<p>With the 2010 versions of its Office servers, and with Office 365, Microsoft began the long task of re-engineering Exchange, Lync and SharePoint for a cloud-first approach. Now with the release of SharePoint 2013 and the upcoming refresh of Office 365, cloud and on-premises servers are identical, with the same user interface and capabilities. That means plenty of change for SharePoint administrators, developers and users, and a future that promises closer integration with Microsoft's social enterprise network Yammer.</p><p>With SharePoint 2013 as much a cloud product as an on-premises server, it's as likely you'll be implementing it as part of an Office 365 subscription as installing it on your own servers or even making it part of an Azure-hosted infrastructure. Setting up your own SharePoint installation will require at least Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2 SP1, and a quad-core CPU with at least 8GB of RAM. Although 8GB is the minimum amount of RAM for a development or test server, you're more likely to need at least 24GB for a full production installation. We'd be inclined to recommend installing SharePoint 2013 in a virtual machine, if only to take the advantage of migrating to new hardware with minimal downtime, or the ability to keep offsite snapshots for disaster recovery.</p><p>Running a local install is easy enough. A prerequisite installer will ensure you have the right versions of .NET and IIS installed, as well as adding AppFabric and the Windows Identity Foundation. Once you've installed the prerequisites, you can run the SharePoint installer. Getting started with Office 365 is a lot easier just sign up, and wait 30 minutes or so for your account to provision a SharePoint instance. You'll find that SharePoint 2013 is designed for clouds, both private and public, with a new distributed cache and support for commodity storage with reduced disk I/O and a new file-save algorithm.SharePoint 2013 makes use of tiles, typography and white space to deliver a 'modern' look and feel.</p><p>Switching to the new SharePointIf you're using Outlook.com or any of the Office 2013 applications you'll find the new SharePoint 2013 user interface familiar. Building on Microsoft's 'modern' design, it uses tiles and typography to deliver information, giving you a clear and easy-to read-view. It's a leaf out the IT consumerisation playbook, with plenty of white space and a responsive design that's more than a little reminiscent of popular social media services. Although the ribbon introduced in SharePoint 2010 is still there, it's much less obtrusive and takes advantage of the new look-and-feel to give users a simpler way of working with their sites and content.</p><p><a href="http://www.zdnet.com/sharepoint-2013-gets-a-consumer-makeover-7000010408/">Keep reading...</a></p><p>Read also:</p><p><a href="http://winsupersite.com/office-2013/office-2013-feature-focus-skydrive-integration">Office 2013 Feature Focus: SkyDrive Integration</a> (Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows)</p><p>Explore: <a href="http://news.google.com/news/more?ncl=dhUF3hoorhQz9YM6wewpiwnNadCoM&ned=us">3 additional articles.</a></p>