IT leaders around the world attended Microsoft Ignite last month. The IT conference focuses on equipping IT decision makers, IT professionals, enterprise developers, press and analysts with hands-on experience, ways to maximize application development, and other insights on critical technology trends. Those who attended the conference were presented with SharePoint Server 2016’s first public demo, a demonstration which quashed a lot of the SharePoint administrator community’s uneasiness. Here are the two biggest takeaways from Microsoft’s conference:

• SharePoint Server 2016 will offer a much better administrative experience – Microsoft made it a point to mention that their product team would attempt to make both administration and management user scenarios a lot easier to work with, especially when concerning updates and patches. Patching new features and security updates will no longer take down your SharePoint services and each patch will only consist of a max of one MSI (patch file) per language pack and two MSIs per SharePoint service. One downside to these great updates is you need to be running Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 2012 R2, due to previous operating systems not being supported.
• SharePoint Server on-premises is still around – Many SharePoint users questioned whether SharePoint 2013 would indeed be the last version of the product to be offered as a perpetual one-time license rather than requiring some kind of delivery system or cloud subscription. A number of enterprises and other companies felt that it was too much to trust that any and all of their sensitive content and documents would be stored in the cloud, meaning it was on-premises or nothing at all. Luckily, SharePoint Server 2016 is looking to add a number of meaningful and useful improvements to the on-premises side specifically, making it a realistic choice for most enterprises and businesses that refuse to store information in the cloud.

Overall, SharePoint Server 2016 will be featuring a number of changes, updates and overhauls which help it hit the sweet spot between on-premises and the cloud. As a Microsoft Gold Partner, the team at C3IT specializes in SharePoint collaborative portals, Custom Enterprise Software and self-service Business Intelligence. Planned for the first quarter of next year, SharePoint Server 2016 will be a big, welcome change to many businesses. Our IT experts can work with your company or organization when you are ready to make the switch to SharePoint Server 2016 in order to make it as smooth a transition as possible. Speak with one of our team members today about SharePoint or any of the other IT services we offer.