Introduction

Hello, and welcome to Pro SharePoint 2013 Administration. In the next sixteen chapters of this book, you will discover administration of the latest version of SharePoint.

SharePoint administration can be intimidating to anyone looking at the platform for the first time, and so this book was written to cover all the major areas and demonstrate configuration in a systematic fashion. Chapter 1 kicks off with an overview of the new SharePoint 2013 platform, changes from the previous version, and what you can expect of the new features.

In this book, you will read about the installation of SharePoint Server 2013 on a new Windows Server. Chapter 1 highlights the prerequisites for the installation and minimal hardware and operating system software requirements. Even if you are a seasoned SharePoint administrator and have performed many installations of SharePoint before, you might gain additional insight from this chapter. Chapter 2 also serves as a great instruction set for anyone looking to install SharePoint 2013 for the first time.

With SharePoint installed, you will embark on a journey through the various areas of SharePoint 2013 covered in this book, which include security and policy; user profiles; social networking; documents, records, and metadata; business intelligence; Microsoft Office integration; health and disaster recovery; search; and user interface branding; among others.

Thank you—for your interest in this book and SharePoint 2013 administration.

Who This Book Is For

The title gives it away that this book is focused at SharePoint administrators (or want-to-be administrators), but this is not to say that Pro SharePoint 2013 Administration has no value for business experts or developer audiences. It should appeal to anyone with an interest in SharePoint 2013—installing it, configuring it, and using many of the best features the platform has to offer.

If you are new to SharePoint, congratulations on joining a large community of like-minded SharePoint enthusiasts. You will gain a wealth of information on grassroots installations, configuration, and administration of SharePoint 2013 from this book. For those audience members familiar with SharePoint 2013, this book serves as great reference material and best practice for what you may already know. For the casual reader in the bookstore, this book should, I hope, whet your palate regarding what SharePoint 2013 has to offer and provide you with an overview if you are curious about what SharePoint is or interested in finding out how the platform has changed since the 2010 version.

Contacting the Author

Should you have any questions or comments—or even spot a mistake that you think the author should know about—you can contact the Rob at [email protected]. Feel free to visit the author’s blog at http://[email protected].