SharePoint 2019 Says Hello to 6 Features and Goodbye to 6 Others

SharePoint 2019 Focuses on 3 Areas

• User experiences developed through SharePoint Online.
• Content engagement across all browsers and devices.
• Powerful scaling security and compliance capabilities
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• 6 SharePoint 2019 Additions

• 1. SharePoint Home Page

  The SharePoint home page is where users can easily find and access SharePoint sites within the organization. Users will also find news from the sites they are following and from suggested sites. Additionally, they can create sites from the home page — if the administrator has enabled the ability to do so.

  2. Lists and Libraries

  The new preview contains the modern experiences for lists and libraries in team sites. This brings the experience up to date with SharePoint Online. The default lists and library experience is optimized for the most common tasks, allowing users to copy and move files using the command bar as well as pin documents, add files as links, filter and sort easily and apply formatting to columns.

  3. New Team, Site Pages

  Communication sites are a place to share news, display a story, or broadcast a message to other people. The new Hero web part can display up to five items with images, text, and links to draw attention to the most important content.

  4. New Pages

  The new pages are built using web parts that can be customized according to needs. Users can add documents, embed videos, images, site activities and Yammer feeds, among other things. Users will be able to use Excel, Word and PowerPoint documents and embed video content too.

  5. Modern Search Experience

  SharePoint 2019 comes with a new search experience. In the modern search experience, users see results before they start typing, and the results update as they type. The search results page shows a compelling overview of search results, grouped by type.

  6. Lists

  The new lists provide individuals and teams the ability to access, share and collaborate around structured data and to bring information from other systems into SharePoint to support business process. The SharePoint 2019 lists simplifies how people create, curate and interact with information.

• 6 Features Sunsetted in SharePoint 2019

• 1. Aggregregate Newsfeed

  The existing aggregated newsfeed feature will be read-only in SharePoint 2019. Both the tile in the app launcher and the option to implement the newsfeed capability will also be removed from this version forward.

  2. Custom Help

  The existing help engine in SharePoint will also be removed in the future. In this edition, Microsoft legacy on-premises SharePoint help engine, which is based on help collections being installed in the on-premises farm, will be updated and will synchronize content with Office 365.

  3. SharePoint Designer 2013

  Microsoft SharePoint Designer (SPD), formerly known as Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer, is a discontinued HTML editor freeware for creating or modifying Microsoft SharePoint sites, workflows and web pages. SharePoint Designer 2013 will work with SharePoint Server 2019 Public Preview for the remainder of the client support lifecycle (2026).

  4. Multi-Tenancy

  As Microsoft continues the push to SharePoint Online, an increasing amount of SharePoint multi-tenancy capabilities are building dependencies on cloud technologies that aren’t available in on-premises environments. The cost and complexity of providing an on-premises alternative has become too expensive, so it will not be available in the SharePoint 2019.

  5. Visio Services

  Visio Services has two options for rendering Visio diagrams: Microsoft Silverlight-based and PNG-based. Microsoft Silverlight will no longer be supported as of Oct. 12, 2021. This means that Silverlight-based rendering will no longer be supported in SharePoint Server 2019 Public Preview.

  6. Code-based sandbox solutions

  Support for code-based sandbox solutions will be removed from SharePoint 2019. Sandbox solutions are customization packages that can be used to deploy customizations to SharePoint on the site collection level. They have already been removed from SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online. Microsoft suggests users look at SharePoint add-ins as an alternative.

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New SharePoint 2019 Features

• New UX features
• Team site updates
• Communication site improvements
• Hybrid OneDrive environments
• IT administration & infrastructure updates
• Integration with hybrid environments
• SharePoint training courses

Modern User Experience Improvements

SharePoint 2019 includes new UX enhancements that are in line with the SharePoint Online experience, including better communication and collaborative capabilities. These features include:

• SharePoint Home: The new home screen will offer all the sites and news you care about in one central dashboard. If you’re familiar with Office 365, you will recognize the SharePoint home screen.
• Modern team and communication sites: Likely one of the most anticipated features of SharePoint 2019, appealing to cloud users through Office 365.
• Lists and libraries: Modern lists and libraries are also available in SharePoint 2019.
• User-friendly pages, web parts and authoring: Human error is common when creating and editing pages in older versions of SharePoint. With new user-friendly improvements in SharePoint 2019, anyone can quickly and easily create content.
• Suite Navigation and App Launcher: The popular Office 365 “waffle” menu is now available.
• Simplified sharing experience: Previously, you could only let outside users access your SharePoint on-premises content by giving them a SharePoint license or anonymous access. Now you can enjoy the flexible sharing capabilities offered in Office 365.

