Business organization generates important data and information that has to be stored in a secured place, organized properly and should be accessible from almost any device. SharePoint has always helped organizations with this as it includes great features and capabilities that help to share important data with colleagues, partners and customers easily.
With SharePoint 2016 now available, it is time to take a look at the latest version and significant new innovations that it has come up with.
Enhanced user experience: SharePoint Server 2016 has come up with some great innovations in user experience from Office 365 to the on-premises farm with many improvements in document libraries and navigation constructs. The updates have proved to be very successful in driving adoption in Office 365 and will also be a great advantage of SharePoint Server. It will offer a seamless user experience that extends from the data-center to the cloud. The touch based experience and mobile access have also been improved.
Cloud infrastructure: SharePoint Server 2016 has come up with a new experience of running SharePoint at scale in Office 365 and helps to improve the reliability, performance and manageability and scale. The code is derived from the same code that is used to deliver SharePoint Online and the codes have been validated by millions of users over the years. This code offers support and updates across both Office 365 and on-premises SharePoint Server and allows a standard set of APIs that spam on premises and the cloud thereby enabling the users and the partners to be innovative easily.
Reporting and compliance: Over exposure to critical information can have various legal and compliance implications. And SharePoint offers a broad array of features and functionalities that are specifically designed to make certain that any sensitive or critical information remains protected. Advanced data encryption and compliance tools are added that provide a balance between allowing user self-service and ensuring content usage that strictly adheres to corporate policies.
SharePoint will enhance the ability of various organizations to deliver high value innovation in three ways:
Smooth connection to Office 365 features: SharePoint allows the users to make smooth transitions between on-premises sites and Office 365 sites. Users can take the advantage of responsive and intuitive authoring capabilities in the new blog experience. The transition from on-premises to Office 365 is seamless.
Unified, hybrid and integrated experiences: SharePoint Server also allows cloud born innovation through hybrid capabilities that integrate, span and unify on-premises farms and Office 365. The new home page provides the users a navigation portal to sites in Office 365. The links on the home page include links that are managed by the organization, the sites that are followed by the users and some sites that are recommended based on the Office Graph.
For IT professionals, it has hybrid search that unifies the index, search experience, query results and on premises farms that run on SharePoint 2016. The unified, hybrid and integrated experiences allow the users to take advantage of the innovation and capabilities in Office 365.
On-premises features and experiences: There is a need to modernize experiences, practices and patterns in SharePoint Server. Many new experiences and frameworks will be provided to the customers of SharePoint Server 2016 with software assurance through Feature Packs. This means that they don’t have to wait for the upcoming version to take advantage of the cloud born innovation in their datacenter.
Thus, SharePoint is used by customers worldwide to support business process automations tasks, custom business applications and to support collaboration so that delivering quality, scalability and manageability is easy with access to innovative new experiences.
