Webinar: What's New in SharePoint 2016

Thank you to everyone that attended our webinar on Thursday July 21 on What's New in SharePoint 2016!  We had a great turn out and some good questions.  There are a lot of new features and improvements in SharePoint 2016 and the ones I specifically spoke about in my webinar were:

1. MinRoles - Improving and simplifying SharePoint server deployments
2. Zero Downtime Patching - Improving how SharePoint is managed and kept up to date
3. Hybrid Search - Improving the end user experience when searching content in hybrid Office 365 and SharePoint Server environments
4. Other Hybrid Scenarios - Hybrid Sites, Hybrid OneDrive for Business, Hybrid Delve
5. User Experience Enhancements - Adding ease of use features such as the App Launcher, new library toolbar, new sharing capabilities
6. On Premise Compliance Center - Enforcing DLP policies and improved eDiscovery on SharePoint content
7. Removing and Improving Limits
• Improving List View Threshold Limits with Automatic Indexed Columns
• Improved Maximum File Size
• Removing File Name Character Limitations
• Site Collections per Content Database increases to 100,000
• Search Index Supports up to 500 Million Items

What Do We Lose with SharePoint 2016

Finally, we spoke about the features or capabilities which we lose in SharePoint 2016:

1. No new SharePoint Designer - but SharePoint Designer 2013 will work with SharePoint 2016
2. New SharePoint Foundation release
3. No SQL Express installed with single server deployments
4. No built in Forefront Identity Manager as part of the User Profile Synchronization
5. STSADM is officially deprecated
6. Excel Services is no longer part of SharePoint - it is installed with Office Online Server 2016 (the new name for the Office Web Apps product)

Questions

A few questions we answered during and after the webinar are:

• When is SharePoint 2016 expected to release?

Microsoft just released the RC (Release Candidate) build of SharePoint 2016 on Wednesday Jan 20th which is now available for free download and testing.  The RTM release is expected to release towards the end of the first half of 2016.

• Do you expect people to use the MinRoles feature when deploying SharePoint?

I think the MinRoles feature is a very useful feature for new SharePoint deployments which are straightforward.  However, but many complex SharePoint environments have been deployed with a variety of services for various reasons, many of which are specific to the client's specific needs.  I do suspect that many existing and complex deployments will use the Custom role and continue to customize the services deployed to their particular needs.

• Is InfoPath supported in SharePoint 2016?

Yes, Microsoft is still supporting InfoPath 2013 with SharePoint 2016.  Microsoft tells us that it will be supported into the early to mid 2020s.

• Since SharePoint 2016 no longer includes the Forefront Identity Manager as part of its installation to support the user profile synchronization process, what are our options here?

You essentially have 2 options here: 

1. You can use AD Import, which will be unidirectional (from AD to SharePoint) and will not right data back to AD
2. You can install the new Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) yourself, which replaces Forefront Identity Manager, which will support 2 way synchronization as user profile synchronization currently does.

You can find the presentation deck from our webinar here: Webinar: What's New in SharePoint 2016.

What’s new in SharePoint 2016! from AntonioMaio2

Please let me know if there you have any other questions about this topic.

   -Antonio