The Future of SharePoint is Here!

So in the early hours of this morning (Melbourne time), Microsoft’s highly anticipated Future of SharePoint event announced the general availability of SharePoint 2016, and unveiled their cloud-first, mobile-first vision and roadmap for SharePoint over the coming year(s), as well as some new innovations to improve information sharing and collaboration.

For IT pros/SharePoint server administrators, arguably the most interesting development – which admittedly has been common knowledge for a good while now – is the ability to harness Office 365 functionality in SharePoint on-premises through a seamless hybrid solution. Now I’m not an IT pro myself, so I’m not going to try and explain this in further detail – I’ll leave that to the experts, so check out this post on the Office Blog site for more information if you’re interested.

From a business user perspective, there’s been some key improvements in the user experience, such as the “waffle” icon, allowing users of SharePoint 2016 on-premises to access their apps in the same was we do when accessing SharePoint through Office 365…

And the addition of some extra option on a document library’s toolbar, reducing the need for the (cumbersome, according to some) ribbon…

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting some hints and tips, as well as showcasing some of the new functionality that has been introduced into SharePoint 2016 on-premises, SharePoint Online and Office 365 in general, so keep checking back here!