Prepare for SharePoint 2013

 SharePoint 2013 RTM was released recently to MSDN subscribers, and I have been reading up on some of its features since then. I'll provide an overview of what to expect from SharePoint 2013.

• In-place upgrades from SharePoint 2010 are not supported. This means that a new farm will have to be created, and 2010 content upgraded by the database attach method. The database attach method supports both content databases and service application databases now.
• Web parts can be hosted outside the farm. Currently web parts must be uploaded to the farm, either as sandboxed soutions (which are going away, btw) or farm-based solutions. This means that a buggy web part can crash your farm. It also makes adding custom web parts to Office 365 (SharePoint Online) impossible. Now, web parts can be hosted anywhere that is accessible from your network, on any platform (RoR, LAMP, etc.) and hosted within SharePoint as basically an iframe. Presumably integration with SharePoint is tighter than what can be achieved with a Page Viewer web part, such as SharePoint managing security for a web part hosted elsewhere behind your firewall.
• Office 365 converging with on-premise SharePoint. It makes eminent sense to host SharePoint in the cloud, and 2013 makes Office 365 instances more customizable.
• Next generation interface offers better support for mobile devices. The erstwhile-named Metro style is designed for touchscreens, making SharePoint 2013 more viable on mobile devices.
• Improved client object model.
• No more tables! Allegedly the HTML served by SharePoint 2013 no longer abuses tables and uses divs appropriately.
• SharePoint 2013 is claimed to be faster than 2010. We can hope!
• Full backwards compatibility.
• Workflow improvements such as loops.
• An app store.

To sum up, SharePoint is becoming Microsoft's portal offering in the cloud and is drifting from its pure-CMS roots. It can still function as a CMS but is now capable of much, much more than being a smart file system. I predict Office 365 will replace on-premise SharePoint in popularity. In the future Windows application developers will target Azure and Windows enterprise architects will target Office 365. Uptake of SharePoint will be faster because legacy web applications can be hosted within a farm with little - if any - customization.