Upgrade to SharePoint 2016

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Why upgrade to SharePoint 2016? SharePoint 2016 (SharePoint 2016 download guide) achieves general availability on May 4, so it’s time to decide about upgrading.

What’s the benefit?  Well, to begin with, if you have a SharePoint farm that’s a few generations behind — say, SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010 — you’re no longer supported. It’s time to face facts, get with the program and upgrade.

However, what if your farm uses SharePoint 2013? Well, here are some exciting reasons why upgrading makes sense:

  1. SharePoint 2016 is faster and more stable — with superior performance and optimization. The SharePoint Online experience informed Microsoft’s perspective on SharePoint 2016 development; the net benefits are in the innovation you’ll see in SharePoint 2016.
  2. SharePoint 2016 has new hybrid mode capabilities, improving the user experience. Office 365 easily integrates with SharePoint 2016 and running in SharePoint hybrid mode, you can use Cloud Hybrid Search and Sites, Delve, Groups, OneDrive for Business, Profile Redirection and more. This extends the capabilities of workloads that remain heavily on-premises.
  3. Do you value compliance and security? If so, then you will like the data loss prevention that is baked into the new SharePoint (so you can forget paying for an expensive third-party data loss prevention tool) as well as the new eDiscovery, security and privacy features. SharePoint 2016 enables you to identify, monitor and protect sensitive data across SharePoint on-premises, SPO and ODFB. In addition to the on-premises capabilities, hybrid customers will like the growth of e-Discovery capabilities across SharePoint on-premises, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Skype for Business — all positioning Office 365 (and SharePoint Server) as the prime store for sensitive and compliance-related data.
  4. Cloud Hybrid Search is a real plus (building on that last point). Hosting your index in the cloud enables you to display all of your results on one page without having to use Result Blocks. Results from O365 and on-premises are listed together by relevancy. The crawler encrypts it all.
  5. FIM was replaced by MIM, Microsoft Identity Manager. ‘Nuf said there.  Whew!
  6. The development experience across server and cloud—i.e., hybrid—deployments is broadening in new ways, albeit slowly. Developers can create contextual solutions that span SharePoint Server 2016 and Office 365 from the web, mobile apps and Office, and Microsoft is working on more innovations.

SharePoint 2016 download achieves general availability on May 4. Take a look at Microsoft’s short, elegant SharePoint 2016 video here.  Contact us if we can help you chart what it would take to upgrade to SharePoint 2016.