The following are top 10 reasons you should consider using SharePoint Server with Office 365 Enterprise features:

1. Have Office when you need it

When you’re away from your PC, stream a full-featured version of Office on any Internet-connected PC (Windows 7 or later required) with Office on Demand.

2. Work together with Site Mailboxes

Store documents from your PC and project-related email in a Site Mailbox so that your team can access the content no matter where you are. The Site Mailbox syncs with SharePoint, ensuring content is up-to-date.

3. Protect sensitive data

Keep your organization safe with data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities that prevent users from mistakenly sending sensitive information to unauthorized people. The DLP features in Exchange identify, monitor, and protect sensitive data through deep content analysis and provide built-in and extensible DLP policies that are based on regulatory standards such as PII, HIPAA, and PCI.

4. Stay compliant with archiving

The ability to retain and discover data across your organization is essential to ensuring internal and regulatory compliance. Compliance officers can use the new eDiscovery Center to identify, hold, and analyze your organization’s data from Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync. The data always remains in place so you don’t need to manage a separate data store.

5. Keep people connected

You can follow documents, sites, and people to track what others are working on. SharePoint even recommends people or documents to follow. With ratings and reputation tools, you can acknowledge co-workers and inspire them to work better.

6. Gain business insights

Combine large volumes of data from various sources with PowerPivot in Excel and explore data, visualize, and tell a compelling story with Power View. Make better decisions with teammates by sharing Business Intelligence-enriched reports and dashboards on SharePoint.

7. Work across time zones and geographies

Discuss and meet, coauthor documents, find experts, and chat in real-time with improved capabilities that keep everyone connected no matter where they are. Detailed contact cards and presence are integrated across all Office applications, making it easier than ever to connect.

8. Collaborate more securely

New capabilities and data governance/protection policy features in SharePoint let you work confidently with partners and customers. Use Lync to connect with others, while getting the authentication, encryption, and media controls your enterprise needs.

9. Get more out of your meetings

The new Lync Meeting tools let you interact with people through video, audio, and instant messaging, and to share content while meeting. Join a Lync Meeting from an HTML5-based browser using the Lync Web App, and enjoy HD video, voice over IP, instant messaging, and sharing of desktops, applications, and PowerPoint presentations.

10. Manage and control your business more easily

Office 365 continues to improve the ease of management from a web-based portal, provides powerful scripting access via PowerShell, and continues to invest in the infrastructure with data backup, disaster recovery, and globally redundant data centers. In addition, the new service health dashboard provides customizable reports that help you get insights into your service.

SharePoint 2013 certainly has some great new functionality and features that you may find enticing, and it may tempt you to expedite the deployment of SharePoint 2013. A few of those temptations include the FAST search technology integrated into the out-of-the-box (OOB) SharePoint search functionality.

SharePoint 2013 also includes several enhancements to the social computing environment, such as status updates, newsfeeds, mentions, as well as improvements in mobile device integration and e-Discovery.

Upgrade Methods for 2013

Another big change is in the upgrade methods for SharePoint 2013. The in-place upgrade option no longer exists for SharePoint 2013 so the only upgrade method, which was always the preferred upgrade method in SharePoint 2010, is the database attach upgrade.

However, there are several improvements in the SharePoint 2013 database attach upgrade process. These improvements include: upgrading service applications, a Site Health Checker feature for site collections, and the option to upgrade site collections after upgrading the database that contains the site collections.

These enhancements streamline the upgrade process and provide a more flexible upgrade process. However, the decision to upgrade to SharePoint 2013 and the process used to upgrade will depend heavily upon your current version of SharePoint and whether or not you are already planning an upgrade from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010.

Getting Up to Speed

If you are running SharePoint 2007, you will have to perform a two-step process to upgrade to SharePoint 2013. The first step is to upgrade to SharePoint 2010, and the second step is to upgrade from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013. At this point you may be wondering, “What is it going to cost to perform the interim upgrade to SharePoint 2010?” The answer is, “It depends.”

If you already have the required hardware for SharePoint 2010, then you will most likely meet the hardware requirements for SharePoint 2013, although I would suggest you beef up the RAM for SharePoint 2013. The core software requirements are slightly different: Server 2008 R2 SP1 or Server 2012, and SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1 or SQL Server 2012. If you already have these, you are set for both the SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013 installations.

You may be thinking, “But wait! That means I need to obtain the SharePoint Server 2010 software to create the interim farm? I certainly don’t want to buy SharePoint 2010 just to upgrade to SharePoint 2013.” The good news is that you can locate a standard or enterprise trial copy of SharePoint 2010 from the Microsoft Download Center, and use this to build the interim SharePoint 2010 farm.

