet.

And one for good luck: 11. Storage and file upload improvements

Limits are made to be exceeded. We received a lot of great feedback during the Office 365 Preview and were able to improve a great number of common requests. Users' storage, SkyDrive Pro, has been raised to 7GB - up from 500MB. Site Collections limits have been raised - 3,000, up from 300. And we've designed for file upload sizes up to 2GB. The complete storage story is shown in the below table across the primary Office 365 plans, plus additional row items to help best plan for your use and migration of SharePoint Online.

SharePoint Online storage table, all maintained here with real-time updates regarding numerous SharePoint Online boundaries and limits.

Tell us what you think about the new SharePoint Online

Office 365 constantly evolves. Microsoft takes feedback seriously and strives to bring you technology that meets and exceeds your requirements - and we hope increases your "wow" experience! For more information beyond these top new features, visit the new SharePoint Online service description where you can compare all new features across all Office 365 plans and SharePoint on-premises offerings.

Try Office 365 today, test out firsthand all that SharePoint Online now offers, and tell us what you think.

Mark Kashman (@mkashman) is a SharePoint Senior Product Manager on the SharePoint team, focused on SharePoint Online.

Law enforcement organization cuts costs and streamlines operations with SharePoint 2013

2013-03-25T17:00:00Z

Today's post is the latest in an ongoing series spotlighting success stories from SharePoint 2013 early adopters.

Cambridgeshire Constabulary replaces aging Lotus Notes environment with 40 Microsoft SharePoint 2013 portals

The Cambridgeshire Constabulary, which provides law enforcement and public safety services for 800,000 residents in Cambridgeshire, England, started using Microsoft SharePoint 2013 in April 2012 to develop a cost-effective environment where employees can easily discover information, share documents, and manage data.

To help lower its costs, the constabulary sought new policing tools for working collaboratively and sharing operational data with neighboring constabularies in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. For many years, the constabulary used Lotus Notes to manage internal data such as event orders, duty rosters, and other critical policing information. It also used Lotus Notes to manage criminal, public safety, and operations databases, some of which must be maintained for 25 years because of government regulations.

"By replacing our Lotus Notes environment with SharePoint 2013, we make our police and business staff more efficient, reduce our IT management burden, and lower our costs," says Ian Bell, Head of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) at Cambridgeshire Constabulary. "With SharePoint 2013, people can work together to collect intelligence, complete investigations quickly, and provide effective public services."

The Lotus Notes environment was expensive to maintain relative to the constabulary's updated IT infrastructure, which included Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, and Microsoft Lync 2010. Constables and other employees could search only one Lotus Notes database at a time, and they often had to open more than a dozen databases before finding the information they needed.

The organization is deploying up to 40 SharePoint 2013 portals and creating collaboration environments for new Police and Crime Commissioners, Cambridgeshire Council, and Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire constabularies. Employees can now take advantage of SharePoint 2013 functionality to:

Maintain portals and manage enterprise content without relying on the organization's ICT team.
Synchronize documents stored on their personal sites offline by using SkyDrive Pro in SharePoint 2013.
Get consolidated search results from the entire Cambridgeshire environment with a single query.
Use a SharePoint 2013 connector to return data from any Lotus Notes database.
Collaborate with tools including blogs, wikis, personal and team sites, and integration with social media channels.

By November 2013, the constabulary expects to deploy SharePoint 2013 to 2,400 internal employees and enable access to almost 10,000 users at Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire. "With SharePoint 2013, we can input information in one place," says Bell. "We can deliver that information to anyone in the organization, anytime, anywhere."

For more on how Cambridgeshire Constabulary is using SharePoint 2013, read the complete case study.