Farm Solutions, Sandboxed Solution and Apps in various SharePoint Technologies

Various versions of SharePoint provides different capabilities to create solutions on SharePoint and these technologies are continuously evolving. I am trying to put the journey here and then will compare between these technologies so that we can take a correct decision on which model should be selected and when.

The below diagram depicts the journey of SharePoint and how the solutions are evolving:

Now some time it is not an easy decision to decide which model we should be selecting for our business needs and I would say that there is no perfect answer for this. I will try to summarize few parameters which can help you to decide the best technology:

	SharePoint Farm Solution	Sandboxed Solution	Apps for SharePoint
Definition	Solutions are small to large scale packages used to customize or enhance SharePoint sites. They are also called full trust solutions.	Sandbox solutions are similar to Farm Solution with a limited capabilities. They are called partial trust solution.	Apps For SharePoint are stand-alone applications that provide specific information or functionality to a SharePoint site.
Hosting	SharePoint Farm solutions are hosted within the SharePoint Farm and they are executed within the main SharePoint worker process (w3wp.exe).	Sandbox solutions are also hosted within the SharePoint Farm but they are executed in sandbox worker process (SPUCWorkerProcess.exe).	Apps run completely outside of the SharePoint server, and their custom code executes either within the context of the client browser or on other servers that are not running SharePoint such as Web servers in the cloud.
Deployment	Mostly a farm solutiona requires a Farm Administrator to do the deployment and mostly restarts the IIS on all the WFEs, which causes a disruption in the service.	Deployment of Sandbox solutions is a lot easier and straight forward and a site collection administrator uploads and activates a sandboxed solution.Though after activating the sandboxed solution it can create some unwarrented effects on the site.	The apps are uploaded in either the public SharePoint app store or to an organization's private app catalog. Once they are made available in a SharePoint site a user can install them on the local SharePoint Site.
Scope	Farm solutions can be installed for any scope such as at Farm, Web App, Site Collection, Site level.	Sandbox solution scope is limited to Site Collections in which they are activated.	app are installed within the same scope of the SharePoint site or at the Tenancy Scope. The tenancy scope is just to make sure that all the tenant site can install the app at the site level.
Physical Files Location	The content of a farm solution goes into the config DB and on the file system depending on the solution content.	The Sandboxed solutions are stored in the content db of the site collection. No content goes in the file system.	The components for an app resides in multiple places: Externally: Remote components are persisted in databases, servers, or cloud-based services, that are external to the SharePoint farm. In SharePoint: SharePoint components, such as list templates, modules, workflows, site pages, Web Parts, and custom content types, are persisted within the SharePoint content database.
Coding Options	In Farm Solutions the Server side object model can be used. The data acces is unrestricted.	In Sandbox Solutions the Server side object model can be used but it is restrictive in nature. The solution can only access content from the site collection in which it was deployed.	Business logic in an app for SharePoint can access SharePoint data through one of the several client APIs included in SharePoint 2013 such as .NET Framework client object model, Silverlight or JavaScript Client Object model code, REST endpoints & Mobile client object model. The server object model can not be used in the Apps for SharePoint.
Integration with Other Apps	Limited options and need to use BCS (Business Connectivity Service), Web Services.	Similar to Farm Solutions.	Multiple options for the integration from Services to actually implementing a fully customized applications against different products SDK as this is technology independent. We can consider a server in the SharePoint farm, an external server such as a server in the cloud, a client computer, and a mobile device.

Hope this helps to take a good decision.. Feedback Welcome!!

Document Preview in SharePoint 2013

I really liked one cool feature in SharePoint 2013. Now we can see the document previews in Document Library and the search results. Though the Search Results one was earlier available in FAST Search but now this has been integrated nicely within SharePoint itself.

With SP2013 in the document library you don't need to open the entire document. You can preview the document like the below through the Document Library:

Also from the Search Result page, it almost generate the preview for everything like Office Docs, Web Pages, Discussion boards etc.. I really liked this new enhancement: