SharePoint Server 2016 Beta 2: What’s New In It

Business organizations often have lots of important documents and information that needs to be accessed by many people. It becomes necessary to store all the important data, organize it, share it and save it in a secured place so that it can be used from almost any device. SharePoint is a document management and collaborative platform that is created by Microsoft. It is basically a CMS and an intranet system used for internal purposes in order to assist with bringing an organization together. It comprises of a multipurpose set of technologies that is integrated with Office 365 and other document management capabilities.

On November 18^th this year, the SharePoint Server 2016 Beta 2 has been released and it is targeted to provide the organizations with a chance to test SharePoint 2016, which is supposed to be released in the first half of next year. It offers significant improvements in the administration and management of SharePoint farms and Microsoft has incorporated various tools and best practices for high quality user experience. In addition to IT and infrastructure features, the Beta 2 also brings business facing functionality and features and other significant improvements to the hybrid environment.

The beta version continues to allow organizations to redirect users to OneDrive for Business in Office 365 when they click Sites or OneDrive in the navigation bar. This feature, allows users to quickly access any documents or information that they want to sync from their SharePoint sites irrespective of their location.

The App launches is now extended to SharePoint 2016 and is a familiar feature in Office. It provides an identical interface to find new apps and navigate SharePoint on premises and Office 365.

We all are waiting for this unified Search experience and Office 365 Search takes your On-Premises SharePoint Search Index so that it can offer you results for the same query for both. The content metadata is encrypted while it is transferred to the search index in Office 365 and this makes the on premises content secure.

This offers a solution to help hybrid users rationalize and reconcile site membership across SharePoint on premises and Office 365. The next release is not just a UI makeover, but it is clear that OneDrive for Business and collaboration with Team Sites or Groups will be a lot closer and this would help organizations to sort their content management issues.

Another new feature related to the user profiles is the bi-directional profile synchronization by using the Microsoft Identity Manager. It is now possible to build end to end identity management solutions that include SharePoint aspects without duplication of IT infrastructures.

Another most significant area of improvement in the latest release is that it has made it easier to configure server roles by using a new configuration feature known as the MiniRole, which allows you to assign server roles to a SharePoint server.