Conversational SharePoint 2016

By Vlad Catrinescu

Copyright© 2016

Conversational SharePoint 2016

Published by Conversational Geek Inc.

www.conversationalgeek.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. No patent liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained herein. Although every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Nor is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

Trademarks Conversational Geek, the Conversational Geek logo and J. the Geek are trademarks of Conversational Geek™. All terms mentioned in this book that are known to be trademarks or service marks have been appropriately capitalized. We cannot attest to the accuracy of this information. Use of a term in this book should not be regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark or service mark.

Warning and Disclaimer Every effort has been made to make this book as complete and as accurate as possible, but no warranty or fitness is implied. The information provided is on an “as is” basis. The author and the publisher shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damages arising from the information contained in this book or programs accompanying it.

Additional Information For general information on our other products and services, or how to create a custom Conversational Geek book for your business or organization, please visit our website at ConversationalGeek.com

Publisher Acknowledgments

All of the folks responsible for the creation of this guide:

Author: Vlad Catrinescu

Project Editor: J. Peter Bruzzese

Copy Editor: John Rugh

Content Reviewer(s): Karla Reina

Note from the Author

I have been working with SharePoint for the past 6 years and as a consultant, I have been able to see over 60 implementations in very different organizations. Each of the organizations has different business requirements, and there are no two SharePoint deployments that are the same. I think that’s why I love SharePoint so much!

Over the past two years, there has been a lot of fear in the SharePoint Community that the on-premises version of SharePoint is going away and Microsoft is moving it all to the cloud. However, with the return of Jeff Tepper, also known as the “Father of SharePoint” to the SharePoint & OneDrive team as well as some amazing announcements in 2015, it’s clear that Microsoft is committed to SharePoint on premise!

SharePoint 2016 is the first version of SharePoint that’s cloud-born, meaning that instead of building an on-premises product and afterwards shipping to the cloud, Microsoft took a snapshot of the code from SharePoint Online, and created a server product out of it, allowing on-premises users to benefit from the latest Office 365 innovations!

This version of SharePoint brings a lot of new features you will learn about in this book, as well as an increased compatibility for Hybrid Scenarios with Office 365.

Welcome to the future of SharePoint - the brand new SharePoint Server 2016!

Vlad Catrinescu

The “Conversational” Method

We have two objectives when we create a “Conversational” book: First, to make sure it’s written in a conversational tone so it’s fun and easy to read. Second, to make sure you, the reader, can immediately take what you read and include it into your own conversations (personal or business-focused) with confidence.

These books are meant to increase your understanding of the subject. Terminology, conceptual ideas, trends in the market, and even fringe subject matter are brought together to ensure you can engage your customer, team, co-worker, friend and even the know-it-all Best Buy geek on a level playing field.

“Geek in the Mirror” Boxes

We infuse humor into our books through both cartoons and light banter from the author. When you see one of these boxes it’s the author stepping outside the dialog to speak directly to you. It might be an anecdote, it might be a personal experience or gut reaction and analysis, it might just be a sarcastic quip, but these “geek in the mirror” boxes are not to be skipped.

Within these boxes I can share just about anything on the subject at hand. Read ’em!

SharePoint 2016 Evolution

SharePoint Server 2016 is the latest and greatest release of SharePoint, and Microsoft has packed a ton of great features inside. Before we go into detail on those features, let’s take a look at the history of SharePoint.

Fifteen years is a long time in technology and SharePoint has grown from a small server given away by Microsoft almost for free to one of its biggest income sources. Looking at some recent statistics from the European SharePoint Conference 2015 in Stockholm, Jeff Tepper shared that over 75,000 organizations (and a total of 160 million users) use SharePoint!

What is SharePoint?

SharePoint is a tool created by Microsoft that allows users to share and collaborate on documents in a web-based portal. SharePoint’s been around since 2001 and has evolved from only a document repository to a powerful tool that facilitates managing Communities, Business Intelligence and automating business processes.

But what made SharePoint a multibillion dollar business? The ability to customize it based on the individual needs of each company. SharePoint makes it very easy to create custom solutions; you can take advantage of the ton of built-in features and adapt it to YOUR custom requirements in order to save time, money and increase your users’ productivity.