After you have upgraded your databases to SharePoint 2010, you can then copy them to your SharePoint 2013 farm and upgrade them to SharePoint 2013. By default, when you upgrade your databases to SharePoint 2013, the site collections contained in the databases remain in a true SharePoint 2010 format, not just visually, but functionally as well.

Identify Issues

This is where the Site Health Checker comes into play; you can run the Site Health Checker on the SharePoint 2010 site collections contained in the SharePoint 2013 databases to determine if there are any issues with the site collection prior to upgrading it to SharePoint 2013.

However, I think something even more helpful is that you have the option of creating a SharePoint 2013 evaluation copy of your SharePoint 2010 site collection. You can now see how the site collection will look and perform in SharePoint 2013 without disrupting your SharePoint 2010 environment. After resolving any issues discovered in your SharePoint 2010 site collection, you are then ready to upgrade it to SharePoint 2013.

These two options make the upgrade process from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2013 quite easy, and the options help you perform the upgrade at a pace that is comfortable for your users, yet it still allows the farm administrators to complete the farm upgrade to SharePoint 2013 when they are ready.

For organizations that are close to upgrading from SharePoint 2007 to SharePoint 2010 in the next few months, consider pausing the rollout of SharePoint 2010 and waiting for the SharePoint 2013 release. This will allow you to take advantage of all the new functionality when using the upgrade process mentioned above.

While You Wait

With that said, you may be asking what you can do during the few months that you are waiting to upgrade to SharePoint 2013 from SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010. How about building a governance plan or improving an outdated governance plan? You could also take some time to clean up your SharePoint data so only current and relevant data is migrated to SharePoint 2013. This time could also be used to review and update the organization of your SharePoint information to ensure a user-friendly environment in SharePoint 2013.

ASPHostCentral.com has a strong commitment to provide the most up-to-date technology and products to our customers and hence, we officially launch the support of the latest SharePoint 2013 Hosting. We provide this product in 2 different versions: SharePoint Foundation 2013 and SharePoint Server 2013.

SharePoint 2013 is the new way to work together. A simplified user experience helps you organize, sync and share all your content. New social capabilities make it easy to share ideas, keep track of what your colleagues are working on, and discover experts you never knew existed. Putting a SharePoint team website in place for your business is a fast, cost-effective way to facilitate team communication while creating a professional looking website. Team sites based on Windows SharePoint Services are useful right out of the box. You can customize your site, changing its appearance and adding functionalities without using other applications or doing any programming

Microsoft SharePoint 2013 collaboration software provides enterprise-scale capabilities to meet business-critical needs such as managing content and business processes, simplifying how people find and share information across boundaries, and enabling informed decisions. Using the combined collaboration features of SharePoint 2013—which includes Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013—plus the design and customization capabilities of Microsoft SharePoint Designer 2013, organizations can enable their users to create, manage, and easily build SharePoint sites that are discoverable throughout the organization.

Our SharePoint Foundation 2013 Hosting package starts from as low as $15.99/month only and we are confident that anyone can easily try the new exciting features in this product. Our SharePoint Foundation 2013 Hosting comes with the following important features:

- Total Hosted Site: 1
- Total Disk Space/Document Storage: 2 GB
- Total User: 10
- Active Directory Configuration
- Support Custom WebPart
- Support SSL
- Public-Site, Anonymous Access
- Support International Language Packs

With the above features and price, we are confident that anyone can jump start and try the new exciting features in SharePoint Foundation 2013.

Our SharePoint Server 2013 Hosting packages start from as low as $60.00/month and we believe that we are the cheapest SharePoint Hosting provider on the market. Our SharePoint Server 2013 is located on a shared SharePoint Server and a customer still has access to some of the enteprise features that come with this product.

For more information about our offer, please kindly refer to http://www.asphostcentral.com/Windows-Sharepoint-2013-Hosting.aspx. 

Cloud App Model

SharePoint 2013 introduces a Cloud App Model that enables you to create apps. Apps for SharePoint are self-contained pieces of functionality that extend the capabilities of a SharePoint website. An app may include SharePoint components such as lists, workflows, and site pages, but it can also surface a remote web application and remote data in SharePoint. An app has few or no dependencies on any other software on the device or platform where it is installed, other than what is built into the platform. This characteristic enables apps to be installed simply and uninstalled cleanly. Apps have no custom code that runs on the SharePoint servers. Instead, all custom logic moves "up" to the cloud or "down" to client computers. Additionally, SharePoint 2013 introduces an innovative delivery model for apps for SharePoint that includes components like the SharePoint Store and the App Catalog.    

