Table of Contents

Introduction to SharePoint 2016 .....................................................................................................2

SharePoint 2016 New Features .......................................................................................................5

Features Deprecated in SharePoint 2016 ....................................................................................... 14

Differences between SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2016 .......................................................... 17

Introduction to SharePoint 2016

Welcome to the new version of SharePoint, SharePoint Server 2016! SharePoint 2016 provides rich,

modern and intelligent intranets to its customers including lot of new features for content collaboration.

SharePoint 2016 is offered in the cloud as part of the Office 365 suite and is known as SharePoint

Online; the on-premises version is known as SharePoint 2016. It’s a cloud-inspired infrastructure that

represents a new generation of SharePoint that makes SharePoint scale in Office 365 and improves

performance, reliability, manageability and scale.

SharePoint Server 2016 is derived from the same code used to deliver SharePoint Online. This unified

code base facilitates support and updates across both Office 365 and on-premises SharePoint Server. It

also enables a standardized set of APIs that span on-premises and the cloud, enabling the customers and

partners to innovate more easily than ever. With this version of SharePoint 2016, apart from the

traditional document management tool and enterprise search this version of SharePoint supports the

wider Office 365 offering, through applications such as Delve, Office Graph, Sway and Yammer.

SharePoint Server 2016 allows users to transition smoothly between on-premises sites and Office 365

sites and experiences. For example, users can launch Delve from the on-premises App Launcher to

access the new People experiences in Office 365. From there, users can take advantage of intuitive and

responsive authoring capabilities in the new Blog experience. These experiences are in Office 365, but

the transition from on-premises is seamless. Administrators can also configure easy connections to

OneDrive for Business and Yammer.

SharePoint Server also delivers cloud-born innovation through hybrid capabilities and experiences that

span, integrate and unify on-premises farms and Office 365.

The new SharePoint home page gives users a navigation portal to sites in Office 365 and on-premises

farms. Links on the SharePoint home page include links managed by the organization, sites explicitly

followed by the user, and sites that are recommended based on the intelligence of Office Graph. The

beautiful new SharePoint home page displays sites in a card-based UI, and each site’s card provides an

activity stream powered by Office Graph.

For IT professionals, hybrid search has been delivered, which unifies the index, query results and search

experience across Office 365 and on-premises farms running SharePoint 2016, SharePoint 2013 and

even SharePoint 2010. Hybrid search enables on-premises content to surface within Office Graph-

powered applications such as Delve. IT professionals can also leverage hybrid configurations to unify

compliance policies, eDiscovery and auditing.

Each of these integrated, unified and hybrid experiences and services enable you to take advantage of

innovation and capabilities in Office 365 while maintaining workloads on-premises that are not suited to

Office 365. You can migrate workloads to Office 365 at your own pace, based on your own

requirements, and still take advantage of Office 365 where it best meets your needs.

SharePoint Server powers your journey to the mobile-first, cloud-first world. We know that customers

worldwide use SharePoint to support collaboration, search, business process automation and custom

business applications; and we know that many customers rely on SharePoint Server for mission-critical

workloads. We know it’s not always easy to move your business and workloads to the cloud.

So SharePoint Server 2016 ensures quality, manageability and scalability. SharePoint Server 2016 is a

foundation for the future and next step in the journey, giving you rapid access to innovative new

experiences in Office 365, enabling you to unify and integrate Office 365 with your datacenter through

hybrid features, and bringing many of our most important innovations to you directly in SharePoint

Server on-premises.

So with this brief introduction let’s begin with some of the key enhancements that’s come up in

SharePoint 2016. The next chapter tells you about the new Features available to us in SharePoint 2016.

SharePoint 2016 New Features

App Launcher:

Microsoft has taken lot of effort to improve the usability of SharePoint 2016. Once of the key features

introduced is the App Launcher. This is an extensible interface that enables you to quickly access

OneDrive for Business, Yammer and Delve, as well as navigate between on-premises and the cloud. You

can even add your own sites for quick access.

Uploading Files:

The earlier version of SharePoint (2013) allowed a max of 2 GB file size to be uploaded. This has been

increased to 10 GB now! Also, file name character restrictions have been removed, so now you can

upload file names containing &, % and #, just to name a few. Durable links provide you the capability to

retain a resource-based URL to documents even after they are renamed or moved in SharePoint.

Usability Improvement:

Usability of SharePoint 2016 also has been improved with the capability of viewing images and videos by

simply hovering over them or clicking on them right in the library. OneDrive's Recycle Bin now is easier

to access from the left navigation area, and OneDrive's synchronization process has been improved.

SharePoint Server 2016 document libraries have some new features introduced. The landmarks to a page make it

easier to navigate, and there are alt text improvements for all major navigation links. The Keyboard shortcuts are

provided for the following document tasks:

o Alt + N - New

o Alt + E - Edit

o Alt + U - Upload

o Alt + M - Manage

o Alt + S - Share

o Alt + Y - Synchronization

Focus improvements have taken places like s keeping focus on prior elements and focus trapping. There are

announcements for upload progress, file name and file types when browsing folder and file lists.