When designing SharePoint 2016, Microsoft had three goals in mind:

Improved User Experiences

New user experiences enable users to quickly and productively consume new apps and experiences across devices and screens. SharePoint 2016 brings new functionality in responsive web design so users can work wherever they are. SharePoint also tries to achieve the same look as Office 365

2001 • SharePoint Portal Server 2001

2003 • SharePoint Portal Server 2003

2006 • Office SharePoint Server 2007

2009 • SharePoint Server 2010

2012 • SharePoint Server 2013

2016 • SharePoint Server 2016

Cloud-Inspired Infrastructure

Even though Microsoft has offered cloud SharePoint Services since 2003, they’ve never had a large scale infrastructure with millions of users as they have now with Office 365. By offering SharePoint to millions of users, Microsoft was able to experience first-hand how fun (and painful) it can be to manage SharePoint sometimes.

In order to achieve the stability and SLA they promise in the cloud, Microsoft made a lot of changes to the SharePoint Infrastructure, and luckily we can benefit from those changes on premise as well with SharePoint 2016. Features such as MinRole and Zero Downtime Patching allow SharePoint administrators to give a faster and more stable service to their users.

I remember the very first iteration of SharePoint (in 2001). It was primarily for

document management and looked nothing like what we have today. The 2003 flavor was an improvement (barely), but starting

with 2007 we began to see the formation of something interesting. Something usable.

People-Centric Compliance

Compliance has been a big topic in the past few years with all the website hacking incidents and information leaks. Some companies handle documents that include important information such as Credit Cards, Passports, Social Security Numbers, etc. Microsoft included Data Loss Prevention capabilities in SharePoint 2016 to allow the compliance department to find documents that shouldn’t be in SharePoint and eventually to block them so no one can access this information.

The Big Takeaways

SharePoint has been evolving for 15 years and has come a long way from its humble beginnings in 2001. It’s not necessary for you to start back at the beginning and learn every little detail in order to jump in and learn SharePoint features built into 2016. We’re going to get you up to speed… fast!

What’s New in SharePoint 2016

We’re going to jump right in and start discussing new features in SharePoint 2016.

MinRole

One of the big changes in SharePoint 2016, especially for IT Professionals is MinRole. MinRole lets SharePoint farm administrators assign a role to each SharePoint server in the farm, and from there, SharePoint starts and stops services on its own. SharePoint Administrators do not need to go on 10 blogs from different MVPs, all with their different opinion on what service should run on each role; SharePoint starts the service on the right server when you create the service application, and if that service application is deleted, the service stops.

The selection is done when the server is added to the SharePoint Farm with the Configuration Wizard.

There are 5 choices to choose from:

Front-End

Service applications, services, and components that serve user requests belong on Front-end web servers. These servers are optimized for low latency.

Application

Service applications, services, and components that serve backend requests (such as background jobs or search crawl requests) belong on Application servers. These servers are optimized for high throughput.

Distributed Cache

Service applications, services, and components that are required for a distributed cache belong on Distributed Cache servers.

Search

Service applications, services, and components that are required for searching belong on Search servers.

Custom

Custom service applications, services, and components that do not integrate with MinRole belong on Custom servers. The farm administrator has full control over which service instances can run on servers assigned to the Custom role. MinRole does not control which service instances are provisioned on this role.

The other choice is the Single-Server Farm. The Single Server farm is similar to the old “Stand-Alone” server option in SharePoint 2010 and 2013, however with one important difference: in SharePoint 2016, the Single-Server Farm does not include a SQL Server Express installation as it did before. You need to install SQL Server manually, before configuring SharePoint in single-server farm mode.

Also, another important point to understand is that a best-practice SharePoint 2016 farm requires at least 4 SharePoint servers, one for each MinRole. If you want to deploy a farm in “MinRole” mode, you need to have one of each or the farm will not work. If you require High Availability, you will need two of each role, so 8 servers!

If you do not have 4 servers, you need to select the “Custom” Option for each server. Custom lets the SharePoint administrator start and stop SharePoint Servers manually, exactly as they managed SharePoint Servers in SharePoint 2010 and 2013.

Sample Deployment Scenarios

To help you to better understand, here are some scenarios as well as the sample topology for each one

Contoso

Contoso is a small business that relies on SharePoint for their day to day activities. If SharePoint goes down, they lose money, so High availability is a must. Due to budget cuts, Contoso can only afford a maximum of 4 SharePoint Servers and 2 SQL Servers.

The recommended topology for Contoso would be 4 SharePoint Servers in “Custom” role as well as two SQL Servers

Our first choice should always be to go MinRole, however, since we need 8 servers for MinRole High Availability, and our client only has budget for 4 servers, we need to manage the servers the “old school” way, and have two “Front Ends” and two “Application” Servers. We would need to start and stop services manually on each server, and make sure that every service is started on at least two servers for redundancy.

