Editor's Note: New Office has arrived and is ready for deployment
The New Office has reached the general availability milestone, and with it a plethora of new content, resources, and tools are available to help IT Professionals gear up to deploy the latest and greatest.
By Nina Ruchirat
One unconventional approach to get IT Pros on their feet with the New Office is the Garage Series for IT Pros — a weekly video blog series that explores what's new and different from a manageability, deployment, and automation perspective. The hosts, Jeremy Chapman of Microsoft and real-world desktop specialist Yoni Kirsh, share their passion for Office 365 ProPlus through demos, answering tough questions, and some other adventurous methods (literally — like skydiving, wakeboarding, driving Ferraris and more). Tune in every Wednesday for a new episode of this extensive series.
The commercial release trial on the TechNet Evaluation Center is now available for the new Office, and the free evaluation of Office 2013 Professional Plusis also available for download.
Detailed descriptions of the services and features that are available with Office 365 (Exchange, SharePoint, Office 365 ProPlus, Project, Lync) have been updated, and a new Office 365 Deployment Center gives prescriptive guidance on how to pilot, deploy, and extend Office 365. A content roadmap, deployment options, and even a deployment tool for Click-to-Run are also available. Learn about each of the control identifiers for built-in UI commands and menu items in all applications that use the Office 2013 Fluent UI in this collection of Help files.
New SharePoint
SharePoint Server 2013 strives to help businesses achieve new levels of reliability and performance. It delivers features and capabilities that simplify administration, protect communications and information, and empower users while meeting their demands for greater business mobility. Trial download is here.
Topics in the Explore section of the TechNet library boast several “what’s new” topics that tackle workloads such as search, workflows, and business intelligence, to name a few. The content teams have also created new Scenario pages for SharePoint 2013 — highlighting key resources based on selected stages of evaluation or adoption. Current scenarios include eDiscovery in SharePoint and Exchange, Personal sites (MySites), and Cross-site publishing.
To gain valuable hands-on experience before planning and deployment, explore this set of Test Lab Guides (TLGs) for SharePoint Server 2013. Peruse these overview videos to understand how upgrade works. Build SharePoint 2013 expertise by stepping through a series of learning goals in these learning roadmaps.
A new series of how-to blog posts on How to set up a product-centric website in SharePoint 2013 can help you setup a website that is based on product catalog data.
This TechNet Wiki topic lists a great collection of resources for claims-based authentication.
SharePoint Online can use Windows PowerShell to complete both simple and complex administrative tasks. This Index of Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Online shows descriptions of cmdlets in both verb and noun order.
New Exchange
Cloud content for Exchange Online is abundant. Start with what’s new for a quick overview, and then delve into the many Exchange Online content options, including permissions, security and compliance, anti-spam/anti-malware protection, and more.
Traditionalists can download a trial of Exchange Server 2013, and those who are considering the eventual switch to the cloud can read up about hybrid deployments and how to extend online the feature-rich experience and administrative control they have with their existing on-premises environments.
New Project
Project Server 2013 offers flexible solutions for project portfolio management and everyday work, enabling you to effectively execute strategic priorities. Download the trial to explore the new features. Learn what’s new, including hardware and software requirements.
For those who wish to deploy Project Server 2013 in a server farm environment, this topic includes ways to install and configure Project Server, deploy Project Web App, and configure reporting.
Many of the resources I mention above and then some are highlighted in this TechNet feature package, so be sure to check it out.
A lot of the resources listed on these previous TechNet Feature packages remain valuable and will be undergoing refreshes, as appropriate, including the following:
Thanks for reading,
Nina
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Nina Ruchirat*, Senior Content Project Manager, sits in the Office Content Publishing group and is a liaison for the technical communities of Office, Office 365, SharePoint, Exchange, Lync, Project, and their related products and technologies. She has worked on various technical and non-technical content projects at Microsoft since 2000. Before that, she was a daily metro newspaper journalist at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Follow Nina on Twitter at @MSNinaR.*