New and improved features in SharePoint Server 2016

The following information provides a summary of the new features in SharePoint Server 2016 release.

MinRoles:

In 2013, server type(application server/search server/distributed cahce server) will be determined by what services you ran in your server.

In 2016, new feaure "MinRoles" get added. MinRoles will apply a set of services to a server based on the role you select it during installation.

Zero Downtime Patching:

The biggest improvement in patching for SharePoint 2016 is In-place, online, installation of patches. You can install the patches in the middle of the day without affecting users accessing the farm at all.

Microsoft removed the downtime which is required to update the SharePoint servers.

In the past with SharePoint, for general updates you got about 37 individual files to process for each patch, plus 10 for each language pack installed. In SharePoint 2016, you get 2 files to process, plus 1 file per language pack.

Compliance features:

New compliance features for SharePoint Server 2016 include the document deletion and in-place hold policies.

The document deletion policy allows you to delete documents in users' OneDrive for Business sites after specific periods of time.

Integrated Project Server:

Project Server 2016 is installed with SharePoint Server 2016 Enterprise, though is licensed separately.

Max File Size for Uploads:

The default maximum file size in SharePoint 2013 is 250 MB, which can be increased up to 2GB. SharePoint 2016 mas file upload size is 10GB.

Note: End users will likely get a time out while uploading large files.

File Name Support for Special Characters:

SharePoint has 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 were blocked in previous versions. SharePoint 2016 will allow these to be used and these restrictions are 

removed in SharePoint Server 2016.

Content Database Size:

In SharePoint 2013 maximum content database size is 200GB. Microsoft posted that maximum content database size is expected to be 1TB. And each content database will be able to hold approximately 100,000 site collections.

Site Collections Per Content Database:

The recommended amount of site collections for SharePoint 2013 is 2,000 with a maximum of 5,000 collections. In SharePoint 2016 you will be able to maintain 100,000 site collections per content database.

Fast Site Collection/Site Creation:

In SharePoint 2013 site creatino takes around 40seconds. Using a template, in SharePiont 2016 users are able to create the site collection very quickly(1second). This will require a configuration with powershell.

SPSiteMaster Windows PowerShell cmdlets help to create sites and site collections quickly.

Override 5,000 View Threshold:

SharePoint has a List View Threshold (LVT) of 5,000 items. Many end users don't know that they had to index their columns to manage the threshold.

In SharePoint 2010 or 2013 indexing the columns is available but end user had to manually index their columns to break the view throshold.

In SharePoint 2016 Microsoft has automated the creation of indexed columns.

Hybrid App Launcher:

Hybrid app launcher helps users to have a more seamless experience when navigating between SharePoint Server and Office 365.

The extensible hybrid app launcher is designed to help you get to your Office 365 apps and services from SharePoint Server. Once you enable this feature, you’ll see the Office 365 Delve and Video apps, along with your custom Office 365 tiles, appear in your SharePoint Server app launcher.

In SharePoint Server 2016, this feature is enabled as part of Hybrid Sites Features.

SharePoint Search Service Application:

With SharePoint 2013, 100 million indexed items per search service application and 10 million per index partition. SharePoint 2016 search supports indexing up to 500 million items per Search Service application.

Open Document Format (ODF):

SharePoint 2016 added new support for Open Document Format (ODF) files to use in documen library templates. It enables users to create new files in a document library and save as ODF files so that users can edit the new file with a program of their choise.

Durable Links:

Durable Link is not the same as Document ID. A Durable Link is a URL of Hyperlink to a Document stored in SharePoint 2016 Document Library.

Durable Links proivde a resource ID to each document. This resource ID will be stored in the content database.

If Durable Links work in you Farm, you will see that links to Documents look like this:

http://WIN-SP2016/documents/DurableLinks.docx?d=wdeb593579df748g0ae79c0217e4bb638 

When the user opens the document using Durable Links, SharePoint 2016 looks up the file by the Resource ID and opens it in Office Online Server Preview. If you move or rename this document, the link you see here will continue to work and redirect you to the same document.

Search for sensitive content:

Search for sensitive content across SharePoint Server 2016, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business.

SharePonit 2016 controls 51 built-in sensitive information types (like credit cards, passport numbers, Social Security numbers, and more).

The sensitive data is exposed through an eDiscovery site(You have to choose eDiscovery template to create the site in Central Admin). And then use DLP Queries from the eDiscovery site collection to discover sensitive content.

SMTP Connection Encryption:

SharePoint 2016 brings a lot of improvement in the field of out-going & Incoming emails. We can send emails using encryption and we can configure the SMTP to non-default ports (default Port is 25).

Sites page pinning:

This is a new feature with SharePoint 2016 which helps users see and follow sites. Users can pin sites that are seen on the sites page. A pinned site shows at the top of the list of followed sites.