Team Site Improvements

SharePoint 2019 makes it easier to integrate your Office 365 group content, SharePoint team sites and Microsoft Teams.

You can connect an existing SharePoint team site to a new group in Office 365, giving you access to a group calendar, shared document library and planner to manage tasks. You also have the option to add a team in Microsoft Teams as a hub for collaboration.

In addition, Microsoft Teams now lets you access and share SharePoint pages and news articles, not just documents stored in SharePoint libraries.

Learn 6 ways to increase productivity with SharePoint workflows.

Communication Site Improvements

New and improved communication sites are available in SharePoint 2019.

Communication sites dynamically pull content from Office 365 using SharePoint web parts.

The modernized communication sites feature new web parts that simplify the process of creating and sharing important updates and announcements. These web parts include Planner, Microsoft Forms, Group Calendar, File Viewer and Twitter.

OneDrive

Organizations with large on-premises libraries will be pleased to know that SharePoint 2019 brings a significantly improved OneDrive Sync Client.

The new iteration features OneDrive Sync Client support for personal and team sites, including files on demand. It also includes push notifications to help create a fast, reliable synchronization experience.

Previously, these features were only available in the cloud. Now on-premises users can access them in hybrid environments.

Improved Support for Business Processes

Businesses rely on SharePoint to support collaboration, business process automation and custom business applications.

Moving complex workloads to the cloud can get messy. Fortunately, SharePoint 2019 includes process automation and forms technologies like PowerApps and Flow to connect with your on-premises data.

Administration/Infrastructure Improvements

There are quite a few SharePoint 2019 features aimed at improving administration and infrastructure, including:

• Direct links to SharePoint documentation: You’ll no longer need to search far and wide for documents. You can now use direct go-to links in Central Administration.
• SMTP authentication for sending emails: You’ll be able to use actual authenticated SMTP (including Office 365) to send your emails.
• Workflow Manager 2019: Workflows are not going away any time soon. This new version replaces Workflow Manager 1.0 with new and improved features.
• Integration with PowerApps and Flow: With SharePoint 2019, you can expect some deeper integrations with Flow and PowerApps. The new features have improved performance and fewer restrictions than before.

Check out the top SharePoint skills you need to learn today.

Hybrid Environments

SharePoint 2019 advances upon many previous features to make SharePoint easier to configure and manage in hybrid environments.

Here are some examples:

• New Hybrid Status Bar: Monitor the status of your hybrid configuration in one view with this new feature.
• Holistic Search: SharePoint 2019 includes a modern search feature for hybrid environments.

Recommended SharePoint 2019 Training

Any new platform or update requires a significant investment in training and onboarding. Here are three recommended training courses to hone your SharePoint 2019 skills.

• MS-301 T01 Implementing 2019 SharePoint Infrastructure: Learn how to deploy and configure SharePoint 2019. The course covers authentication, security and how to manage SharePoint content to fit with modern information architecture.
• MS-301 T02 Implementing SharePoint 2019 Service Applications: IT administrators can learn how to plan, manage and configure service applications in SharePoint 2019, including managed metadata, business connectivity services and enterprise search.
• MS-301 T03 Implementing SharePoint Hybrid Scenarios: The cloud-only model doesn’t work for everyone. Businesses are increasingly turning to hybrid on-premises and cloud environments to stay agile and cost-effective. This course prepares IT professionals to plan and launch SharePoint hybrid scenarios to create a seamless user experience.

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What’s New in SharePoint 2016: 11 Features You Need to Use

What’s New in SharePoint 2016

1) Hybrid

Microsoft has worked hard to bridge the gap between SharePoint Online and SharePoint On-Premises. Some businesses trust the cloud, while others, for privacy concerns, would rather keep their data on-premises, since they can’t always trust servers to host all their sensitive information.