Familiar programming model using web standards

SharePoint 2013 makes it easy for any web developer, including those who work on non-Microsoft platform stacks, to create SharePoint solutions. What makes this possible is that SharePoint 2013 is based on common web standards like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Furthermore, implementation relies on established protocols like the Open Data protocol (OData), and OAuth.     

Development tools

The current release reflects enormous strides in optimizing the existing development tools like Visual Studio and SharePoint Designer, in addition to providing the release of newly developed web-based tool "Napa" Office 365 Development Tools for developing apps. The new unified project system in Visual Studio lets you develop apps for SharePoint, apps for Office, apps for SharePoint that include apps for Office, or apps for Office that are hosted by SharePoint. In addition to the SharePoint project templates that were provided in earlier versions, Visual Studio 2012 now includes a new app project template in the Apps folder named Apps for SharePoint 2013. Several new properties have been added to the Properties window and Properties pages to support app for SharePoint projects. Other improvements include full support for development against the Cloud App Model, including OData and OAuth support, and full support for development against the Workflow Manager Client 1.0 platform.   

Core platform enhancements

On a broader scale, SharePoint 2013 has been improved and enhanced to support the new cloud-based architecture and app-driven development framework. From the SharePoint APIs at the lowest level to connectivity to social media integration, SharePoint 2013 is designed and executed to support a rich application development experience. In addition to the use of Representational State Transfer (REST) endpoints for web services, there is a broad new API for both server and client development. Remote event receivers and now supported in addition to client-side rendering.     

Mobility

With SharePoint 2013, you can combine Windows Phone 7 applications with on-premises SharePoint services and applications, or with remote SharePoint services and applications that run in the cloud (such as those that use SharePoint Online), to create powerful applications that extend functionality beyond the traditional desktop or laptop and into a truly portable and much more accessible environment. The new mobility features in SharePoint 2013 are built on existing Microsoft tools and technologies, such as SharePoint, Windows Phone 7, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Silverlight. You can create SharePoint-powered mobile applications for Windows Phone using the new SharePoint phone application wizard template in Visual Studio, which lets you create simple list-based mobile applications. You can integrate new features introduced in SharePoint 2013, such as the Geolocation field type and “push" notifications from SharePoint Server, into your mobile applications.   

Social and collaboration

New and improved social and collaboration features make it easy for users to communicate and to stay engaged and informed. The improved My Site social feed helps users keep up to date with the people and content that they care about. The new Community Site feature provides a rich community experience that lets users easily find and share information and find people who have similar interests.     

Search

Search functionality in SharePoint 2013 includes several enhancements, custom content processing with the Content Enrichment web service, and a new framework for presenting search result types. Additionally, there have been significant enhancements made to the keyword query language (KQL).   

Workflows

Workflow Manager Client 1.0 is a redesigned workflow infrastructure that is built on Windows Workflow Foundation 4 and brings new power and flexibility to workflow authoring in SharePoint 2013. A fully declarative authoring environment enables information workers to use SharePoint Designer 2013 to author powerful workflows, and a new set of Visual Studio 2012 workflow project templates let developers access more sophisticated features like custom actions. Perhaps most importantly, Workflow Manager Client 1.0 is fully integrated with the model for apps for SharePoint. In addition, workflows execute in the cloud, not in SharePoint, which provides enormous flexibility in designing workflow-based apps for SharePoint.     

Enterprise Content Management

In SharePoint 2013, you can now use .NET client, Silverlight, Windows Phone, and JavaScript APIs, in addition to the newly expanded set of .NET server managed APIs, to customize Enterprise Content Management (ECM) experiences and behavior.     

Business Connectivity Services

Business Connectivity Services (BCS) enables SharePoint to access data from external data systems such as SAP, ERP, and CRM, in addition to other data-driven applications that are exposed through WCF services or OData endpoints. BCS in SharePoint 2013 has been improved and enhanced in many ways, including OData connectivity, external events, external data in apps, filtering and sorting, support for REST, and others.     

Application services

SharePoint Server 2013 includes several services for working with data in your SharePoint sites. New for SharePoint is the Machine Translation Service, which translates sites, documents, and streams for multilingual support. SharePoint Server 2013 also includes Access Services and a new data access model. For converting files and streams to other formats, SharePoint Server 2013 has Word Automation Services and PowerPoint Automation Services (a new feature for SharePoint). SharePoint also provides data analysis tools, like PerformancePoint Services and Visio Services, that enable business intelligence, and powerful new features in Excel Services.