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.

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.