I am a massive fan of SharePoint Online 2013 and I am positive that SharePoint Online will become a very powerful Enterprise platform in the near future. There are still differences with SharePoint 2013 On Premises. The grumpy cat just found out:
She isn’t amused 😉
In my SharePoint Online presentations I always mention the following main differences:
- Full Trust Solutions
- BCS limited
- WCM limited
- Performance Point Services
- Search Control and Index
- Managed Paths
Let’s take a closer look.
Full Trust Solutions
You can create custom solutions for SharePoint Online but only with Sandbox Solutions and the new App model. These two option have their limitations compared to Full Trust Solutions (FTS). The reason you aren’t able to use FTS is because of the multi-tenant model. You share your SharePoint farm with other customers. A FTS needs to be installed on a server and this can impact SharePoint’s performance of other customers on the same farm.
BCS limited
I will be honest, I know what BCS can do but technically I have no idea how it works. BCS is available in SharePoint Online but there are limitations. I found the following resource:
WCM limited
All the improvements and new SharePoint 2013 WCM features are aimed at public facing websites such as the catalog, cross site publishing and faceted navigation. These feature aren’t in SharePoint Online 2013 because Office 365 comes with its own solution for public facing websites.
Performance Point Services
You can use Excel and Visio services to create Business Intelligence (BI) solutions in SharePoint Online but the main tool to create advanced BI solutions is of course Perfomance Point Services. This isn’t available in SharePoint Online 2013.
Search Control and Index
Although SharePoint Online 2013 has most of the On Premises search features and finally its own place in the SharePoint Online Administration Center, you aren’t able to influence the crawl schedules or create custom solutions against the Search index. There are also limitations with creating managed properties.
Managed Paths
When creating a new site collection you can only choose from sites and teams as managed path:
This is also because of the multi-tenant model but it would be great if this can be extended in the future. Especially for departments or projects site collections.
You can click here to get a full overview of the available features in SharePoint Online 2013 per Office 365 plan.