SharePoint 2016 offers a hybrid feature that allows for the storage of data both on the cloud and on premises. The hybrid installations are now simplified and automated.

2) Hybrid Search

This is possibly the biggest new addition to SharePoint 2016.

The hybrid search offers a unified search experience that runs across SharePoint Online and SharePoint On-Premises for your end users.

Previously, the hybrid setup showed different result lists for SharePoint On-Premises and SharePoint Online on one page, but the results were never organized. Now, you can index all your data and specify what kind of content you would like to search for.

3) Media Preview

SharePoint 2016 also allows you to preview videos and images while hovering over them with your mouse, so you no longer have to click on content to view it.

4) Large Files

Older versions of SharePoint do not support large files; any file larger than 2047 MB will not be uploaded. With the release of SharePoint 2016, the permitted file size has been increased to 10 GB.

However, it’s generally best to avoid storing very large files in SharePoint, as you may get disconnected while uploading them.

5) Complete Privacy

Hacking is a big issue nowadays for companies with sensitive information. With this in mind, Microsoft decided to focus on improving its encryption connections in SharePoint 2016.

SharePoint now supports Transport Layer Security (TLS 1.2), which ensures a greater degree of privacy and data encryption between two communicating apps.

6) Mobile Experience

Accessing SharePoint on a mobile device used to be a nightmare for many due to its lack of responsive design. Fortunately, SharePoint 2016 comes with a user-friendly mobile version featuring excellent design and navigation. Now, you can access SharePoint from anywhere and speak with your team remotely to get work done more easily.

7) Server Roles

The release of SharePoint 2016 came with server role configuration, a feature that allows a SharePoint administrator to assign the role of their choice to a specific SharePoint 2016 server. This enables only the functionalities that you need and ensures that all servers belonging to each role are cooperative. You can also convert servers to serve new roles if needed.

8) Faster Site Creation

SharePoint 2013 used to take over 40 seconds to create a site. With PowerShell configurations, you can now use templates to create site collections within a few seconds, generally improving site performance.

9) Compliance Centre

This feature is essential for controlling the flow of data exposed to the cloud. SharePoint allows you to create your own policies and apply them as needed to your environment.

For example, it offers a feature similar to a retention policy; after a certain number of years, you can delete information from OneDrive for Business sites.

10) App Launcher and Sites in One Place

SharePoint 2016 allows you to view both On-Premises and Office 365 in one location via the App Launcher under the “Sites” app.

The App Launcher provides easy access to Office 365 apps such as Delve, OneDrive, OneNote, and more.

11) Durable Links

Lastly, the links you distribute will remain intact even after a document moves to another location or is renamed.

You can achieve this by using a Resource-ID-based link for documents hosted in SharePoint. You no longer have to search files by name and can just use the resource ID containing the document stored in the database.

These are just a few of the great features Microsoft introduced in SharePoint 2016. Do you have any others you’d like to add? Let us know in the comments.

New Features VS Deprecated Features In SharePoint 2016

New features in Share Point 2016

Mini Roles
There had been a lot of hype going over this new feature and it comes right on to you when you are installing Share Point 2016. Once you have done the installation and when you run the configuration wizard you get a window asking you to specify the Mini Role as shown below :



Figure 1: Mini

This is a cool feature that optimizes the functioning of the servers in a Share Point farm based on the role they have been assigned. 

So when you are configuring the server, depending on the intended functionality you may chose the appropriate role as the following:

Role	Functionality
Special Load	Reserved for services to be isolated from other services, I.e. 3rd party, PerformancePoint, etc.
Web Front End	Services end user requests, optimized for low latency.
Single Server Farm	Provisions all services on the server for a single server deployment. This role is provided for evaluation and development purposes.
Search	Reserved for Search services.
Application	Services the backend jobs or the requests triggered by backend jobs, optimized for high throughput.
Distributed Cache	Services distributed cache for the farm. Optionally, the server assigned to this role can load balance end user requests among the web front ends.

