SharePoint 2016

The GSX Blog

imageSP resized 600Ignite isn’t yet over and everyone is still astonished by all new improvements promised by Microsoft related to the future SharePoint 2016. This version will have strong interactions with Office 365. For Microsoft, the O365 market is the future and SharePoint a brick of this future. If we talk about O365 here are some numbers presented at Ignite 2015:

– 80% of fortune 500 has bought O365 in the past 12 months
– Office 365 market represents 6.3 billion revenue per year

SharePoint 2016 will be the first version with the “Cloud Experience”

Microsoft has presented the Hybrid model to createCcloud-accelerated experiences.

Cloud Search Service Application
This scenario purposes a true Hybrid search between your On-premises install and Office 365, surfacing results as a single result set that can be refined regardless of where the content resides.

This is a massive improvement for the Hybrid search experience, which has been a blocker for some of my clients moving to a Hybrid model, as the federated search did not provide a suitably joined-up experience for end-users.
With this comes the ability to surface On-premises results into Delve and the Office graph. You’ll still need to go to Delve in Office 365, but it will surface results from On-premises.

And the big announcement for this one was… it will be available on SharePoint 2013 On-premises installations during the 2015 summer!

Extranet Hybrid Scenario
It will allow you to publish your internal sites to the Internet using Office 365 Federation Services, removing the need to stand up extensive authentication mechanisms for externals users.

Team Sites – Hybrid Mode
Looking to join-up some of the profile experiences, e.g. documents you follow On-premises should show in your online profile etc. For the moment, we are still missing information on this topic.

Hybrid Deployment Automation
A wizard based install for deploying Hybrid scenarios. I’m not a big fan of wizard…so you will have to make your own mind about this.

Unified Compliance Centre
Extending the Office 365 Compliance Centre to include On-premises, with a great investment in classification IDs for identifying content.

Regarding SharePoint, Microsoft can be satisfied. For 2014, this market increased by 400% each month in terms of users. SharePoint 2016 should be embedded with new online portals like Delve (all SharePoint profiles will be manage by Delve), Yammer (Microsoft promises a “more social” SharePoint), Onedrive (the future of the file management will pass by OneDrive with MDM, DLP , audit and sync) or PowerBI.

Microsoft will use the learning machine to improve the search engine of SharePoint 2016. The search will still be Fast Search but Microsoft promises a better, faster and smarter search engine. Moreover if SharePoint runs in a Hybrid architecture, the search engines from the Cloud and On-Prem will be unified to permit global search.

Regarding updates, Microsoft talked about a zero downtime patching. To do this, Microsoft will reduce the number of MSI and MSP packages in each update, thus reducing the chances of regression issues, the overall footprint and deployment time. In addition, Microsoft changed Build2Build upgrades, now they are done ONLINE! These can be made during the day in total transparency for users.

At least the deployment wizard has been improved with introduction of roles (front-end, search, application, distributed cache, special load).

In terms of limitations, Microsoft pushed the limits:

• Content database size to increase into the Terabyte’s range
• 100,000 site collections per content database
• Increasing the list of thresholds beyond 5,000
• MaxFile uploads increased to 10GB and character restrictions removed
• Search index increases to 500 million items

Microsoft schedules a new release every 3 years. The SharePoint 2016 Beta will be available end of Q4 2015. The RTM should be available Q2 2016. Simultaneously, new data protection and monitoring tools will be provide.

In terms of requirements, SharePoint 2016 needs 12/16Gb of ram (24 for a single server) and 80Gb of disk. It will run only on Windows Server 2012 R2 (and of course Windows Server 10).

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