BCS in SharePoint 2013

Business Connectivity Services in new SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 suite offers a whole lot of capabilities for users. It allows them to use these services as an interface into data that exists outside the SP. This is made possible by connecting to an external data source and running a query to return desirable results. Users can perform various operations using BCS such as Create, Read, Update, Delete, and Query (CRUDQ). Open Data, web services, WCF, .NET assemblies, cloud based services, custom connectors etc allow access to BCS so that it can interact with external sources.

SharePoint Training can help you gain core working knowledge and skills on this topic.

 What New can SharePoint do with BCS?

·         Ability to connect to OData sources

·         Ability to receive events from external systems

·         Enhanced support for REST and client object model

·         Scope of external content types at application level

Excel Services in SharePoint 2013

SharePoint allows users to really explore all aspects of data sharing and collaboration. It also offers business intelligence capabilities, which include data analysis functionalities such as Excel Services. With this feature, you can render and publish Excel workbooks onto the SharePoint server for sharing. Users get to use Excel Web Services, Excel Calculation Services, and Excel Web Access Web Parts etc. Here's a lowdown of how you can manage, secure and share workbooks in your browser.

Sharing: Other users can get browser access to Excel workbooks once you share it in the library. Users need not have it on their systems. They can view, analyze, sort, filter or expand the latest version of workbook available. You can set access privileges to control who gets to view/modify what data. SharePoint Training will help you understand these nuances.

BI Dashboards: Excel Web Access Web Part allows you to create business intelligence dashboards.

Workflows in SharePoint 2010 Training

The key capability of SharePoint 2010 to create custom workflows holds many benefits for users. One, it allows for users to attach behavior to data. Another important benefit is that this property tends to reduce the unnecessary interactions between users while they perform business processes. The more the amount of user interactions, the more it intervenes with the business process and inhibits its completion. Here we discuss the essential workflows that help users streamline their processes.

You can learn more about these and other functions in detail by enrolling for SharePoint 2010 Training. Workflows can be applied by end-users at the document library or list level. They can be added to list items, documents or content types. There are two basic workflow types which you can create.

·         Sequential Workflows

·         State Machine Workflows

You can use either of these in your SharePoint operations. Let's talk about them one by one.

Sequential workflows, as the name suggests, represent a series of steps to be completed in succession until the last task on the list is completed. However, there is a limitation. The actual order of execution of steps can vary because there may be some external events with parallel logic flows, which interfere with the sequential flow of events.

State Machine workflows represent a set of actions or states. The initial state is called start state and a transition to the next state can be made based on an event. The last state is known as final state, when the workflow ends.

Also, remember that workflow versioning is a crucial technique. One of the best practices, creating a version every time is important because it can hamper the way you want your workflow activities to behave. Attending a hands on training for SharePoint will help you learn more about this in greater detail. Koenig India provides this course and many other IT certifications for those looking to upgrade their technical skills. 

Best Virtualization Practices for SharePoint

SharePoint 2010 gets full support when you deploy it in a virtual environment powered by Windows Hyper-V technology or those listed in the Server Virtualization Validation program.  But how can you make sure that you do everything right and get the most out of your investment? Here we outline a few essentials and best practices for your virtualized setup. Although, getting a SharePoint 2010 Training is the best bet if you want to learn in detail, we give you a lowdown of some pointers to begin with.

Use hyper threading

For processors that support this technology called symmetric multithreading (SMT), it is a sure shot way of increasing performance by as much as 16% on an average (tested on 8-core server). Hyper threading assigns two threads per processor core, thus, doubling the logical processors available per core.

Hardware assisted virtualization  (HAV)

Enable this feature if your host supports it. HAV tends to improve performance and response time of applications by almost 5%.

Restrict the Use of Snapshots

This is because SharePoint Server extensively uses timer jobs, and a snapshot latency is high due to the fact that they are file based snapshots of data, state and configuration of a VM at a particular point of time. Therefore, it affects time sensitive operations adversely and results in data loss or corrupt data. Snapshots significantly diminish VM performance and swell physical storage needs.

These are just some of the important practices you need to keep in mind so as to ensure an up-and-running SharePoint 2010 virtualization infrastructure for your organization. You also need to make sure that you don't overload the Hyper-V host and maintain version compatibility while running integration services. Following these steps will give you a direction as to where you want your project to head to.