It’s been a more than two years since SharePoint 2016 became generally available, and while most companies doesn’t actually operate on the latest version of SharePoint Server, that doesn’t mean we don’t think about it. In this post, experts will offer their opinions on what features have resonated with SharePoint 2016 users over the last year.
Since its release, experts in the field have offered plenty of input regarding new SharePoint 2016 features. One feature stood out as being a favorite of several of experts, and that was the improved hybrid functionality of SharePoint 2016.
From MinRole to mobile responsiveness to Zero Downtime Patching, SharePoint community resident experts are ready to share the SharePoint 2016 features that they’ve seen the community respond to!
My Take
“Hybrid is a major driver and Microsoft has brought in some really useful capabilities – the hybrid search and hybrid auditing are huge for customers. They really, like those but those features don’t require SharePoint 2016. SharePoint 2016 has really improved on hybrid functionality we’ve seen in previous versions of SharePoint.
SharePoint 2016 also offers improved hybrid search and hybrid auditing features, which are huge hits with our customers – especially those who operate in highly regulated spaces such as the medical and financial services industries. Also, SharePoint 2016 offers a much more user-friendly mobile experience with the SharePoint Mobile App, resulting in more responsive mobile SharePoint pages and an improved user experience.”
“I like how they’ve made it so SharePoint can connect with Office 365 and you can designate the workloads. To me, that’s the biggest value to SharePoint 2016. Microsoft has also given organizations more options to really tailor SharePoint’s functionality to best suit their needs. In the past, SharePoint has been a software that has been installed on local servers. Now, Microsoft Office 365 has SharePoint Online, which is great, but a lot of companies want a mix of both. In the past, if they wanted to connect on-premises SharePoint to SharePoint Online and Office 365, you would have to get developers, custom code it, and make it work.
If you think about Microsoft Office – Office is not a product. Office was Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook – think of SharePoint like that. SharePoint has search, it has OneDrive for file sharing, sites for teams to work on, etc. With SharePoint 2016, you can look at all these features and you can decide, ‘You know what? For search, instead of using native search, I’m going to use the one in Office 365.’ You can mix and match and have that hybrid functionality. The overall capability of that is the most powerful feature that they included in SharePoint 2016.”
SharePoint 2016 is the breakthrough version. This version seems to bring together all of the technologies I have previously used separately (e.g., social, collaboration, search). The online version (Office 365 – SharePoint Online) adds even more features which makes those previously mentioned technologies even more robust.”
Given the type of work Rick does as an infrastructure architect, he said he’s also a fan of MinRole in SharePoint 2016.
“I like that I don’t have to manually set all the services for a specific role of a server that is in my farm; and with Feature Pack 1, some additional PowerShell scripts were added to allow for the additional server roles and enhancements to the support for small farms.”
In Conclusion
While SharePoint 2016 didn’t necessarily reinvent the wheel, it offers organizations improved functionality in several key areas, namely search and better hybrid functionality, resulting in an environment where information can be more easily obtained from multiple sources, both in-cloud and on-premise. Users were also given more options when it comes to customization of these features. After SharePoint 2016’s first birthday, it seems that these things have unquestionably made an impact with those who work with the platform on a daily basis.SharePoint 2016 RTM has passed and SharePoint 2016 is now generally available! In this post, We’re covering the 4 Most Exciting SharePoint 2016 Features for End Users and what’s new in SharePoint 2016! In case you missed it, check out the official announcement where the world learned about all of the new features to expect in 2016. IT Administrators are excited for all of the changes to the back-end of SharePoint, but what about you – the end user? As an end user myself, these are the top four new features in SharePoint 2016 that are most enticing.