KnowPoint

Microsoft has finally made it. We've been through:

• Public Preview July 16, 2012
• RTM (Release to Manufacturing) Oct 11, 2012 (10/11/12)
• Consumer release for Office 365 January 29, 2013
• Full general availability of SharePoint 2013 – February 27, 2013

Hooray! Now, since October, its true there have been a number of hotfixes pushed out, as you might expect. But none of them has yet been bundled as the official "cumulative update". Oh goody!

Goody Boy © 2013 Christopher F. McNulty on Flickr

If you are new to SharePoint, Microsoft rolls up off the patches into a consolidated update every two months (February, April, June, August, October, and December). Major functional changes are usually only made as part of a Service Pack. For SharePoint 2010, so far, there's been only one – SP1.

However, all bets are off for the moment. For two reasons. First, Microsoft has already promised to use SharePoint 2013 as a model for releasing more frequent functional updates. Since Office 365 uses the commercial on-premises version at its core, updating the cloud version means the full build needs to be updated. So will it be quarterly? More or less frequently? We'll know soon.

Additionally, all the "in between patches" since October are out there. There is a lot to adjust in the early days of a release. Let's look at a typical hot fix. Here's the description for the SP2013 hotfix released the same day as the 2007 and 2010 Cumulative Updates.

Description of the SharePoint Server 2013 hotfix package (2760486)

• Assume that you upgrade from Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 to SharePoint Server 2013. In this situation, when you create a feed post, it is not displayed on your My Site page.
• When you perform a search on a SharePoint Server 2013 server, you experience performance problems.
• When you configure Access Services to use Microsoft SQL Azure, database connections may time out too early.
• If you use the Chinese lunar calendar in Outlook 2013 or in an earlier version of Outlook, the Gregorian date is displayed as an incorrect lunar date. For example, the Gregorian date June 8, 2013 is displayed as lunar date 4/30 instead of 5/1.
• Assume that you create a site that has some files located in subfolders in the Site Pages document library in SharePoint Server 2013. When you try to save the site as a template, you may receive the following error message:
  • Unexpected Error happened
• You cannot edit a Microsoft Silverlight web part on a SharePoint 2010 mode site collection by using SharePoint Server 2013.
• Consider the following scenario:◦You are an Active Directory user.
  • You click the FILE tab in an Office 2013 client.
  • You click Add a service on the Account tab, point to Other Sites, and then click Microsoft account to connect to a Microsoft account.
  • You close the Office 2013 client and change the password of the Microsoft account.
  • You restart the Office 2013 client and try to repair the Active Directory connection of the Microsoft account.
  • In this scenario, the Office 2013 client crashes.
• Consider the following scenario:
  • You upload a document to a SharePoint Server 2013 document library that has the Require Check Out feature enabled.
  • You use the Sync button in the document library to synchronize the document with the local folder on your computer.
  • You open the document from the local folder.
  • In this scenario, the document is displayed in offline mode. However, the document should be displayed in read-only mode and should have a checkout bar.
• When you create a meeting on a group calendar in a SharePoint 2010 mode site, the Attendees field is not filled by a default value.
• Assume that a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 site contains a navigation link that has an invalid URL. However, after you upgrade from SharePoint Server 2010 to SharePoint Server 2013, you cannot access the site.
• When you set a Russian language as the IME in Word 2013, the CTRL+X shortcut does not work as expected.
• When user A creates a post that mentions or replies to user B in a different SharePoint farm, user B does not receive a notification email message.

Wow. All that sounds useful. But you can't have it yet. The package is no longer available due to a technical problem.

So best advice:

• Only deploy updates that fix a specific issue.
• Stay tuned – Microsoft will undoubtedly release an update during the next three months, at the latest

SharePoint 2013 release numbers can be found similarly to how you find them in 2007 - just go to Central Admin | System Settings | Manage Servers In Farm. Or, in PowerShell, use:

(get-spfarm).buildversion

For more information on SharePoint 2013, please visit http://sharepoint.microsoft.com