SharePoint 2013 offers a basic preview capability; however, it only supports Microsoft Office file formats. This is an issue for organizations that need a consistent user experience across a multitude of file formats including: PDF, AutoCAD, Adobe Suite, Outlook and other more rare formats.

In SharePoint 2013, the basic preview functionality requires installing a separate Office Web Apps server farm in addition to your SharePoint farm. This extra infrastructure can be prohibitive due to extra cost and complexity. However, with Ontolica Preview full graphical previews are enabled without such overhead.

 

A preview solution becomes a highly visual and exposed part of the SharePoint user interface, and it is often critical to ensure adequate responsiveness in the UI for previews to become productive for all end-users. SharePoint environments differ greatly in size and complexity, and it is imperative to have flexible deployment options allowing different caching strategies and service load balancing, which ensures enterprise class performance.

 

The business requirements for a preview solution can vary greatly depending on usage scenarios, and will often change over time as utilization of SharePoint matures and increases. Consequently, configuration is critical to ensure a successful implementation of a preview solution that can keep up with changing requirements and enable a close match to end-user expectations.