SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

Putting things in context…

If you have followed this blog over the last few years, you will know that I am no longer part of the Microsoft Partner Network and I now find myself working on the other side of the fence.

Rather than looking for the very latest technologies and keeping myself up to speed to aid my customer’s requirements, I now have a specific customer in mind, with specific requirements.

Right now I manage a team of .NET and SharePoint developers and contractors with a heavy emphasis on wanting to know how to develop in cloud based technologies such as Office 365, Azure etc.

Anyway, so lets talk about the sessions (multiple blog posts to come) and discussions at the Office Expo area (vendor stands)

SharePoint 2016 Roadmap and New Features

Delve and the Office Graph API

So they are bring SharePoint 2016 to the On-Premise environment with the key feature that Microsoft is bringing down is Delve and along with that the office graph API.

For those not in the know… Delve has been around for little in the Office 365 space but this will be the first time bringing the technology to the On-Premise environment and if you are to believe the hype in the conference… Delve and more to the point the Office Graph technology is the future in bringing disparate information to the end user from most technologies in the Microsoft Online space.

So lets talk about the Office Graph API… essentially it is the API to their machine learning engine behind the scenes, designed to bring together the information that is relevant to you!

Delve is the current front-end view of this API that surfaces the information from SharePoint, OneDrive, Search, Office 365 Video, & Exchange for now… but the API is in place for you to add your own custom apps!

New Blog Experience / Next Gen Portals

Along for the ride is new terminology called Next Gen Portals.  Designed to be a single consistent experience for a particular piece of functionality.

For example,

• Blogs with the ability to drag images into the page that automatically get uploaded and stored
• Knowledge Management portals
• You Tube like Video Portals (O365 Video API’s are coming we are told!)
• New Personal Profile (as part of Delve) – the Me Contact Card

The theme being very much, why do all this customization to your portals, the 1st class experience is available out of the box and will be available On-Premise as well as on Office 365.

Hybrid Cloud Search

Introduced with the 2016 release will be a new Managed Service that will allow us to combine Office 365 Search and On-Premise Search into a single set of results (yes, all refiners will work across both indexes!).  This is to help with Office 365 adoption in hybrid scenarios.

This coupled with the fact that the Office Graph API (built on top of search) essentially means you can inject search results and have them surface up in delve makes the whole proposition very powerful.

This hybrid Managed Service capability is also coming to SharePoint 2013 later this year!

Document ID’s

The Document ID is no longer limited to a Site Collection and now works across the Farm.  This is now known as Durable Links.

The User Profile Service is dead! long live the User Profile Service!

So what on earth do I mean by that?  Well it will no longer be a Managed Service within SharePoint 2016.  AD Import will still exist within SharePoint but if you want to still use the User Profile service, you will need to setup FIM (Forefront Identity Manager) as a separate server outside of the SharePoint Farm.

Personally I believe this is a good thing… FIM was cut down within SharePoint caused no end of troubles!

Testing / Reliability

Also highlighted was the amount of testing that has gone into SharePoint 2016.  It is clear that this version is only a step change compared to SharePoint 2013 but as a result, we have better experiences that are well tested from the various learning and implementations of the Office 365, SharePoint Online solutions.

Distributed Cache has been vastly improved in reliability.

As part of this, there is a solemn promise that One Drive for Business Sync will be improved with a brand new version coming soon.  (Thank goodness for that – no more Groove / SharePoint Workspace related products please!)

Installation and setup changes

You can now build servers with specific roles from the Product Config Wizard… this includes roles such as:

• Web Front-end
• Search
• Application
• Distributed Cache
• As well as other, depending on your need.

This is designed to minimize workloads for specific purposes and although you could do this before… it certainly makes life easier!

Zero downtime patching

It has been recognized that patching is a nightmare nowadays with the bi-monthly patches often being bigger than SharePoint’s initial install to allow for differences in patch versions.

Install’s are long and the farm is out of commission whilst doing so.

It is also recognized that patches need to be tested thoroughly still, due to the amount of changes inside them.

So to help improve this situation for On-Premise… they introduced the idea of Zero downtime patching with SharePoint 2016.  Patches can be applied without downtime of the servers.

Not too much more was said about this during the roadmap session but I suspect to learn more throughout the week!

Release Schedule

Lastly, what we all really wanted to know and confirm!  The release schedule for SharePoint 2016

• SharePoint 2016 Beta 1 – Q4 2015
• SharePoint 2016 Release Candidate – Q1 2016
• SharePoint 2016 RTM (Release To Manufacturing) – Q2 2016

Ok that’s it… more to follow when I get time…