Friday, May 31, 2013

Investigating network performance improvements in SharePoint 2013

Various improvements have been made to network performance in SharePoint 2013.  

One of the key improvements is known as Minimal Download Strategy.  From Introduction to Minimal Download Strategy in SharePoint 2013: "Minimal Download Strategy is a new feature in SharePoint 2013 that improves client rendering performance and fluidity when navigating from page to page by download only the changes between two compatible pages. Fewer bytes will be downloaded and the page will appear more quickly."

Sites running with Minimal Download Strategy (enabled by default for SP2013 team and community sites) only load the master page and layout once.  To compare, in SP2010, navigating to a sub-folder in a document library will cause the entire page to load again.  In our existing SP2010 site, the core layout and master page takes up 48Kb of bandwidth on each load, plus whatever the content of the actual page is (such as a document library, which is about 25Kb per page).  If you navigate to five pages within a site on SP2010, that uses around 350Kb of bandwidth.  In SP2013, this would be 170Kb.

In my tests on my own connection to the SP2010 server, a 70Kb page took on average 1113ms to display, which works out at 16ms per Kb.  For 20 typical page loads in SP2010, this would be 22.4 seconds of network usage.  In SP2013 (in theory), this would be reduced to 8.7 seconds of valuable network usage.

(Please note that these tests are certainly not controlled and comprehensive, but give a general idea of the improvements that Minimal Download Strategy can bring.)

Other improvements to WAN performance are improved image compression, and faster response time to incoming requests (up to 50% in some tests).  In other tests carried out by Microsoft (see Testing WAN connections for SharePoint 2013 architectures) on a connection between Redmond and Beijing showed a 10Mb ZIP file taking 53-140 seconds to upload to SP2010, but only taking 49-63 seconds to upload in SP2013.

Also worthy to note is the improved document library synchronisation.  This did exist in SP2010 using SharePoint Workspace, but I found this to be incredibly buggy and difficult to use when working with large teams.  Since SP2013 uses SkyDrive Pro (included with Office 2013), SharePoint document libraries can be completely synced onto a user's computer for offline use.  This can be used for an individual's personal work documents (in which case, the files are synchronised to the user's MySite on SP2013), or for a team to collaborate on documents as a group.  SkyDrive is already considered a worthy competitor to other services such as Dropbox and Google Drive for personal use, and this SP2013 integration brings that functionality to a business as well. (See also: Overview of SkyDrive Pro in SharePoint Server 2013)

To bring this all back to the end user, these improvements, plus the new look and feel (with better tactile response and more interactive page layouts) can help the SP2013 site seem almost instant and easier to use.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

How to sell SharePoint 2013 to a steering committee

A few weeks ago, I was asked to prepare a presentation on the reasons we should upgrade our SharePoint 2010 environment to SharePoint 2013.  It wasn't enough to simply say "it looks pretty", but that was obviously (what I thought) a key selling point, as the presentation was to be delivered to non-technical decision makers.  My presentation included a look at the improved social computing features, an improved way of deploying new custom developments (or apps), and one final slide just summarising some of the new technical features - Translation Services, Workflow Services, and "Minimal Download Strategy".

It turns out that the greatest interest from almost everyone at the table was these three technical points.  The look and feel?  Not of interest to most people, as we already have a heavily-customised and branded master page.  Others didn't like the social element at all.  But the last slide was the strongest for them, and I learnt from that to focus more on these parts.

I decided to carry out more research on these technical features to better sell the product.  Sure, the end users will probably appreciate the new user interface and ease of use, but if the business owners don't see a benefit, the users will never get to use it.

The next few posts will be my semi-technical findings on:

  • Minimal Download Strategy (or, more generally, network performance improvements)
  • Translation Services

Hopefully someone else researching SP2013 will find some interest in these features and help them also sell a very promising product upgrade.

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Changing a name in SharePoint People Picker using PowerShell

The company I work for has recently acquired another business, and the migration process for getting their Active Directory users into our Active Directory has resulted in duplicate accounts for the same person. Sometimes the duplicate account is on a different domain, but often it's the same domain, resulting in confusion when there is a need to select a user from the People Picker.

One option to resolve this is to simply delete the SPUser.  However, I don't like deleting things.  There is always a chance this could have adverse effects somewhere else, and there's also the higher chance that the SPUser will just be recreated when something occurs in the Active Directory.  So, I've opted for another solution, which is to simply change the DisplayName of that erroneous account to something obvious (such as "Do not use").

Eventually, these duplicate accounts will be deleted from the Active Directory, which makes me more confident in deleting the SPUsers too, but until then, this will have to do.

Set-SPUser -Web http://sharepoint -Identity "domain\duplicateuser" -DisplayName "Do Not Use"