Well this was the day I was waiting for.  If you’ve been wanting to get some more information on SharePoint 2016, today’s recap is for you!  I’ll briefly review some tips from the great duo of Todd Klindt and Shane Young on upgrading to SharePoint 2013, then I’ll dangle some awesome new not yet released tools for Dynamics CRM and Office 365 straight from the mouth of the great Girish Raja.  I then got some great insights from the master Spence Harbar himself on OneDrive for Business migrations, then rounded out the day diving deep in the new hybrid search service application for SharePoint 2013 / 2016.  If anything of this interests you, keep reading!

I’ll apologize now for the length of today’s entry but there was too much great information to leave out.  Now let’s get to SharePoint 2016.

Session – What’s New for It Professionals in SharePoint Server 2016

This is what I was waiting for – to get an early peek at the details of some of the changes coming in SharePoint 2016.  There was a ton of information in this session, and I’ll struggle to try and boil it down to a few summary nuggets of information but no promises.  Again led by Bill Baer, a Senior Technical Product Manager for SharePoint.  The huge amphitheater was packed, with folks lined up waiting to get in. 

DISCLAIMER - One thing to remember with all this information – we are still almost a year from release, so this is all tentative, subject to change and probably will, etc., etc. 

What is SharePoint 2016?

What really defines SharePoint 2016?  Microsoft is looking to the cloud to see what SharePoint 2016 should be.  Office 365 was born from the SharePoint 2013 code base, and this is when things diverged.  Microsoft made improvements, innovations and changed the way SharePoint worked in Office 365, but made only standard updates to 2013 on-premise.  Today, there is a large disparity between Office 365 features and SharePoint 2013 on-premises.  SharePoint 2016 aims to fix this by basically becoming the new code-base for on-premise.  They are back-porting almost all of the capabilities in SharePoint Online and bringing them to the on-prem builds. 

Hardware Requirements for SharePoint 2016

The hardware requirements really don’t change at all from SharePoint 2013. 

Software Requirements for SharePoint 2016

Things start to change a little when it comes to the software requirements.  The minimum OS and SQL get a bump.

No More SQL Server Express

The big change is there is that standalone / single server installs will NOT support the Windows Internal database or SQL Server Express.  You MUST install and use SQL Server Standard / Enterprise / Datacenter, etc., though it can be on the same server. 

Upgrade Paths to SharePoint 2016

The paths are the same as from 2010 to 2013 where you can either DB attach or use a 3rd-party migration tool, that hasn’t changed.  But there has been speculation around if you are required to go to 2013 before 2016 or if you can skip.  Bill seemed to put this to rest.  You MUST upgrade to SharePoint 2013 before you can upgrade to SharePoint 2016.  In addition, any site collections that use the 2010 format will have to be converted to 2013 (15) mode before upgrading to 2016. 

Another huge change coming down the pipe in the upcoming months is a new migration API.  This has been mentioned a lot over the week, when looking to migrate content to Office 365.  This will help facilitate easier upgrades from on-premise to SharePoint Online / OneDrive for Business scenarios. 

Identity

In SharePoint 2016, SAML claims becomes a first-class citizen and the default authentication though it will still support Windows Identity over SAML claims.  Basically this is aimed to set the stage for cloud integration, being cloud ready and trust Azure AD.  This is essence one authentication provider to rule them all. 

Roles & Services

There are some HUGE and fundamental changes going on here.  Defined roles are coming back (think 2007 WFE) to SharePoint 2016 but in a whole different way.  We’ve all seen where a CU will get released, then gets pulled due to regression and has to be re-released.  This is because Microsoft can’t test reliability in every combination of service configuration.  So they have established what they call MinRoles.  After installing the bits and you fire up psconfig, you choose what role this server will perform in the farm.

Think of Search, when you deploy it you have to run all this PowerShell.  Now SharePoint will configure the server with only the necessary bits and services for Search to run on this box and nothing else.  Since SharePoint configured it, they know how it should be, and can be plan for and test this configuration.  This is seen in new rules in the Health Analyzer, and even a Fix it button in Services in Farm in Central Admin if things get out of compliance configuration wise.  You can still create these in PowerShell using a new switch called –isserverrole for psconfig.  Scaling an environment becomes very expected and easy, just stand up a new server, join to the farm, and pick a role.

This allows for tremendously smaller update patches, from 40 installer files to 2, and 18 language pack files to 1. 

Boundaries and Limits

This information is more fuzzy, but there are the current planned new limits in SharePoint 2016.

Other Improvements

• The User Profile Service will NOT be included in SharePoint; it will be separated and can be run independent of SharePoint
• Project Server has its databases consolidated into the Content DB”
• Files shared will have “durable” links, so if they are moved, renamed, etc. the link will still work using resource ID
• Leveraging BITS for faster download/upload of these 10GB files
• Fast Site Collection creation – basically does a SQL table row copy instead of going through API (spsite.copy) in content DB
• Real time telemetry
  • Basically much more robust dashboards and analytics from an improved health and usage database
• Allow storage of ODF files in document libraries, which any editing program can edit
• enhancements in compliance for document fingerprinting, classification IDs, etc.
• Cloud Search Service
  • I will talk about this later
• Extranets – some form of ability leverage Office 365 identity federation service, think external users in SharePoint Online but now in on prem
• Much easier way to configure hybrid via new UI tool

Session - Upgrade to Microsoft SharePoint 2013 and Ready for Cloud Potential

There was actually not really anything really new for me here, but typical information from Todd Klindt and Shane Young – fun filled and informative session with solid information!  I’ve done whole webinars on upgrading issues and mitigation from SharePoint 2010 to 2013 so I won’t go into detail here.  There is plenty of guidance out there on this on this topic.  Just some key points:

• If running classic authentication, upgrade to 2013 first then convert the webapp to claims authentication because convert-spwebapplication is way awesome
• Start thinking about using FQDN URLs in your webapps for thinking ahead to cloud, since it requires FQDN for hybrid scenarions
• With the February 2015 CU, you can redirect 2010 My Sites to OneDrive for Business in Office 365
• FAB 40 is dead!
• Per Todd, “don’t upgrade crap”.  Review those old sites and don’t migrate them if you don’t use them!
• Get familiar with Azure AD as it will be a crucial component moving forward in the SharePoint landscape

Session – Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online: What’s New?

