Description
If you feel like you only just got your head wrapped around all the improvements and new features that SharePoint 2010 offered, you may also be feeling a bit dismayed by the appearance of SharePoint 2013. When will the madness end? Clearly, SharePoint 2010 was a huge leap forward from SharePoint 2007 — its improvements and enhancements were massive. It introduced us to the service application infrastructure that was a much needed improvement to the SSP model that SharePoint 2007 used. It was a great time to be in the SharePoint business. At this point, you are probably all cozy and comfortable with your SharePoint 2010 farms. You have them built and humming along just the way you want and now Microsoft has released SharePoint 2013!
Don’t worry; it’s still a great time to be a SharePoint administrator. SharePoint 2013 is new and improved, but it’s nothing you can’t handle, especially with this trusty book by your side. This chapter provides a brief overview of some of the more exciting new features of SharePoint 2013, and what has changed since SharePoint 2010. It is meant to pique your interest in the SharePoint 2013 journey that lies ahead of you, both as you explore this book and as you work with SharePoint in real-world scenarios. Each abbreviated description includes a reference to the chapter in which you can get the full scoop. Of course, you’ll want to read this delightful tome from cover to cover, certainly before the movie comes out, but this chapter enables you to jump ahead to the juicy parts.
INSTALLATION CHANGES
Familiarizing yourself with SharePoint 2013 might seem daunting, but you’ll be pleased to hear that the installation process is not radically changed from the SharePoint 2010 installation process. If you can install SharePoint 2010, with a little effort and a small amount of stumbling, you can install SharePoint 2013, too. The following sections break it down, hitting the main points.
System Requirements
SharePoint 2013 is a little more demanding than SharePoint 2010 when it comes to hardware requirements. Gone are the days of squeezing by on 8GB of RAM and a measly 80GB C: drive. SharePoint 2013 does big things, and it needs big iron to do them. For a production SharePoint Server 2013 box, you need at a minimum 12GB of RAM and four 64-bit cores. In truth, you can still get by with that 80GB C: drive. If you want to run everything on a development or evaluation box, you’ll need to crank that RAM up to 24GB in order to handle SharePoint and SQL Server. Keep in mind that these values are minimums. The Windows 8 minimum RAM requirement is a miniscule 1GB, but no one would seriously consider running it in production that way. A Windows 8 box with 1GB of RAM is how an IT department would punish users who pester them too much. Don’t punish your users by running your SharePoint servers on the minimum requirements either. They remember that kind of stuff when they’re buying holiday gifts.
SharePoint 2013’s software requirements are very reasonable. It requires a database back end that’s running 64-bit SQL Server that’s either SQL Server 2008 R2 with Service Pack 1 or SQL Server 2012. If you want to use some of the advanced business intelligence (BI) features or the new Access Services service application of SharePoint 2013, you’ll need Service Pack 1 on SQL Server 2012. SharePoint itself must be installed on a server running Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 or Windows Server 2012. It does a good job of bridging the old and the new both with SQL Server and Windows.