Sensitive Information Types and Data Loss Prevention 
This is a feature that excites most of the Enterprise companies who were reluctant to adopt Share Point stating security as one of the reason. Microsoft has now built DLP into Share Point 2016 Enterprise search. They have introduced 51 Sensitive Information Types like SSN,Credit Card No etc. that can used to write pattern rules to find out documents that exposed sensitive information. 

This can be achieved by setting up the eDiscovery site and configuring a filter using the Sensitive Type.



Figure 2: eDiscovery 

Above search will pick up sensitive documents/data that expose SSN .The entire Sensitive information types can be picked up from here

Enhanced Software boundaries 

Share Point 2016 comes with huge improvements in software boundaries.

	Share Point 2016	Share Point 2013
Content DB Size	Size has been increased to TB’s	Recommended : 200GB
Site Collections per Content DB	100,000 Site collections	Recommended : 2000
Max File Upload Size	Increased to 10 GB	Default is 250 MB but can be increased to 2 GB
Search Indexing	Increased to 500 million items per Service Application	Up to 100 million items can be indexed in a single Service Application

Image and Video Preview
In SharePoint Server 2016, you can see a preview of the images and videos posted to a document library by hovering the mouse over the image or video, or by clicking on them. 



Figure 3: Document

UI Changes and App Launcher
With Share Point 2016 the UI of the home page got a slight change. The suite bar which had a blue back ground has now been changed to have a black one. Similar to Office 365, an App launcher has been introduced to quickly launch the apps. 



Figure 4: Site

Expanded Support for special characters

In previous versions Microsoft had blocked file names that included the &, ~, {, and }characters, file names with leading dots, file names that had a GUID, and file names which were longer than 128 characters. These restrictions are removed in SharePoint Server 2016. However characters such as % and # are still restricted and cannot be used in file names.

Enhanced Document Library UI
We have an enhanced set of new controls for the library as shown below:



Figure 5: Library

Moreover the document upload process is now much more robust with an improved UI that shows the progress of the upload.



Figure 6: UI

New Keyboard shortcuts have been provided for the following tasks:

• Alt + N - New
• Alt + E - Edit
• Alt + U - Upload
• Alt + M - Manage
• Alt + S - Share
• Alt + Y - Synchronization

Improved Threshold limit by providing Auto Indexing

SharePoint 2010 and 2013 had a threshhold limit of 5000 due to which when we try to query / view items more than that throttling error occurred. This was a restriction purposefully imposed to mitigate the lock escalation issues within SQL Server.


Figure 7: Thresh



Figure 8: Error

Though the threshold limit could be increased above 5000 it created performance issue. The work around was to manually create index on columns. However in SharePoint 2016 a new Timer job has been introduced to Auto Index the columns namely “Large List column index management”.

In Share Point list ‘Advanced Settings’ there is a new setting which has to be enabled to achieve this:



Figure 9: Advance

Microsoft Project Server 2016 (PWA) integrated to SharePoint 2016
Earlier Project Server required a separate installation as well as license to be used with SharePoint. However, now it comes as a Service Application in SharePoint 2016. I have written an article on how to provision Project web App within SharePoint 2016 here



Figure 10: Home

Fast Site Collection Creation
Fast Site Collection Creation is a new functionality introduced in SharePoint Server 2016 which improves the Site Collection creation performance by reducing Feature activation overhead. ‘Fast Site Collection Creation’implements the creation of site collection by making use of Copy-SPSite at the Content Database level . This is achieved using the new Enable-SPWebTemplateForSiteMaster PowerShell script. The Site collection creation time had reduced from 40 sec to 2 sec which is an exponential reduction.

Compliance Policy Centre Site template for retention management



Figure 11: Complaince

The site upon creation will appear as below:



Figure 12: Appear

By way of this we can set retention policies and assign them to site collection. Multiple rules can be assigned as part of the policy.



Figure 13: Policies 

New timer jobs have been added to monitor the policies set and delete the documents as said in the policy. 

Zero downtime patching

Even with SharePoint 2013 whenever a new Service Pack or Cumulative Update had to be installed. Administrators had to plan for SharePoint down time. But with SharePoint 2016 patching can be done online by minimizing the down time, if any. 