This was lead by two well known Senior product Managers at Microsoft Girish Raja and Luis Camino.  Now a lot of this was standard new stuff shown at Convergence or other online places.  But there there were a couple new things I want to call out for our Dynamics CRM users.

New Outlook App for CRM

Releasing in the next few days, there is a new “Outlook app” that will be available in the store.  This doesn’t directly replace the current CRM for Outlook client, but it helps to alleviate some of its pain.  It allows you to track email, and configure folder-based email tracking.  Constantly track an email to the same account or opportunity?  Just drag the email to a folder, and it will be tracked.  This works in Outlook desktop, OWA, and mobile!   You can do so much more, like create a contact right from the email (uses the quick create form, and CAN be customized). 

This is enabled by IT / administrators, but configured per user by going to CRM options –> Email, configure folder tracking rules –> add new folder mapping.  And yes, you can add multiple mappings.

Using Office in CRM

• Office 365 Groups
  • Group activities, documents and members are surfaced on a CRM record contextually
• Excel
  • When you are looking at a view, you pick edit in Excel instead of Export to Excel, and if you make a change in Excel and save, it will update the record in CRM
• OneNote
  • This requires document management integration to be configured
  • The OneNote notebook is stored in SharePoint, and can created from CRM
  • This cannot be customized per say or get hooks into it
• Future – Delve
  • Over time they are working to integrate CRM activities into Delve as well

Session - Configuring OneDrive for Business Deployment: Options and Best Practices

In this session our fearless Certified Master and Architect Spence Harbar reviewed the options for moving to OneDrive for Business, and configuring the redirection of on-prem OFB to Office 365 OFB.

Why would you want to do this?  When you want to take advantage of cloud-based personal storage, but you are not yet ready for the full-blown Office 365 environment.  This lets users get the benefits of OFB in the cloud, but still stay everything else on prem. 

In order to do this, you need SharePoint 2013 with SP1 or SharePoint 2010 with the February 2015 CU, and some form of directory sync or SSO setup.  Here are the basic steps:

• Create an audience and establish membership rules to include the users you want to redirect
• in on-prem Central Administration, configure the Office 365 OFB link (My Sites root URL)
  • Select the audience you created
  • Likely leave the redirect site page not checked unless you want to redirect everyone
• In Office 365, assign a license

There is a migration API coming that is basically a bulk CSOM API.  You can call this API “CreatePersonalSiteEnqueue” from code or from PowerShell.  This API can be used when you need to bulk migrate.  It is done in batches via a queue limited to 200.  You need to be sure to create the OFB sites in Office 365 beforehand, and then assign permissions to the bulk user. 

You can also use the OneDrive for Business network bandwidth calculator to check what impact this will have on your network bandwidth.

Session - Implementing Next Generation SharePoint Hybrid Search with the Cloud Search Service Application

This was yet another packed session!  Here we were taken a tour and deeper look into this new and elusive creature called the “SharePoint Server Cloud Search service application”.

Basically this is a new service application coming to SharePoint 2013 by the end of the year (2015), and baked into SharePoint 2016 at release.  It provides the ability to aggregate your content index from multiple sources, farms, etc. and push the index to Office 365.  This allows on-prem content to show up in search results from SharePoint Online, and even in Office 365 content to show in a 2010 search center (if configured) with preview! 

Why do I care?

When you previously setup hybrid search, it worked, but the different result sets showed that way, separate in the results.  It wasn’t a very unified experience, and required hosting of ALL of the search components.  Now the search cloud service app can be on-prem, in Azure, anywhere.  It only hosts the crawler, and then pushes the encrypts the files / metadata to the index in Office 365. 

How do I create / configure it?

Here’s the basic high-level procedure:

• In Central Admin create a new could search service application (you can still use PowerShell to scale the environment as desired)
• by default, it isn’t connected to Office 365 so you execute an onboarding script
  • this needs global admin credentials in Office 365
  • now this is a PowerShell, but might be different at release
  • this onboarding script does all the main setup and configuration for you
• If you need to make the online results show in 2010 on-premise, you publish this new search service application and consume from the 2010 farm

Security trimming is still respected, and is calculated at the source of where the document / item lives.  The new service app maps the value of the user’s SID to their PUID in Office 365, and stores this on prem SID in a new property called “msOnline-OnPremiseSecurityIdentifier”. 

There is also a new managed property called IsExternalContent (boolean).  This allows easy creation of content sources to include or exclude content from on-premise or cloud, etc. via query rules. 

Much more will be released on this topic, so this is an early peek.  But there is TREMENDOUS promise in a number of scenarios and looks to make hybrid configurations much better!  The speakers were swarmed after the session, more than I’ve ever seen if that’s any indication of how much interest there is on this topic. 

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