SharePoint 2016 New Features and Enhancements

Below features are the first look for SharePoint 2016 it can chnge anytime as it is still 1 year to go for the RTM release of the product.

Microsoft’s Focus for SharePoint 2016 is on :

• Content Management
• Security Compliance
• Advanced Analytics and Insights (data analysis and reporting)
• Cloud experiences

New Features

1. User Profile Service Application is being removed – AD Import will still exist but profile sync is being removed.. because of the few issues we experienced :). If you want to still use the User Profile service, you will need to setup FIM (Forefront Identity Manager) as a separate server outside of the SharePoint Farm
2. Durable links - All Urls are now Resource ID based Urls. That means, document links won’t break if you rename a document in SharePoint.
3. SharePoint 2016 is a Cloud Inspired Infrastructure. – The emphasis here is building a Hybrid platform to let users benefit from enhanced cloud innovations that Microsoft often releases for Office 365. One of the most important experience that MS will be introducing to On-Premises clients is the use of Cloud based Search. The power of Delve & Office Graph can also be now applied to the On-Premises Content and the integrated cloud of course.
4. New Profile Page (Powered by Delve) – New Service applications will have an integration option for Delve and Office Graph.

The profile page will also be Responsive. Delve will be a huge part of SP2016.

New Extranet Hybrid - This will allow a company to provision and extranet site powered by Office 365 identity federation services.

Zero downtime Patching – MS has now reduced the footprints of updates so there is no down time during Patching. All SharePoint upgrades will run online. No more CUs that were released on monthly basis.

Health Analyzer will have advanced scheduled scan which can run on servers in the farm daily. It also has the Fix button.

Content Management Enhancements :

Improvement in Content limits –

• No more 5000 item limit. The list threshold has been increased.
• In creased File size to 10GB
• Removed Character limit in Urls
•  Data loss protection
•  New customer Lock box
•  Encryption

Analytics and Insights (data analysis and reporting) :

There is a huge improvement in how SharePoint records and displays data analytic and Reporting. SharePoint 2016 will provide Real user Monitoring form :

Services

Actions

Usage

Engagement

Diagnostics

Installation & Configuration Enhancements :

Supported OS – Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2010

• New Server Installation Wizard (also called Minimal Role) will allow users to perform a Role based Installations. You can select the role for the server install from the Role based wizard. No more defining server by the service or role assigned to it.

About Migration :

MS is providing built-in Cloud Component (Wizard like) to let you use their popular Cloud Options like Azure for AD etc. while migrating from other SharePoint versions. SharePoint 2016 is as said “Cloud-Ready”.

• SP2016 will have have fully automated builds available on Cloud platforms like Azure and others.
• A Hybrid Configuration Wizard will be presented while installation and hopefully during migration. This will let you choose Hybrid scenarios like Search, Onedrive for business.

So keyword here is Hybrid on-premises utilizing the Cloud Power.