There is improved callout reading and a fixed use of color issues for views switcher. There are also few updates to

the Help documentation.

Sharing:

Enhancements to the sharing process also have been introduced in SharePoint 2016. For instance, you

now can create and share folders, view who a folder is shared with while viewing the folder, quickly

share a page, approve or deny a request for access within an email using a single click, and users in the

Members group can now share documents.

Search:

The biggest focus of SharePoint 2016 is the Next Generation Hybrid Search. Search as we know, is a

huge part of any of document management system, and with the emphasis of a SharePoint hybrid

environment between SharePoint 2016 On-Premises and SharePoint Online, Microsoft has unified the

search capability.

The best advancement is that it provides a truly unified search experience across SharePoint on-

premises and SharePoint Online for the end users. This is something that is crucial to ensure you get

your users on board with the hybrid implementation. With the Next Generation Cloud hybrid Search,

you can now effectively index all of your content and therefore provide one set of results with combined

search relevancy ranking.

You now can perform one search that will return the results from both locations in a single search

results page, enabling you to easily identify the location of each result item and then access that item.

This is a huge improvement in Search Capability of SharePoint.

Compliance and Reporting:

SharePoint 2016 has a unique feature of compliance and reporting. Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is non-

negotiable, and overexposure to information can have legal and compliance implications. SharePoint

Server 2016 provides a broad array of features and capabilities designed to make certain that sensitive

information remains protected with investments in DLP, new scenarios to enable data encryption and

compliance tools that span on-premises servers and Office 365 while providing a balance between

enabling user self-service and ensuring content usage adheres to corporate policy.

OneDrive Redirection:

Though this has been available in SharePoint 2013 since SP1, with SharePoint 2016 you can redirect your

My Sites to your Office 365 subscription’s OneDrive for Business host. In other words, if a user clicks on

OneDrive, he'll be redirected to his Office 365 My Site and no longer to his On-Premises. OneDrive for

Business is turning out to be more than just a My Site. It aims to bring users to one place to help them

work with their files regardless of where they are.

Another great improvement is that this is very easy for the administrator to setup as it is wizard based.

Once it’s complete, any click of the One Drive link from on-premises will direct to One Drive in the Cloud.

When the redirection is complete, users can begin moving or syncing files to the Cloud for storage.

Follow Sites:

Now users can click on “Follow” both On-Premises and on their Office 365 and see them all in one place

under the “Sites” app in the App Launcher.

MinRole:

You can now install just the role that you want on particular SharePoint 2016 servers. This will only

install what’s required there, but even better, it'll make sure that all servers that belong to each

role are compliant. You’ll also be able to convert servers to run new roles if needed.

Zero Downtime Patching

Patching SharePoint servers has always been a challenge. A major culprit for administrators is the

fact that installing SharePoint fixes will cause downtime to the SharePoint farm. For SharePoint

Server 2016 it was announced that we will have zero-downtime patching.

Removed 5,000 View Threshold:

This is one the pain points which many of us face on daily basis. Our customers often complain

about this feature. However, many of you know that 5,000 seems to be the actual limit for many

end users that don't know they had to index their columns. Instead of removing this unpopular

threshold, SharePoint 2016 now supports automated the creation of Indexed Columns. This means

that, technically, the limit is still there, but you won’t have to worry about it.

Fast Site Creation:

By using a template, Site Collections can be created in just 1 second. This compares well to

SharePoint 2013 that more than half a minute sometimes. This will require a level of configuration

with PowerShell to set up.

New Compliance Center in SharePoint 2016:

The In-Place Policy Hold Center and the Compliance Center of SharePoint 2016 allows you to build

your own policies and apply them against your environment. New basic policies allow you to delete

data in OneDrive for Business sites after an x amount of years for example. The below picture tells

you more in detail about the Document Deletion Policy Center.

Improved Mobile Touch Experiences:

In addition to a consistent cross-screen experiences, SharePoint Server 2016 provides the latest

technologies and standards for mobile push and information synchronization. With deep investment in

HTML5, SharePoint Server 2016 provides IT professionals and designers with capabilities that enable

device-specific targeting of content – a really interesting feature considering targeting and

personalisation are on everyone’s minds at the moment. This helps ensure that users have access to the

information they need, regardless of the screen they choose to access it on. As a company who are huge

ambassadors of great user experiences, we love to see this. The out of the box mobile experiences on

2016 are still quite standard, although there is a new touch friendly interface. But with some

customization and thought into the design, there’s the capability to create some really compelling

mobile experiences for users in 2016. SharePoint 2016 comes with a touch friendly interface as shown

below. This interface is more mobile friendly unlike earlier versions of SharePoint.

