SharePoint 2016 officially released for on-premise content collaboration

Microsoft has just announced the general availability of SharePoint Server 2016, which will now be providing SharePoint customers with a foundation for modern, intelligent intranet and content collaboration.

• Cloud-Inspired Infrastructure: SharePoint Server 2016 represents a new generation of SharePoint that accures the experience of running SharePoint at scale in Office 365 and brings investments in SharePoint Online to your data center to improve performance, reliability, manageability, and scale.
• Compliance and Reporting: SharePoint Server 2016 provides a broad array of features and capabilities designed to make certain that sensitive information remains protected with investments in data loss protection, new scenarios to enable data encryption and compliance tools that span on-premises servers and Office 365.
• Enhanced User Experiences: SharePoint Server 2016 brings innovations in user experience from Office 365 to on-premises farms, with improvements to document libraries and navigation constructs that are consistent with Office 365.

SharePoint Server 2016 will also deliver unconditional improvements to enhance the quality of on-premises SharePoint solutions and enable customers to take advantage of the innovations in Office 365. Microsoft is highlighting the value of SharePoint 2016 in a blog post and is dividing it into three areas: cloud inspired infrastructure, compliance and reporting, and enhanced user experiences.  The full details on each of these values can be seen below.

Additionally, Microsoft is also highlighting how SharePoint 2016 is the foundation for the future. Moving to a unified code-base, Microsoft claims, will bring as much value as possible from SharePoint Online to SharePoint Server. The company details this in each of the following categories which can be seen below:

• Seamless connection to innovate Office 365 features and experiences: SharePoint Server 2016 allows users to transition smoothly between on-premises sites and Office 365 sites and experiences.
• Integrated, unified, hybrid experiences: SharePoint Server also delivers cloud-both innovation through hybrid capabilities that span, integrate, and unify on-premises farms and Office 365.
• On-premises experiences and feature: We will provide many of the new experiences and frameworks to SharePoint 2016 customers with Software Assurance through Feature Packs. This means customers won’t have to wait for the next version of SharePoint Server to take advantage of cloud-born innovation in data centers.