<p>A major facelift to the Microsoft collaboration platform puts social networking, cloud, business intelligence and modern apps at the fore.</p><p>Microsoft has refreshed just about every major product this year including System Center, SQL Server, Windows Server and, of course, the sweeping retrofit of its Windows client. As 2012 comes to a close, Microsoft is retrofitting one more major new product family: SharePoint and Office.</p><p>The release of the SharePoint 2013 and Office 2013 tandem this month for volume licensees marks a major revamp of the widely used Microsoft platform for enterprise collaboration and content management. Unlike key architectural changes made to the platform with SharePoint 2010, Microsoft focused more on giving SharePoint 2013 a significant facelift that changes the way individuals view, find, analyze and share mounds of information that may be widely distributed throughout an organization and beyond. The changes mean IT pros and developers must come up with new ways of managing data and building new modern apps designed for mobile devices.</p><p>While Office 2013 boasts a new interface consistent with Windows 8 and the GUI formerly known as "Metro" tuned for touch, along with synchronization with the cloud and other devices, SharePoint 2013 extends the Microsoft collaboration and information-sharing platform to a broader audience of workers while changing the way existing users interface with it. Combined with the recently released Microsoft SQL Server 2012 database and support for improved business analytics, those that deploy SharePoint 2013 will find it at the epicenter for parsing big data, which includes structured and unstructured information and how it's shared and analyzed (see "SharePoint 2013 Raises the Bar on User-Driven BI and Big Data,").</p><p><a href="http://redmondmag.com/articles/2012/12/01/under-the-hood-of-sharepoint-2013.aspx">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://searchexchange.techtarget.com/tip/New-Exchange-2013-features-tighten-integration-with-SharePoint">New Exchange 2013 features tighten integration with SharePoint</a> (TechTarget)</p><p><a href="http://www.sfgate.com/business/prweb/article/Ignition-Achieves-Silver-Competencies-for-4086149.php">Ignition Achieves Silver Competencies for SharePoint</a> (San Francisco Chronicle)</p><p><a href="http://careers.hereisthecity.com/job/senior-sharepoint-developer---epsom---k-377999/">Senior Sharepoint Developer - Epsom - 60k</a> (Here Is The City)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=d2FU1ECtEJBXilMM17xZ-rqZIxM3M&ned=us">37 additional articles.</a></p>