Microsoft announces general availability of SharePoint Server 2016, which will provide SharePoint customers a foundation for modern, intelligent intranets and content collaboration. SharePoint Server 2016 delivers foundational improvements which enhances the quality of your on-premises SharePoint solution and will help you to take advantage of innovations which the company will introduce to its users to Office 365 and SharePoint Server moving forward.
All the users who would like to evaluate the capabilities of SharePoint Server 2016 can now easily download the trial versions which are available at the SharePoint Server 2016 website.
In addition to the general availability of SharePoint Server 2016, Microsoft has also announced a new version for SharePoint along with significant new innovations across SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business.
SharePoint Server 2016
SharePoint Server 2016 delivers significant value in three areas:
Cloud-inspired infrastructure: SharePoint Server 2016 represents a new generation of SharePoint which accrues the experience of running SharePoint at scale in Office 365; it also brings investments in SharePoint Online to your datacenter in order to improve the performance, reliability manageability and scale.
“SharePoint Server 2016 is derived from the same code used to deliver SharePoint Online—code that has been validated over years, by millions of users, making it the most comprehensively tested version of SharePoint to date. This unified code base also facilitates support and updates across both Office 365 and on-premises SharePoint Server, and enables a standardized set of APIs that span on-premises and the cloud, enabling customers and partners to innovate more easily than ever.”
Compliance and reporting: Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is non-negotiable, and overexposure to information, which can have legal as well as compliance implications. SharePoint Server 2016 provides an array of features as well as capabilities which has been designed to make certain the sensitive information remains protected with investments in DLP, new scenarios in order to enable data encryption and compliance tools that span on-premises servers and Office 365 while providing a balance between enabling user self-service and ensuring content usage adheres to corporate policy.
Enhanced user experiences: SharePoint Server 2016 brings innovations to user experience from Office 365 to your premises with improvements to document libraries and navigation constructs which is consistent with Office 365.
The company states,
“These updates have proven successful in driving adoption in Office 365 and will now benefit SharePoint Server. And for hybrid customers, there will be a seamless user experience that spans from the datacenter to the cloud. We’ve also improved mobile access and the touch-based experience in team sites.”
SharePoint Server 2016—foundation for the future
The company states,
“We’re determined to bring as much value as possible from SharePoint Online to SharePoint Server in your datacenter. Moving to a unified code-base makes that possible, and SharePoint Server will accelerate our ability to deliver high-value innovation to you in three ways.”
Seamless connection to innovative Office 365 features and experiences. SharePoint Server 2016 allows users to transition smoothly between on-premises sites and Office 365 sites and experiences. Yammer.
Integrated, unified, hybrid experiences: SharePoint Server also delivers cloud-born innovation through hybrid capabilities and experiences that span, integrate and unify on-premises farms and Office 365.
The new SharePoint home page provides users with navigation portals to sites in Office 365 and on-premises farms. The links provided on the SharePoint home page goes includes links which are managed by the organizations, sites especially followed by users and sites which are recommended based on intelligence of Office Graph. The new SharePoint home page displays sites which are card based UI, and each site’s card provides an activity stream which is powered by Office Graph.
The company states,
“For IT professionals, we have delivered hybrid search, which unifies the index, query results and search experience across Office 365 and on-premises farms running SharePoint 2016, SharePoint 2013 and even SharePoint 2010. Hybrid search enables on-premises content to surface within Office Graph-powered applications such as Delve. IT professionals can also leverage hybrid configurations to unify compliance policies, eDiscovery and auditing.’’
The first Feature Pack will be delivered through public update channels starting in calendar year 2017, and users will have complete control over which features are to be enabled in their on-premises farms.
SharePoint Server - powering your journey to the mobile-first, cloud-first world
The company states,
“We know that customers worldwide use SharePoint to support collaboration, search, business process automation and custom business applications; and we know that many customers rely on SharePoint Server for mission-critical workloads. We know it’s not always easy to move your business and workloads to the cloud.”
Hence the company has invested in SharePoint 2016 in order to deliver quantity ad manageability which you will be able to rely on. SharePoint Server 2016 is the foundation for the future and the next step will provide you with rapid access to innovative new experiences in Office 365, enabling users to unify and integrate Office 365 with your datacenter through hybrid features, bringing the most important innovations directly to you in SharePoint Server on-premises.
The company states,
“Today also marks availability of Office Online Server, which, when paired with SharePoint Server 2016, allows organizations to deliver browser-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote; document previews in lists and libraries; and powerful capabilities to include Durable Links and Excel Online.”