10 things which might surprise end users in SharePoint Server 2013

SharePoint Server 2013 has made a lot of great changes to the user interface – including the new metro style - which make it easier and more fluent to use. While most of these changes make life a lot easier for end users there are some things which might surprise/confuse users who have worked with previous versions of SharePoint – here is my top 10 list (not necessarily in order of importance). If you think there are some other things, just leave a comment.

• The breadcrumb control which allowed you to navigate in the hierarchy of sites is not visible anymore. For a great way to show it again see SP2013: Extending the SuiteBarDelegateControl by adding the Title Breadcrumb control (the more complicated option:-), an easier alternative is presented by Nick Grattan – Sign in as a different user and SharePoint 2013
• Meeting workspaces have been deprecated – so you can’t create a new meeting workspace . Microsoft’s reasoning: Other collaboration features exist in SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013: Lync to conduct live meetings, OneNote to take notes during meetings, and SharePoint team site or My Site to store shared meeting notes. (See Discontinued features and modified functionality in SharePoint 2013). I’m really disappointed by this one because it was quite heavily used by a lot of customers.
• Share functionality which allows users to be able share their content with other users without requiring them to have a deep understanding of the SharePoint security model.  instead of managing permissions to  Take a look at Sharing – simplified (SharePoint product team blog) or the Channel 9 video – Microsoft SharePoint 2013 Sharing and Security for more information.
• The Recycle Bin is not visible anymore in the left navigation – you should now first navigate to site contents and there you see the recycle bin. 

• Another menu which has moved is the Create subsite option – it is now visible under site contents at the bottom of the page. This might be a good thing though since SharePoint sites are created quite frequently whereas a simple extra document library might be a better option.
• In a multilingual setup for SharePoint with language packs installed – it is quite complex to change your language settings – check out  Multilingual User Interface and Language Packs for SharePoint Server 2013
• The log on as a different user is not visible anymore – see KB2752600 Sign in as different user menu option is missing in SharePoint Server 2013
• In SharePoint Server 2013 you can only create a blank site using Powershell or the Object model – the option to create a blank site has been removed from the SharePoint user interface.
• SharePoint Server 2013 use a new date format which does not use the traditional MM/DD/YYYY format but outputs the date format in a more extensive format. You can however still switch back to the standard format (See Modified column below)



• Drag and drop functionality for SharePoint document libraries not working in Internet Explorer 8.0 and 9.0 if you don’t have Office 2013 installed – but  it works in most versions of Firefox and Google Chrome (See SharePoint Server 2013: Drag and drop contents to library ) . Consider tying a SharePoint Server 2013 together with a Windows 8 or Office 2013 roll-out.

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