Content approval can be used on both lists and libraries in a SharePoint site. With content approval enabled, you have additional options to control the visibility of items. Content approval is enabled through the list/library settings page. Content can be approved manually through the context menu and toolbar of an item or it can be automated with workflows. SharePoint includes a workflow specifically for approving content.

Workflows are a popular way to perform automated work in SharePoint. The pay versions of SharePoint Server, Standard and Enterprise, come with extra out-of-box workflows that can be associated and configured with lists and libraries using just the browser. Custom workflows can be created with software applications such as SharePoint Designer 2013 or Visual Studio 2012.

SharePoint Designer is a powerful and fairly easy to use tool for creating custom workflows and does not require any formal developer skills. Visual Studio, although extremely powerful in creating custom workflows, requires developer skills to use. The walk-throughs and exercises in this course will focus on using SharePoint Designer 2013 to create custom workflows.

The Managed Metadata service in SharePoint Server 2013 provides central term storage and management. The Term Store is what allows you to have common sets of terms that can be shared across all sites and site collections within a farm. The Managed Metadata service only comes with the pay versions of SharePoint Server, and it is not available with SharePoint Foundation 2013.

Term Store terms are organized within a Term Set which is created within a Term Group forming a hierarchy nested within the Managed Metadata Service. The parent service defines Term Store Administrators that are responsible for creating the Term Groups. The Term Groups define the Group Managers and Contributors.

Business Connectivity Services is a free service that comes with the Foundation version of SharePoint. The service enables administrators to create external lists linked to data outside of SharePoint. Normal SharePoint lists expose data that is stored inside of a SQL content database that SharePoint creates and maintains.

In this lesson, you will learn the basics of information management policy.

Content organizer is a SharePoint feature that only comes with the pay versions of SharePoint. It provides document routing from a drop-off library. The feature is enabled at the site level and the drop-off library is created as part of the feature activation. Once the drop-off library is created, you can define rules that route documents placed in the drop-off library to their final destination.

SharePoint’s Document ID service, available with the pay versions of SharePoint, creates unique IDs for documents that are prefixed with text the Site Collection Administrator defines. What’s more is that the ID assigned to the document creates a fixed URL that can be used to link to the document even if it is moved to another library or site.

The Document ID service can only be used on documents and cannot be used on list items. The Document ID service is enabled at the Site Collection level by activating a feature. Once the service is activated the Site Collection Administrator can define the prefix string to be used. SharePoint uses a Timer Job, Document ID assignment job, to set the IDs on existing documents once the Document ID Service has been activated. The Timer Job runs every 24 hours by default so existing documents will not have the IDs until the job has run. A Farm administrator can manually run the job to have the IDs created sooner. New documents will have IDs created when the document is saved to the library.

SharePoint’s Documents Sets are like enhanced versions of folders. As with folders, you primarily use them to group similar documents together. They are enhanced with the ability to have their own metadata, workflows, and home page.

The Document Sets feature is only available with the pay versions of SharePoint Server 2013. To use Document Sets, the feature must be active at the Site Collection level. Once activated, there will be a new Document Set content type in the Site Collection’s content type gallery. To best take advantage of the enhancements offered by Document Sets, you should create custom content types that inherit from the Document Set content type.

SharePoint’s publishing infrastructure provides an enhanced way to create and store information displayed through the site’s Web pages. The publishing infrastructure is only available on the pay versions of SharePoint is can be enabled by activating features at both the site collection and site level.

SharePoint 2013 comes out-of-the-box with search capabilities, even the free Foundation version. The main difference with SharePoint Foundation 2013 version of search is its limited in scalability, everything has to run on a single server. Other than the scalability the Search services is internally the same for all versions of SharePoint 2013.