SharePoint 2016 - New Features

SharePoint Server 2016 is our most reliable, scalable, secure and high-performant server release ever. With built-in Hybrid Cloud capabilities, it is the premier choice for organizations who are looking to take advantage of the latest innovations in Microsoft Cloud offerings while also maintaining critical content or custom applications on-premises. SharePoint Server 2016 will help organizations unlock breakthrough performance and resiliency as well as quickly build solutions and extend data across on-premises and Office 365 with the confidence that their data will be safe and secure.

SharePoint Server 2016 will deliver enhancements and new capabilities in three major areas:

• Improved user experiences
• Mobile Experience
• Personalized insights
• People-centric file storage and collaboration
• Cloud-inspired infrastructure
• Improved performance and reliability
• Hybrid cloud with global reach
• Support and monitoring tools
• Compliance and reporting
• New data protection and monitoring tools
• Improved reporting and analytics
• Trusted platform

Boundaries and Limitation in comparison to SharePoint Server 2013

New and improved features in SharePoint Server 2016 Release Candidate

• MinRole farm topology 

The role of a server is specified when you create a new farm or join a server to an existing farm. SharePoint automatically configures the services on each server based on the server role, optimizing the performance of the farm based on that topology. There are six predefined server roles that are available, as shown in the following table.

• Central Administration is no longer provisioned on all servers by default

SharePoint Server 2016 Central Administration is now provisioned on the first server in a farm by default when using the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard. Central Administration is not provisioned on additional servers in a farm by default.

• Compliance features

The document deletion policy allows you to delete documents in users' OneDrive for Business sites after specific periods of time. The In-Place Hold policy allows administrators to preserve documents, email, and other files.

• Document Library accessibility

The following features are now available for working in SharePoint Server 2016 Release Candidate document libraries

Landmarks to a page make it easier to navigate, and there are alt text improvements for all major navigation links.

• Keyboard shortcuts
• Focus improvements
• Announcements for upload progress.
• Improved callout reading.
• Fixed use of color issues for views switcher.
• Updates to the Help documentation.

• Fast Site Collection Creation

This new feature provides templates that work at same level as SQL Server, which reduces the round trips required between the SharePoint and SQL servers.

• File names - expanded support for special characters

SharePoint has historically blocked file names that included the &, ~, {, and } characters, file names that contained a GUID, file names with leading dots, and file names longer than 128 characters. These restrictions are removed in SharePoint Server 2016 Release Candidate and are now available to use.

• Hybrid in SharePoint Server 2016 Release Candidate

In SharePoint Server 2016 Release Candidate, new hybrid features are available to enable hybrid solutions.

• Hybrid sites
• Hybrid sites features
• Hybrid OneDrive for Business
• Cloud hybrid search

• Identify and search for sensitive content in both SharePoint Server 2016 Release Candidate and OneDrive documents

With this new capability, you can:

• Search for sensitive content across SharePoint Server 2016 Release Candidate, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business.
• Leverage 51 built-in sensitive information types (credit cards, passport numbers, Social Security numbers, and more).
• Use DLP Queries from the eDiscovery site collection to discover sensitive content relating to common industry regulations from the SharePoint eDiscovery Center, identify offending documents, and export a report.
• Turn on DLP Policies from the Compliance Policy Center site collection to notify end users and administrators when documents with sensitive information are stored in SharePoint and automatically protect the documents from improper sharing.

• App Launcher

The App Launcher provides a new navigation experience where all your apps are easily available from the top navigation bar. You can quickly launch your application, browse sites and access your personal files.

• Image and video previews

Now you can see a preview by hovering the mouse over the image or video, or by clicking on them

• Large file support

Previous versions of SharePoint did not support uploading or downloading files larger than 2,047 MB. SharePoint 2016 now allows you to upload or download larger files. You can configure the desired maximum file-size limit on a per-web application basis in your SharePoint farm.

• Power Pivot add-in and Power View are now available to use with SharePoint Server 2016 Release Candiate

Power Pivot add-in and Power view are after the release of SQL Server 2016 CTP 3.1 available in SharePoint Server 2016.

• Sharing

The following list shows the sharing improvements that are available for SharePoint Server 2016 Release Candidate:

• Create and Share folder
• Sharing Hint
• See who the folder is shared with when viewing a folder
• Members can share
• Improved invitation mail
• One-click email to approve or deny a request for access

• SharePoint Search Service application

SharePoint Search supports indexing of up to 500 million items per Search Server application.

• SMTP connection Encryption 

In SharePoint 2013 & SharePoint 2010, we always leverage port 25 for any communication, now SharePoint 2016 supports STARTTLS connection encryption. In older versions of SharePoint all the communication through emails, alerts was unencrypted. In SharePoint 2016, we can run on non-default ports which encrypted communication between SharePoint and the messaging service. This can be configurable through Central Administration and PowerShell.

• Authentication 
• SAML authentication becomes a first class citizen in SharePoint 2016. 
• There were multiple authentication providers in SharePoint 2013 like windows Claims, form based authentication, SAML Claims, WSFED and others to provide backward compatibility.
• In SAML Claims is the default and recommended model but SharePoint 2016 will continue to support Windows Identity.

• New controls for working with OneDrive for Business

You can click a control to create new Office documents, upload files, synchronize your files for offline use, and share your files.

• Open Document Format (ODF) available for document libraries

The Open Document Format (ODF) enables you to create new files in a document library and save as ODF files so that users can edit the new file with a program they choose.