In-Place Hold Policy Centre site template
A new site template called In-Place Hold Policy center has been introduced in SharePoint 2016 . This helps to manage policies defined across site collections.



Figure 14: Template

Enhanced PowerShell scripts.
PowerShell had always been a SharePoint administrators Swiss army knife. A whooping number of 115 new PowerShell scripts have been added to support SharePoint.

SMTP Connection encryption for outgoing email
This is a new feature introduced in Share Point 2016. We can define custom ports and enable SSL.



Figure 15: Connection

Cloud Hybrid Search
By using cloud hybrid search SharePoint 2016, you can index all your crawled content, including on-premises content, to your search index in Office 365. When users query your search index in Office 365, they get search results from both on-premises and Office 365 content. This would come native to SharePoint but will also be pushed to Share Point 2013 as an update. 

Hybrid OneDrive and Site Features
Hybrid OneDrive and Site Features in SharePoint 2016 is a new feature that would allow users to use OneDrive as their personal repository instead of the On-premises OneDrive or MySites. This feature basically allows users to continue using their On-premises SharePoint farm while providing users with an easy way to store, share, and collaborate in the cloud with OneDrive for Business in Office 365. 



Figure 16: Hybrid

Durable Links
Durable links introduced in Share Point 2016 works such that a file can have its name changed, or even move locations and the link will still function correctly. This way, if you send someone a link to a document, and down the road change the document name or location, the link stays valid. This is something SharePoint as a Content Management System was waiting for a long time. The internal implementation will be discussed in an upcoming article. 



Figure 17: Durable

Increased number of Timer jobs
A lot of new timer jobs have been introduced in the new release taking the total count to 226. As part of the newly introduced Retention Policy Site templates, Auto Indexing feature and other enhancements we have a lot of new timer jobs added to the Central Administration.



Figure 18: Number

SharePoint Logging API (SLAPI)
SLAPI will be built on existing analytics component and can be used to understand how users interact with SharePoint. Reports can be generated which would provide for growth trends and forecasting usage by SharePoint site template, etc.

Deprecated/Removed features from SharePoint Server 2016 
SharePoint Foundation: The free to use edition of SharePoint will no longer be a part of the Share Point 2016 suite. SharePoint foundation was a minimal SharePoint product which lacked enterprise features. 

Standalone Install Mode: SharePoint 2016 cannot be installed in standalone mode. You will have to choose one of the 6 Mini Roles available during the configuration phase. The Single Server Farm option where everything is installed on the same computer is supported for dev purposes.

InfoPath: New version of InfoPath will not be released. The previous version InfoPath 2013 will be available and supported. 

SharePoint Designer: A new version of SharePoint Designer will not be released with SharePoint 2016. The older version SharePoint Designer 2013 is available and will be supported.

Forefront Identity Manager Client (FIM): When you configure the User Profile Sync in Share Point 2013 you could choose “Profile Synchronization” which used FIM, or Active Directory import. But now FIM has been deprecated and only Active directory import is available. There is also an option to connect to external Sync services like Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM).



Figure 19: MIM

Excel Services

Excel Services capabilities are not available in SharePoint 2016. Excel Services functionality is now part of Excel Online in Office Online Server Preview, and SharePoint users can use the services from there. The following Excel Services functionality has been deprecated:

• Trusted data providers.
• Trusted file locations.
• Trusted data connection libraries.
• Unattended service account.
• Excel Services Windows PowerShell cmdlets.
• Opening of Excel workbooks from SharePoint Central Administration site.

Tags & Notes

SharePoint 2013 had the Tags & Notes feature which is deprecated in SharePoint 2016.



Figure 20: Tags

Users can no longer create new tags and notes or access existing ones. However old tags and notes data can be exported using PowerShell.

STSADM

 

STSADM is deprecated in SharePoint 2016. PowerShell is the way to go. However, backward compatibility remains with STSADM. 

Upgrade Considerations

• There is no supported upgrade from Share Point 2010 directly to 2016. Existing sites and Content DB should be running under Share Point 2013.
• The upgrade process remains the same as in Share Point 2010 – Share Point 2013. Content Databases can be detached from SharePoint 2013 and attached to SharePoint 2016.