In a previous post, I compared the on-premises features of SharePoint 2013 by version (Foundation vs. Standard vs. Enterprise) from an article that Microsoft published detailing a comparison of all of the features of SharePoint Online for the new Microsoft Office Customer Preview (i.e. SharePoint 2013 Preview) along with the various Office 365 and SharePoint online subscription plans (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj819267.aspx). 

In this post, I have tried to detail some of the key feature differences in On-Prem vs. On-line.

Disclaimer: As SharePoint 2013 RTM has just been released, I’m sure there are still updates being made so please refer to the above TechNet article(s) for any extra information required as well as updates. Microsoft states that some values in this article may not represent the final values for SharePoint Server 2013 and that they will update the article with appropriate values as data becomes more generally available.

 

SharePoint 2013 Feature Description SharePoint Online? Minimum Version?
Developer      
App Deployment: Autohosted Apps Autohosted Apps are installed to a host web on the customer’s SharePoint Online tenancy, with components automatically installed into a Windows Azure website account. The Windows Azure Web Sites infrastructure manages isolation of tenancies. Learn more about hosting options for apps for SharePoint. Yes Only SharePoint Online
BCS: Profile Pages Not available to SharePoint Online customers. Business Connectivity Services (BCS) provides a special WebParts page called Profile pages. Profile pages allows for BCS to display details of the external data in addition to its related external content types. No Standard
BCS: Rich Client Integration Not available to SharePoint Online customers. Business Connectivity Services (BCS) uses a complimentary client and server-side architecture that allows for Office clients, such as Outlook and Excel, to work directly with external data exposed to SharePoint through external content types. Learn more about Business Connectivity Services Client Runtime. No Enterprise
Custom Site Definitions Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 customers can create their own site definitions that customize and extend standard SharePoint site templates. Learn more about creating custom site definitions. No Enterprise
Custom Site Provisioning Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 customers get a quick and easy way for users to make their site requests and to start using their sites quickly. No Enterprise
Full-Trust Solutions Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 customers can create full-trust solutions. Also called farm solutions. Unlike apps for SharePoint, farm solutions contain code that is deployed to the SharePoint servers and makes calls to SharePoint’s server object model. These assemblies always run with full trust. Farm solutions should be used for customizations of SharePoint administrative functions, such as custom timer jobs, custom Windows PowerShell cmdlets, and extensions of Central Administration. Learn more about building farm solutions in SharePoint 2013. No Foundation
IT Pro      
Alternate Access Mapping (AAM) Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 customers can configure alternate access mapping to map requests where the URL of a Web request received by Internet Information Services (IIS) differs from the URL that was typed by a user. No Foundation
Analytics Platform Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 customers can use the Analytics Platform, which replaces the Web Analytics service application, to help identify and surface the content that users consider to be the most useful and relevant. Learn more about Analytics Platform. No Enterprise
Claims-Based Authentication Support Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 customers configure claims-based authentication for web applications that support SharePoint Server 2013 server-to-server authentication and app authentication. Learn more about claims-based authentication. No Foundation
Configuration Wizards Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 customers can use the Farm Configuration Wizard to configure some SharePoint Server 2013 services automatically. Or they can configure services manually, which gives greater flexibility in designing a logical architecture. Learn more about the Farm Configuration Wizard. No Standard
Distributed Cache Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 customers can use the Distributed Cache service to cache feature functionality, which improves authentication, newsfeed, OneNote client access, security trimming, and page load performance. Learn more about Distributed Cache. No Foundation
Host Header Site Collections Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 site collections can have their own unique host header. Creating a host-named site collection enables organizations’ to hose multiple site collections with vanity URLs, which are easier for people to remember. No Foundation
Managed Accounts Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 system administrators can use a Managed Account, an Active Directory user account whose credentials are managed by and contained within SharePoint, to easily manage administrative tasks. That way the fate of your organization’s deployment does not rest on just one person’s account. No Foundation
Patch Management Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 updates will be released by using a two-step phase process: patching and upgrading. During the patching steps, new binary files are copied to the Central Administration server. Any services that are using files that have to be replaced are temporarily stopped. There are some instances when a server must be restarted. No Foundation
