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In this post, I share information about On-Premises SharePoint, highlights of SharePoint 2016 and see how Outlook attachments (bye-bye) are changing as we know them.

Firstly I’d like to congratulate the SP24 Conference (#SP24Conf) organisers for delivering an awesome conference this week. The format was new and a challenge for those involved I’m sure. It worked very well aside from the twenty-first-century hiccup or two. I look forward to the next one when the crew have all recovered and caught up on their sleep. Maybe I might be able to get a speaker slot next time where we might hear more about SharePoint 2016!

I managed to stay up for three sessions before calling it a night (a late one at that – 2 am UK time. I was delivering an Azure briefing at the Microsoft Offices in London the next morning. But I did manage to attend five other sessions towards the end of the day. Hopefully, in a few weeks, we will have access to all the sessions when I’ll try to watch as many sessions as I can when the time arises.

SharePoint 2016 highlights and more…

I’d like to share some highlights I learned during the SP24 Keynote that Bill Baer’s delivered. It’s important news for all those involved in the industry to hear at this time. More importantly, it demonstrates again that Microsoft is continuing to share more and more with us long before they would have done before.

SharePoint On-Premises lives on

With Microsoft investing so much in their Cloud products whether that’s Office 365 or Microsoft Azure, many have thought that time had been called for the On-Premises version of SharePoint. Well, that time is not in sight – not yet anyway!

So the next version of SharePoint that we’re shipping in later 2015 will in fact not be the last version of SharePoint server that we ever ship.

Sure we’ll see features and changes to these Cloud products more often especially Office 365, long before we see them On-Premises. We might not see some features at all but Bill said, “Microsoft will continue to develop in On-Premises for as long as there is demand for it”.  SharePoint 2016 is not going to be the last.

We are going to continue to ship SharePoint server on-premises as long as there is a demand for SharePoint server on-premises!

Not only that but SharePoint 2016 will ship towards the end of 2015.

In late 2015 we are going to launch another version of SharePoint server to our on-premises audience.

SharePoint 2016 highlights

On top of the On-Premises news, Bill also demonstrated features from the next version of SharePoint – SharePoint 2016. Here are some highlights from the Keynote:

The close integration with Yammer was clear once again and more Office Graph functionality seemed to be visible since the demonstration during the SharePoint Conference 2014 (#SPC14).

We also learned about Remote Index. This will make it possible to push On-Premises Search Indexes to Office 365 to provide a single search experience and result set. A unified search index in Office 365 along with Office Graph will create an awesome experience for end-users.

Outlook is the first program that many of us launch on a typical working day yet we have many other sources of information. Expect to see changes to Outlook that will help us access this information and deliver more than just email to us.

A further change to Outlook and SharePoint 2016 that we’ll see in the next version is the removal of email attachments as we know them with the help of OneDrive for Business. Users will continue to attach files to their emails but they’ll be saved to their OneDrive for Business Document Library and shared with all to, cc and bcc addresses via a URL in the email. This is a really exciting change and I look forward to discovering more about soon. The net result is users will have continuous access to the latest files and can use features such as Co-Authoring.

Discover more

Join me over the next year as I discover more news and information about the next version of SharePoint and Office 16 by following my #Office16 tag.

#InBillWeTrust