What is New in SharePoint 2016?

Microsoft releases a new version of SharePoint every three years. SharePoint 2016 public Beta version is available. The full version is expected in Spring 2016. Here is what is new in SharePoint 2016 version.

SharePoint 2016’s main goal is to bring the best of Office 365 Cloud technology to on-premises solutions. In this truly effective Hybrid model, organizations will be able to have the best of the Cloud, whilst keeping all their important information and data stored on-premises.

SharePoint Server 2016 has been designed to reduce the emphasis on IT and streamline administrative tasks, so that IT professionals can concentrate on core competencies and mitigate costs. Tasks that may have taken hours to complete in the past have become simple and efficient processes that allow IT to focus less on day-to-day management and more on innovation.

Main Focus

User Experiences

• Mobile experiences
• Personalized insights
• People-centric file storage and collaboration

Infrastructure

• Improved performance and reliability
• Hybrid cloud with global reach
• Support and monitoring tools

Compliance

• New data protection and monitoring tools
• Improved reporting and analytics
• Trusted platform

MinRoles

You can now install just the role that you want on particular SharePoint 2016 servers. This will only install what’s required there, and it will make sure that all servers that belong to each role are compliant. You will also be able to convert servers to run new roles if needed. You can look at the services running on the SharePoint 2016 server and see if they are compliant.

Downtime for Updates

Downtime previously required to update SharePoint servers has been removed.

Mobile and touch

Making decisions faster and keeping in contact are critical capabilities for increasing effectiveness in any organization. The ability for end users to access information while on the go is now a workplace necessity. In addition to a consistent cross-screen experience, SharePoint Server 2016 provides the latest technologies and standards for mobile push and information synchronization. With deep investment in HTML5, SharePoint 2016 provides capabilities that enable device-specific targeting of content. This helps to ensure that users have access to the information they need, regardless of the screen they choose to access it on.

SharePoint 2016 further empowers users by delivering a consistent experience across screens, whether using a browser on the desktop or a mobile device. Through this rich experience, users can easily transition from one client to another without having to sacrifice features.

App Launcher

The App Launcher provides a new navigation experience where all your apps are easily available from the top navigation bar. You can quickly launch your application, browse sites and access your personal files.

Improved Controls

Based on SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business, SharePoint 2016 document libraries inherit the improved control surface for working with content, simplifying the user experience for content creation, sharing and management.

Content Sharing

SharePoint 2016 improves the sharing experience by making it more natural for users to share sites and files. You can just click the "Share" button at the top right corner of every page, enter the names of people you want to share with, and press Enter. The people you just shared with will get an email invitation with a link to the site.

SharePoint still uses powerful concepts like permission levels, groups and inheritance to provide this experience. Part of sharing is also understanding who can see something. If you want to find out who already has access to a particular site, you can go to the "Settings" menu in top right corner, click "Shared with", and you will see the names and pictures of people who have access to the site.

Large File Support

SharePoint 2016 provides support for uploading files up to 10GB.

Compliance Tools

Preventing data loss is non-negotiable, and over-exposure to information can have legal and compliance implications. SharePoint 2016 provides a broad array of features and capabilities designed to make certain that sensitive information remains that way, and to ensure that the right people have access to the right information at the right time.

New In-Place Hold Policy and Document Deletion Centers will allow you to manage time-based, organization-wide in-place hold policies to preserve items in SharePoint and OneDrive for Business for a fixed period of time, in addition to managing policies that can delete documents after a specified period of time.

Cloud Hybrid Search

Cloud hybrid search offers users the ability to seamlessly discover relevant information across on-premises and Office 365 content. With the cloud hybrid search solution, you index all your crawled content, including on-premises content, in your search index in Office 365. When users query your search index in Office 365, they get unified search results from both on-premises and Office 365 cloud services with combined search relevancy ranking.

Cloud hybrid search provides some key benefits to customers of both SharePoint 2013 and early adopters of SharePoint 2016 IT preview, such as:

• the ability to reduce your on-premises search footprint;
• the option to crawl in-market and legacy versions of SharePoint, such as 2007, 2010 and 2013, without requiring upgrade of those versions;
• avoiding the cost of sustaining large indexes, as it is hosted in Office 365.

With this new hybrid configuration, this same experience will also allow users to leverage the power of Office Graph to discover relevant information in Delve, regardless of where information is stored. You will not only be able to get back to all the content you need via Delve, but also discover new information in the new Delve profile experiences and even have the ability to organize content in Boards for easy sharing and access.

You will have to use the Office 365 Search for this to work. If SharePoint 2016 On-Premises users query against their On-Premises Search service, it will continue to give them local results only.

However, once available, this will allow users to fully embrace experiences like Delve in Office 365 and more to come in the future.

OneDrive Redirection

With SharePoint 2016, you can redirect your My Sites to your Office 365 subscription’s OneDrive for Business host. In other words, if a user clicks on OneDrive, he will be redirected to his Office 365 My Site and no longer to his On-Premises. Although you can use document libraries in on-premises SharePoint, Microsoft's larger strategy pushes users to use OneDrive to manage files across all devices. This creates the ability to integrate that OneDrive cloud storage into your on-premises SharePoint.

Follow Sites

Now users can click on “Follow” both On-Premises and on their Office 365 and see them all in one place under the “Sites” app in the App Launcher.

Site Folders

The OneDrive for Business area aims to bring users to one place to help them work with their files regardless of where they are. You will also be able to navigate your Sites and their libraries from there.