Quota Templates Not available to SharePoint Online customers. A quota template consists of storage limit values that specify the maximum amount of data that can be stored in a site collection. When the storage limit is reached, a quota template can also trigger an email alert to the site collection administrator. SharePoint Online administrators and SharePoint Server 2013 farm administrators can create a quota template that can be applied to any site collection. No Foundation
Read-Only Database Support Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 administrators can set content databases to be read-only. No Foundation
Remote Blob Storage Not available to SharePoint Online customers. Remote BLOB Storage (RBS) is an add-on feature pack for Microsoft SQL Server. RBS is designed to move the storage of binary large objects (BLOBs) from database servers to commodity storage solutions. If the content databases in Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 are 4 gigabytes (GB) or larger, consider using RBS as part of your data storage solution. No Foundation
Request Management Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 administrators can define rules, by using Request Manager, to do request routing and throttling to improve performance. No Foundation
Request throttling Not available to SharePoint Online customers. Request throttling provides SharePoint Server 2013 administrators with options for throttling HTTP requests when front-end web servers become too busy to handle all the incoming requests. No Foundation
Resource throttling Not available to SharePoint Online customers. Resource throttling provides SharePoint Server 2013 administrators with options for monitoring and throttling server resources and large lists for Web applications. Resource throttling can monitor such resources as CPU, memory, and Wait Time, checking resources every 5 seconds. No Foundation
SharePoint Health Analyzer Not available to SharePoint Online customers. New for SharePoint Server 2013, site collection pre-upgrade health check examines a site collection and then generates a report listing ay potential upgrade issues and how to address the issues. For example, if a file has been customized, it will be flagged, so your organization can identify the custom file and reset it to the default template if the site definition, if you want. No Foundation
SharePoint Online Admin Center The Microsoft SharePoint Online Administration Center, available to certain SharePoint Online customers only, enables administrators to manage features such as the following: Site collections, InfoPath forms,User Profiles,Business Connectivity Services (BCS),Managed metadata and the Term Store,Records management,Search,Secure Store,Apps for SharePoint,External sharing,Information Rights Management,Self-service site creation Yes Only SharePoint Online
Shredded Storage Not available to SharePoint Online customers. Shredded storage is essentially the chunking of data—only differences are saved. That means if versioning is enabled and someone makes a change to a document, only changes “shreds” are added to the storage footprint of that document. Shredded storage improves I/O performance by reducing how much information retrieved by the web server from the content database. Shredded storage removes duplicate files, and improves data transmission speed. No Foundation
State Service Not available to SharePoint Online customers. The State Service allows SharePoint Server 2013 customers to check whether all services in their farm are configured correctly. No Foundation
Streamlined Central Administration Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 administrators can use Central Administration to perform administrative tasks from a single location. No Foundation
System Status Notifications Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 site collection owners will receive an email message and a status bar notification in a site collection when an upgrade is available. No Foundation
Unattached Content Database Recovery Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 customers can recover content from an unattached content database by using Central Administration. No Foundation
Upgrade evaluation site collections Not available to SharePoint Online customers. A key benefit of separating the process of upgrading software and data from upgrading sites is that it allows site owners or administrators to run sites in SharePoint 2010 mode until the sites are ready to be upgraded to the latest version. In preparation for upgrading the site, site owners or administrators can request an evaluation site collection, which is a copy of the site, for review purposes. Evaluation sites are set to automatically expire and be deleted. No Foundation
Usage Reporting and Logging Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 administrators use audit log reports to view the data in the audit logs for a site collection. Learn more about Site Collection audit logs. No Foundation
Content      
Auditing of View Events Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 customers who deploy on-premises can track and log when someone views a document. No Standard
External Sharing: External Access If your organization performs work that involves sharing documents or collaborating directly with vendors, clients, or customers, then you might want to use your SharePoint Online sites to share content with people outside your organization who do not have licenses for your organization’s Microsoft Office 365 subscription. Learn more about external sharing. Yes Only SharePoint Online
External Sharing: Guest Link When a site is shared in SharePoint Online, an email message is sent to the external user containing the invitation to join the site. Invitations can be sent to people with any type of email address, such as *.gmail.com, *contoso.com, or *Comcast.net. However, to sign in to the site, the email address has to be associated with a Microsoft account. Learn more about sharing a site with external users. Yes Only SharePoint Online
