This week saw the release of SharePoint Server 2016 Preview to build on previous releases and investments, primarily addressing the following areas:

1. Lower IT costs with a cloud inspired infrastructure and scalable collaboration platform

2. Better manage risk by safeguarding your business with secure and reliable capabilities

3. Deliver modern collaboration experiences across devices and screens

From my experience, the challenges that organisations face working with managing information is always present despite technologies. The people and cultural behaviours are really the keys with strong support of change management to have SharePoint adopted successfully in the new cloud world of business!

The key features and improvements SharePoint Server 2016 Preview delivers are:

· MinRole feature – SharePoint farm administrators can define each server’s role in a farm topology, automatically configuring the services on each server based on the server’s role, and optimising performance of the farm based on that topology. The server roles are: Front-end web, Application, Distributed Cache, Search and Custom.

· Compliance features – includes the document deletion and in-place hold policies.

· Document library accessibility features

· Durable Links – Resource-based URLs retain links when documents are renamed or moved in SharePoint

· Encrypted Connections – TLS 1.2 connection encryption by default

· Fast Site Collection Creation

· Hybrid – integrate your on-premises farm with Office 365 productivity experiences

· Data Loss Prevention – Identify and search for sensitive content

· New Recycle Bin in OneDrive and Team Sites – adds a link for the Recycle Bin in the left navigation area of the OneDrive and Team sites.

You can download and access further information on SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview from the following links.

· Explore

o MinRole overview

o New and improved features in SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview

o What’s deprecated or removed from SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview

o Known Issues in SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview

o Upgrade

· Plan

o System requirements

§ Hardware and software requirements

§ Browser support planning

· Install and configure

o Prepare for installation

· Hybrid for SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview

o Plan SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview hybrid

o Install and configure SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview hybrid

· Technical reference

o Windows PowerShell for SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview

Enjoy!
Chirag Patel @techChirag