Last May, Microsoft announced their vision, strategy, timeline and investment areas for SharePoint in Office 365 and on-premises. Recently, Microsoft announced details about their inaugural Feature Pack for SharePoint Server 2016. Feature Pack 1, available in November, brings several enhancements driven by recent innovation in Office 365 and your feedback.

These enhancements include:

• Logging of administrative actions performed in Central Administration and with Windows PowerShell.
• Enhancements to MinRole to support small environments.
• A new OneDrive for Business user experience.
• Custom tiles in the SharePoint app launcher.
• Unified auditing across site collections on-premises and in Office 365.
• Unified taxonomy across on-premises and Office 365.
• OneDrive API 2.0.

What’s a Feature Pack?

Unlike previous versions of SharePoint, release-to-manufacture did not define the end of innovation, but the beginning. As Microsoft continues to develop SharePoint Server 2016, they’ve paid close attention to customer feedback, trends in content management, team collaboration, user experiences across devices, and how the cloud can be blended into existing on-premises scenarios in new and compelling ways. Feature Packs allows Microsoft to accelerate delivery of cloud-first features to their Software Assurance customers (where noted) of SharePoint Server 2016 outside of the traditional 2- to 3-year release cadence.

New capabilities for administrators

For IT professionals, Feature Pack 1 includes several new capabilities based on feedback Microsoft received throughout the development of SharePoint Server 2016, from IT Preview to Release Candidate.

Administrative actions logging—SharePoint administrators spend a considerable amount of time troubleshooting administrative changes to their on-premises environment, which can result in failure conditions or other undesired effects. In Feature Pack 1, Microsoft introduced logging of common administrative actions performed in the Central Administration website and with Windows PowerShell.

MinRole enhancements—One of the infrastructure advancements in SharePoint Server 2016 was the concept of MinRole. MinRole is designed to transform architectural guidance into code, simplifying deployment and scale with SharePoint by ensuring a request is served end-to-end by the receiving server based on the origin of the request (i.e., end user or batch processing) and role of the destination server.

Once the new MinRole enhancements are enabled, you will notice that two additional server roles are available: “Front-end with Distributed Cache” and “Application with Search.” The Front-end with Distributed Cache role combines the Front-end and Distributed Cache roles together, while the Application with Search role combines the Application and Search roles together. These new roles let you host a multi-server MinRole farm with just two servers or four servers with HA.

New user experiences

A new OneDrive for Business experience—OneDrive for Business is an integral part of Office 365 and SharePoint Server. It provides a place where you can store, share and sync your work files. OneDrive for Business makes it easy to manage and share your documents from anywhere, and work together in real-time, on your favorite devices. Feature Pack 1 brings the modern OneDrive for Business user experience to SharePoint Server 2016. The new OneDrive user experience is a Software Assurance benefit.

SharePoint App Launcher custom tiles—The App Launcher was introduced in SharePoint Server 2016 with the ability to extend the tiles with the SharePoint Hybrid App Launcher to include apps available in Office 365. The App Launcher provides a common location to discover new apps and navigate between on-premises SharePoint and Office 365 applications. Now, in addition to native SharePoint and Office 365 apps, you can also add your own custom tiles that point to other SharePoint sites, external sites, legacy apps and more. This makes it easy to find and navigate to the relevant sites, apps and resources to do your job.

Hybrid capabilities

Unified auditing—Unified auditing gives SharePoint administrators detailed visibility into file access activities across all site collections, on-premises and in Office 365. With unified auditing in place, the Office 365 Security and Compliance Center can provide audit logs search for your SharePoint Server 2016 on-premises audit logs in addition to Office 365 audit logs.

This hybrid auditing capability—powered by Microsoft SharePoint Insights—enters preview with Feature Pack 1. Configuration is simple: a few clicks in Hybrid Scenario Picker wizard and you’re ready to start viewing and experiencing unified auditing.

Unified taxonomy—SharePoint’s managed metadata service application makes it possible to create a taxonomy for information architecture across site collections and web applications. With Feature Pack 1, you can implement a unified taxonomy across a SharePoint Server 2016 farm and Office 365. You can seed the term store in SharePoint Online from your on-premises term store and then manage your taxonomy in SharePoint Online. Replication to on-premises SharePoint is performed by the hybrid taxonomy feature.

Developer enhancements

OneDrive API 2.0—The OneDrive API provides a common API for access to files located on-premises and in the Office 365 cloud. The API provides access and enables developers to build solutions that target user data stored in OneDrive for Business and SharePoint document libraries.

 Feature Pack 1 features will become generally available November 2016. To learn more about the Feature Pack process or if you have any questions, please contact us at (206) 781-1797 or sales@vorsite.com.