Best New User Features for SP 2013

After attending #SPC12 and playing in my sandbox, I have come up with a small list of the features I think will most benefit the end users. They are in no particular order.

1. Social integration of Yammer features: This is huge! The ability to have a project-based conversations on the team site is really not a new thing. We had them before and they were called "Discussion Boards". The problem with discussion boards was...it required you to go TO that site to make a comment. Now you have the ability to comment on any of the discussions within your my site. You also have the ability to tag comments much like you do with Twitter. Targeting is another beautiful feature that allows for you to have certain people be notified in their activity stream. In a nutshell, this takes the way you live and use the internet away from the office, into the office. Many businesses will find this difficult as they want that separation of business and personal, but for the workers, this is a natural way to communicate.
2. Task rollups: This LONG awaited feature was brought to us by the MS Project team. They have managed to take the tasks you have been assigned on all of those team sites, site collections, Exchange, and Project and rolled them all into your my site. The first time I saw this I think I squealed like a school girl. For the end user this reduces having to check 15 places to get and keep track of your tasks.
3. In-Browser Design: Although not everyone will use this feature, the power users may find this extremely useful. Certain things have happened outside SharePoint that will change the Power User roll as we know it. First being SharePoint Designer no longer has a design view. For some people in the design community this is a highly contested topic. For others, they feel this will separate real designers from the ones improperly using the style sheets. As for me, I think it is not an issue as long as you can provide an alternative. Introducing Design Manager... Design manager allows for you to make HTML pages any way you want (i.e. Dreamweaver, Fusion, etc.) and when you upload the file using design manager, it can be saved as a page layout, css, or even the master page. Yep! Master page can be created from an uploaded HTML page. More squealing occurred during this announcement.
4. SharePoint Store: This feature is one of the best! To provide the end users with the ability to add a feature as needed, is simply fantastic! You know how you have an app store for your smart phone, this is in that same vein. You can now download SharePoint applications directly into your environment. It will install the application and everything. Microsoft even checks the application before allowing it to be added to the store. So what kind of apps are we talking about? Well, the product has still not officially been released, but already there are 55 applications available ranging from Napa (Microsoft's in-browser coding application for SharePoint) to Facebook integration which allows for you to "like" and pull profiles of Facebook users. This is only the beginning of the store. At the conference many of the vendors were already working to release apps for the store.
5. Linked Activities: One of the presentations was by the Project team. They showed a true progression of how a business activity can evolve and include different people with different usage patterns. For example: A manager created a small spreadsheet and started annotating some objectives for the new intern. Not much later, the manager started asking for other activities that could be added to the list. At this point, the list became a bit more than passing around an Excel spreadsheet. So, they imported the spreadsheet into SharePoint and worked from there.
   Soon after, the team figured that timelines were going to be involved. They then added this popped this into a Project list and worked through assigning resources. (this was exciting...I smiled). They then proceeded to place the tasks into a hierarchy. (This is when I weeeeee'd like the pig). The hierarchy capability was not in the previous version of a project list.
   This same project progressed, gained some executive support and turned into a real project and portfolio. They then connected a Microsoft Project client to the project list. (I felt light-headed). Then they published it to...Project Server. (I was tearing up at this point).
   Wait...The person who was working on the list may be left behind though right? Nope! When the Project list was updated, it updated the list...and the Project Server. (I pee'd a little at this point).
   Lastly, but certainly not least, remember item number 2? When the task was assigned to the person, it shows in their my site. They can update it in their my site and it updates it on the Project list, list, Project server. (this was the point I lost consciousness)...from what people told me though, that pretty much ended the presentation.

Needless to say, SharePoint 2013 has some fantastic end user features that will rapidly increase the usability of the platform. I will have more as time goes on.