Office ProPlus (Osub) Office ProPlus provides the complete Office 2013 application suite as a monthly subscription service. This lets customers purchase monthly licenses for each user that allow five concurrent installations. Learn more about Office ProPlus for Office 365. Yes Only SharePoint Online
PowerPoint Automation Services Not available to SharePoint Online customers. PowerPoint Automation Services helps enterprises manage their presentations. It is a shared service that provides unattended, server-side conversion of presentations into other formats. Learn more about PowerPoint Automation Services in SharePoint Server 2013. No Standard
Shared Content Types To share content types among site collections, you make on content type gallery the “hub” of a managed metadata service, create connections to the service from each web application that contains a site collection, and specify that site collections should use the content types in the service. Learn more about sharing term sets and content types in SharePoint Server 2013. This feature is not available in SharePoint Online. No Standard
WCM: Analytics Not available to SharePoint Online customers. The Analytics Processing Component helps SharePoint Server 2013 administrators identify and surface content that users consider to be the most useful and relevant. The component analyzes both the content itself, and also the way users interact with it. The results from the analysis are added to the items in the search index so that search relevant improves automatically over time. Also, the results are used in reports that help search administrators see which manyual steps they can take to improve the search system. Learn more about analytics processing in SharePoint Server 2013. This feature is not available in SharePoint Online. No Standard
WCM: Catalog Not available to SharePoint Online customers. A catalog is a library or list that is shared across other sites and site collections. Lean more about catalog content for SharePoint authoring sites. No Enterprise
WCM: Cross-site publishing Not available to SharePoint Online customers. Cross-site publishing allows SharePoint Server 2013 customers to use one or more authoring site collections to author and store content, and one or more publishing site collections to control the design of the site and to show the content. The authoring site collection contains catalogs, such as Pages libraries and lists, which contain content that is tagged with metadata. These catalogs are indexed by the search system and made available to the publishing site collection. The publishing site collection issues queries for data that was indexed and shows it on web pages by using Web Parts that use search technology. Learn more about cross-site publishing in SharePoint Server 2013. This feature is not available in SharePoint Online. No Enterprise
WCM: Faceted navigation Not available to SharePoint Online customers. Faceted navigation help users browser for content more easily by filtering on refiners that are tied to terms in a term set. By using faceted navigation, SharePoint Server 2013 administrators can configure different refiners for different terms in a term set without having to create additional pages. Learn more about refiners and faceted navigation. No Enterprise
WCM: Image Renditions Not available to SharePoint Online customers. Image renditions let organizations have large source images on a SharePoint Server 2013 site and also have places on a site where pages only use smaller versions. No Enterprise
WCM: Multiple Domains Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 can create host-named site collections with the host header. Host-named site collections in SharePoint provide URL management and scalability of sites within a single web application. This feature is not available to SharePoint Online customers. No Enterprise
WCM: Topic Pages Not available to SharePoint Online customers. Category pages and catalog item pages are page layouts that you can use to show structured catalog content consistently across a SharePoint Server 2013 site. Learn more about cross-site publishing. This feature is not available in SharePoint Online. No Enterprise
Word Automation Services Not available to SharePoint Online customers. Word Automation Services enables unattended, server-side conversion of documents that are supported by Microsoft Word. With Word Automation Services, tasks that previously required you to run the Word desktop application can be automated in SharePoint Server 2013. No Standard
Insights      
PerformancePoint Services Not available to SharePoint Online customers. PerformancePoint Services enables SharePoint Server 2013 customers to create interactive dashboards that display key performance indicators (KPIs) and data virtualizations in the form of scorecards, reports, and filters. Learn more about PerformancePoint Services. No Enterprise
PerformancePoint Services (PPS) Dashboard Migration Not available to SharePoint Online customers. With Dashboard Migration, SharePoint Server 2013 customers will be able to copy complete dashboards and dependencies. This includes the .aspx file, to other users, servers, or site collections. This feature also allows the ability to migrate single items to other environments and migrate content by using Windows PowerShell commands. Learn more about creating Dashboards by using PerformancePoint Services. No Enterprise
Scorecards & Dashboards Not available to SharePoint Online customers. A scorecard shows at a glance whether performance is on or off target for one or more key performance indicators (KPIs). A dashboard is a collection of views that can include scorecards and other reports. Scorecards and dashboard are designed to show current performance information and are typically rendered in a site such as a SharePoint Server 2013 site. Learn more about creating and using a report or a scorecard. No Enterprise