Fabrikam

Fabrikam is a medium-sized company that uses SharePoint as an intranet platform and light document collaboration. High availability is not needed, as no business critical information is stored on SharePoint. Fabrikam can afford 4 SharePoint Servers and 1 SQL Server

The recommended topology for Fabrikam would be a full MinRole topology.

Since our first choice is MinRole, and the client does not need high availability, we are able to create a MinRole farm and stay within Microsoft’s best practices.

Trey Research Inc.

Trey Research is a Fortune 100 company that relies on SharePoint to run their business. Having 20 000 users, Trey Research is looking for a stable farm that’s available 24/7/365. The farm will also run Trey Research’s Public website.

The topology for Trey Research would be a fully Highly Available MinRole farm. In this scenario we don’t have a budget limit, but we do have a load as well as a high availability requirement. In this topology we would need at least 8 servers, 2 of each MinRole, so we decided to add some extra Front Ends and a Distributed Cache server to handle the load.

Benefits

MinRole brings a lot of benefits to SharePoint Administrators. Here are some of the main ones:

By hardcoding the services that run on each server

with the best practices learned by Microsoft from

running Office 365, we get optimal performance and

stability.

There are fewer scenarios for Microsoft to test when

releasing updates. Instead of having millions of

possible scenarios, by knowing in advance what

services run on each server, Microsoft can spend more

time on each scenario and make sure their updates

don’t have any bugs.

MinRole also brings a simplified farm scalability for

SharePoint Administrators. When adding a server to

the farm, the SharePoint Admin simply decides what

role the server must be, and the services start

automatically. No more need to make a list of services

to start

MinRole Takeaways

The goal of MinRole is to take the guesswork out of which SharePoint server should run which service.

You need at least 4 servers to have a MinRole Deployment.

If you don’t have 4 servers, select “Custom” and

manage servers the same way as we did before in

SharePoint 2010 and 2013.

Data Loss Prevention

Data Loss Prevention (DLP) is one of the features that comes from the cloud with SharePoint Online back down on-premises to the server room in SharePoint 2016. Data Loss Prevention can be confusing at first. A lot of users seem to confuse it with another Microsoft product called Data Protection Manager (DPM). DPM is a product in the System Center suite that does backups, while DLP allows SharePoint users to find documents with sensitive content that should not be in SharePoint. There are four main goals in DLP for SharePoint 2016:

Identify

DLP in SharePoint 2016 allows us to find a total of 51 information types from Credit Card Accounts, Social Security Numbers, Bank Account numbers, Passports and so on!

Monitor

Using the eDiscovery Center, allowed users can search for documents that go against a policy and create reports on it in real time. Users can search across SharePoint 2016, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online with one single search. Furthermore, SharePoint will automatically send information to a selected email address whenever a document is found. The information will include the rule broken, the information about the document, and the person who last modified the document.

Protect

When creating policies, the policy creator can choose to block access to a document if it has sensitive information inside. Once the document is blocked, only Site Collection

Administrators, the user who created the document and the last user that modified the item have access to the document. The document will have a “stop sign” on the icon as well as information that it is blocked in the information pane.

End User Education

The SharePoint 2016 DLP functionality also lets users know what they did wrong. First, users get an email about the document, and the policy they are breaking.

Also, if enabled, users can have a policy tip in the document information pane that shows the issues with the document.

Durable Links

Durable links is one of the cool features in SharePoint 2016 that will give business still using file shares another reason to migrate to SharePoint. This feature allows the link to work, even after a document has been renamed and /or moved to a different document library!

In a classic file share, the path to a document would be:

\\Share\folder\doc.docx

In a SharePoint 2013 Document Library, the URL to a document would look like this:

http://portal.demo.localDocument%20Library/Doc.docx

However, in SharePoint 2016 as long as we have Office Online Server 2016 (previously called Office Web Apps), the URL to all the document formats supported by Office Online Server (Word, Excel, OneNote, PowerPoint and PDF) will get an ID at the end of the URL. The URL will look something like this:

http://portal.demo.localDocument%20Library/Doc.docx?d=w065d0fcd105b45148d4b6c2f287231ce

The ID that gets added at the end of the URL allows us to move the file anywhere in the same Site Collection, and even rename it, without the link being broken.

