What's new in SharePoint 2016 Preview

What's new in SharePoint 2016 Preview

Microsoft made huge investments in SharePoint products and always added more and more value into the product. Since the inception of SharePoint in 2001; SharePoint made serious progress in the product and now I am passionately welcoming SharePoint 2016 product. 

SharePoint 2016 Roles and Services

SharePoint 2016 placed Services into 3 main Roles

1 - User Services: 

Sync Client

OneNote

User Profile

Page Rendering

Excel Services

Sandbox Code

Project

Subscription Settings

2 - Robot Services:

Provisioning 

Timer Jobs

Search

3 - Caching Services:

Caching

Note:

SharePoint 2016 consolidated into one single machine reducing the number of discrete roles

MinRole Roles and Services

WebFrontEnd: For End User requests and servers for WebFrontEnd Role are optimized for low latency

Application: For back-end jobs or requests coming from back-end jobs and servers are optimized for high throughput

Specialized Load: 3rd Part services which are needed to be isolated from other SharePoint Services

DistributedCache: Manage distributed cache for the whole SharePoint Farm.

Note:

There is a new feature in SharePoint 2016 to analyze MinRole enforcement where Health Analyzer scans each server in the farm daily except servers with Specialized Load Role and compares service instances on the server against expected configuration. There is Fix Button as well to fix the problem right there.

New SharePoint 2016 Server Patching Strategy

Good news for SharePoint Administrator and especially business stakeholders that in order to minimize down-time of SharePoint 2016 Farms; Microsoft introduced minimal update footprint capability that means reduced number of MSI and MSP and patch updates are available for in-place and online installations. No more monthly CUs

SharePoint 2016 Boundaries and Limits

SharePoint Content Database : Terabytes

Site Collections per Content Database: 100,000 per site collection

List Threshold: Greater Than 5,000 with Auto Indexing option to manage larger lists

MaxFile Size: 10GB and no more character restrictions

Search Index Items: Search Scale increases up to 2 times and 500 million items

User Profile Service Application

Microsoft removed built-in User Profile Service Application / FIM Service. 

Hurray (I know many readers will start smiling or sending SMS to friends/groups/facebook etc. or even celebrating).

Active Directory Import still exist via native Active Directory Synchronization but User Profile Synchronization is being removed. 

Note:

If some organisations still want this capability; they need to setup FIM Server/Farm outside SharePoint 2016 Farm and configure it.

Profile Page powered by Office 365 Delve

SharePoint 2016 introduced a new Service Application integrated with office 365 Delve and Office Graph. Delve will be a vital part of SharePoint 2016 product. The Power of Office 365 Delve and Office Graph can now also be applied to SharePoint 2016 On-Premises Farm content as well as the the integrated cloud.

Cloud Search Service Application

SharePoint 2016 Search Service Application enables the Hybrid capability so the Cloud Search will crawl on-premises content source and feed it to Office 365 Search Index. The Cloud Search Service Application will unify on-premises and cloud search indexes and provide Search as a Service for the organisation Search Requirements.

I planned to write detailed blog on the Cloud Search Service Application very soon.

New hybrid Extranet Capability 

SharePoint 2016 leverages Office365 Identity Federation Services and capable to publish internal sites to Extranets.

Upgrade from SharePoint 201X to SharePoint 2016

There is no upgrade option directly from SharePoint 2010 to 2016. SharePoint 2010 sites and databases need to upgrade to SharePoint 2013 first using the database-attach method and the same way to upgrade to SharePoint 2016.

Note:
More knowledge-base articles for SharePoint 2016 are coming. Stay tuned.

Happy SharePointing