Search      
Advanced Content Processing Not available to SharePoint Online customers. To improve SharePoint Server 2013 search relevance, the document parsing functionality in the content processing component analyzes both the structure and content of documents. Documents parsers extract useful metadata and remove redundant information. For example, parsers extract heading and subheadings from Word documents, and titles, dates, and authors from slides in PowerPoint presentations. For HTML content, redundant generic information such as menus, headers, and footers are removed from document summaries in the search results. Learn more about search improvements. No Foundation
Content Search Web Part Content Search Web Part Not available to SharePoint Online customers. The Content Search Web Part is a SharePoint Server 2013 feature that displays content that was crawled and added to an organization’s search index. It is a very powerful and versatile Web Part, especially when it is used in combination with managed navigation and category pages. The Content Search Web Part allows you to select a result source. This makes it very easy to specify which content should be searched. You can also use Keyword Query Language to add more filters and search terms to the query in this Web Part. Learn more about Content Search Web Part. No Enterprise
Continuous crawl Not available to SharePoint Online customers. Configure crawl schedules for SharePoint Server 2013 content sources so that crawls are performed continuously. This option eliminates the need to schedule incremental crawls and automatically starts crawls as necessary to keep the search index fresh. Learn more about managing continuous crawl. No Foundation
Custom entity extraction Not available to SharePoint Online customers. SharePoint Server 2013 administrators can create and deploy custom entity extraction dictionaries to configure the search system to look for specific words or phrases (entities) in unstructured content. The extracted entities are stored in separate managed properties, and you can use them to improve your organization’s search experience, for example by creating refiners. Learn more about creating and deploying custom entity extractors. No Enterprise
Extensible content processing Not available to SharePoint Online customers. Developers can call out to an external content enrichment web service to change the managed properties of crawled items before they are indexed. The ability to change managed properties for items during content processing is helpful for tasks such as data cleansing, entity extraction, classification, and tagging. Learn more about custom content processing. No Enterprise
On-premises search index The search index is stored in the on-premises SharePoint Server 2013 environment and is not available to SharePoint Online customers. Learn more about search schema in SharePoint Server 2013. No Foundation
Refiners Not available to SharePoint Online customers. Refiners categorize the top documents in SharePoint Server 2013 search results into groups that lets users filter the search results. Learn more about the Refinement Web Part. No Foundation
Search connector framework SharePoint Server 2013 provides default connectors (protocol handlers) for the most popular protocols, which can be used to crawl and index content. To crawl content that requires a non-default connector, your organization can purchase and install third-party connectors or build your own custom connectors. Learn more about default connectors in SharePoint Server 2013. Yes Only SharePoint Online
Tunable Relevancy The search system has strong built-in relevant that will automatically improve over time. In addition, many tools can be used to manually tune the relevancy to match content and to create specific search experiences for an organization. Learn more about managing search relevance in SharePoint Server 2013. Yes Only SharePoint Online
Public Website (SPO) Your Office 365 account includes a public website that you can use to create a professional online presence for your organization. Learn more about Public Website. Yes Only SharePoint Online
Add-Ons      
Additional Storage Should you require more storage, it is available at a cost per gigabyte (GB) per month. Yes Only SharePoint Online
App Hosting: Base The add-on is used to buy additional app hosting licenses which provide hosting resources to the Autohosted Apps in SharePoint app catalog. Yes Only SharePoint Online
App Hosting: Per User The add-on is used to buy additional app hosting licenses which provide hosting resources to the Autohosted Apps in SharePoint app catalog. Yes Only SharePoint Online
Azure Provisioned Apps: Access Services Access Services allows business users to quickly create apps that run in Office 365 and store their data in SWL databases on Windows Azure. Yes Only SharePoint Online
Azure Provisioned Apps: Custom Code in Azure Lightweight Web Role (LWR) Provider-hosted apps for SharePoint include components that are deployed and hosted outside the SharePoint farm, usually by a developer, but in some scenarios by the customer. The provider-hosted app for SharePoint interacts with a SharePoint site but also uses resources and services that reside on the remote site. Learn more about hosting options for apps for SharePoint. Yes Only SharePoint Online
Duet Online Duet Online for SharePoint and SAP is a jointly developed product from SAP and Microsoft that enables interoperability between SAP applications and SharePoint Online. Learn more about Duet Online. Yes Only SharePoint Online

 

 

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