Security Improvements:

Few important improvements have been made with respect to Security in SharePoint 2016. The SMTP

connections now support TLS. The SAML claims-based authentication is the preferred and default

authentication method (NTLM and Kerberos will continue to be supported). As stated earlier compliance

features with complex rules (51 out of the box) to support identification and protection of sensitive data

Hybrid Improvements:

eDiscovery and Legal Hold will now traverse SharePoint Online in O365. The Search Service can query

SharePoint Online in O365 and provide a single ranked results set with integrated relevancy (no separate

verticals). The consolidation of Social features to ensure followed on premise and online content appears

in a single social profile. Delve and Office Graph API can surface content from on premise services along

with content in O365 (will be released for 2013 this year).Item level encryption using Azure AD Rights

Management Services is now supported.

Performance Improvements:

Some of the performance improvements of SharePoint 2016 would be like 500 million maximum items per search

index partition (was 10 million). BITS now replacing FSS over HTTP and Cobalt to reduce IO between servers and

bandwidth to the end user. Traffic Management endpoint automatically routes user requests based on server

health

Single Server Farm:

Single Server farm is still an option for SharePoint 2016, but you don't get SQL Server Express included in the

installation. If you want to create a single server farm, you'll need to install SQL Server independently of the

SharePoint installation.

Features Deprecated in SharePoint 2016 The following features are deprecated in SharePoint 2016

Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint:

Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP cannot be deployed with SharePoint Server 2016. SharePoint

Server 2016 doesn't have any Duet components, so it will not install.

If you want to deploy Duet Enterprise for Microsoft SharePoint you must use SharePoint Server 2013 Enterprise

Edition.

SharePoint Foundation:

The previous releases of SharePoint Server included SharePoint Foundation, a free edition of SharePoint that

included most of the core functionality and architecture provided by the commercial editions of SharePoint.

SharePoint Foundation is no longer available in the SharePoint Server 2016 release.

Standalone Install mode:

SharePoint Server 2016 doesn't support the standalone install option, so it is no longer available in the setup

program. We need to use the MinRole feature during installation and choose one of the available install options.

The Single Server Farm option where everything is installed on the same computer is supported for dev/test/demo

purposes. When you use this option, you must install SQL Server yourself and then run the SharePoint Server 2016

farm configuration wizard.

ForeFront Identity Manager client (FIM):

Earlier versions of SharePoint used ForeFront Identity Manager client (FIM) to synchronize between Active

Directory and SharePoint. SharePoint Server 2016 no longer uses FIM as the synchronization client. The default

process is Active Directory Import. You can also use any synchronization tool such as Microsoft Identity Manager

2016, or any third-party tool.

Excel Services in SharePoint:

Excel Services and its associated business intelligence capabilities are no longer hosted on SharePoint Server. Excel

Services functionality is now part of Excel Online in Office Online Server and SharePoint users can use the services

from there.

The following Excel Services functionality has been deprecated:

Trusted data providers

Trusted file locations

Trusted data connection libraries

Unattended service account

Excel Services Windows PowerShell cmdlets

Opening of Excel workbooks from SharePoint Central Administration site

The following Excel Services functionality requires Excel Online in Office Online Server:

Viewing and editing Excel workbooks in a browser (with or without the Data Model)

Excel Web Access web part for SharePoint

ODC file support (no longer requires Data Connection Libraries)

Programmability features such as JavaScript OM, User Defined Function Assemblies, SOAP and REST

protocol support

SharePoint BI capabilities:

If you want to use Microsoft SQL Server Power Pivot for SharePoint or Microsoft Power View for SharePoint for BI

solutions with SharePoint Server 2016 you must install the Power Pivot or Power View add-ins for SQL Server 2016

RTM. The SQL Server 2014 (SP1) Power Pivot for SharePoint and Power View for SharePoint add-ins cannot be

deployed or used with SharePoint Server 2016. To deploy these add-ins you need to upgrade to SQL Server 2016

RTM.

Tags and Notes:

The Tags and Notes feature is deprecated in SharePoint Server 2016

Administrators can archive all existing tags and notes by using the Export-SPTagsAndNotesData cmdlet.

Work Management Service Application:

The Work Management Service Application has been removed from SharePoint Server 2016. The My Tasks and

associated Exchange Task Sync features have also been removed from SharePoint Server 2016. Both of these

features required the Work Management Service Application.

Stsadm.exe:

The Stsadm command-line tool has been deprecated, but it is included to support compatibility with previous

product versions. Use of Powershells is the recommended approach.

Differences between SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2016 Comparison table between SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2016 is shown below:

SharePoint 2013 SharePoint 2016

MinRoles

MinRole Farm Topology

Zero Downtime Patching

Integrated Project Server

File Size for Uploads 2 GB 10 GB

File Name Support for Special Characters

Content Database Size 200 1+ TB

Site Collections Per Content Database 5,000 100,000

Fast Site Collection/Site Creation

Override 5,000 View Threshold

App Launcher

SharePoint Search Service Application Indexing 100 million items Indexing 500 million items

ODF Support for Document Libraries

ReFS File System Support

Durable Links

Search for Sensitive Content

SMTP Connection Encryption

Sites Page Pinning

Deprecated Features

ForeFront Identity Manager Client (FIM)

Support for SQL Express

SharePoint Foundation

Standalone Install Mode

Excel Services in SharePoint

Hope you like this eBook and I would amend this in near

future with some more chapters. Thanks.