Large File Support

SharePoint 2016 introduced some increased limits for both the infrastructure back end as well as for users. One of the most-liked limit increases is the increase of the max file size from 2GB to over 10 GB! Ten Gigabytes is a recommended limit, but not a hard limit, meaning you can increase it to 12-15-20 GB if you needed to! Microsoft also changed the code behind file uploads, so uploading a 10GB file will not take you five hours.

The setting can be changed from the Central Administration, for each Web Application independently.

List View Threshold

The famous 5000 limit list view threshold has been changed in SharePoint 2016. Let me start by telling you this was never a limit in SharePoint, it was only a recommendation by Microsoft to keep views under 5000 items in order to not have a performance hit.

This 5000 item recommendation comes from the fact that SQL Server caused a lock on a table if there was a query requesting

more than 5000 items. We could always increase the limit to over 100,000 items in the same view if we wanted.

The highest limit I have ever seen in production is 150 000 items!

In SharePoint 2016, Microsoft introduced a couple of measures to make sure users don’t get annoyed with the number of items on a list anymore. First, the queries on databases no longer cause a lock escalation, so no more performance hits! Of course, the more items it has to return the longer it will take, but since there are no more table locks, it should be a lot faster.

Also, a new timer job has been introduced in SharePoint 2016 that analyses all the lists with more than 2500 items, and if it makes sense, it will automatically index some columns.

However, by default, the limit is still 5000 in SharePoint 2016, and as before, it can be changed from the SharePoint Central Administration.

SMTP Encryption

On the security side, one of the features included in SharePoint Server 2016 is the ability to encrypt the emails sent by SharePoint, as well as send emails on a non-default port.

In prior versions of SharePoint, the emails were always sent in plain text, on port 25, allowing someone to eventually capture them and see data they shouldn’t have access to.

Zero Downtime Patching

Zero Downtime Patching is a new feature in SharePoint 2016 that allows a SharePoint admin to patch a SharePoint farm with zero user downtime. There are a few requirements to it, such as having a MinRole in High Availability (so 8 servers!).

Remember that “You Can” doesn’t mean “You Should”. I think patching should still be

done off hours!

The Zero Downtime patching also brings another improvement, smaller and faster patches. Even if you do updates on the weekend, I am sure knowing that it doesn’t take hours to apply a cumulative update anymore will make you happy!

Project Server Integration

Project Server 2016 is now fully integrated with SharePoint Server 2016, so no more separate installation, and no more separate updates or language packs.

Project Server 2016 is simply a Service Application in SharePoint 2016; you get the Project Server functionality.

Of course, the Client Access Licenses are still a separate purchase!

Improved Mobile Experience

SharePoint 2016 gives users a better, mobile-friendly experience when they navigate document libraries and OneDrive for business.

Image Source: Microsoft

After personally testing it using mobile, I find the experience to be a lot better, however there are still places for

improvements, and third-party providers of mobile applications for SharePoint & Office 365 have nothing to worry about.

Hybrid Features

SharePoint 2016 enables companies to get the most out of SharePoint by allowing them to combine the stability and privacy of SharePoint on Premise with the power of Office 365.

Hybrid was something we could do in the past as well, but it just wasn’t up to speed yet. Users could see the difference between the systems, and there was no harmony between the on-premise and cloud version of SharePoint. Here are some of the features SharePoint 2016 brings us when connected to Office 365:

Hybrid Team Sites

Hybrid Team Sites allows users to see their followed sites, whether the sites are in the cloud or on premise, on the same window.

Image Source: Microsoft

This allows users to go to one central place and find their favorite sites, instead of having to go to “on-premises” followed sites and then to “Office 365” followed sites.

Profile Redirection

In SharePoint 2013, hybrid users had two profiles, their SharePoint on-premises MySite and their Delve home page. When a user from a site in SharePoint Online clicked on a username, the user was redirected to Delve, however when a user from SharePoint Server clicked on a username from a locally hosted site, the user was redirected to the on-premises MySite.

With Profile Redirection, users will always be redirected to the online profile in Delve, whether they click on a username in SharePoint on premise, or online.

OneDrive for Business

With Hybrid OneDrive for Business, companies can give more than 1TB to each user of storage for their personal space, without having to worry about buying disks, backing up data, etc.

OneDrive for business can be accessed from inside the company as well as outside, so users always have access to the documents they need.

Hybrid App Launcher

Since SharePoint 2016 has an app launcher, like Office 365, SharePoint 2016 shows Delve, video and any custom tiles you’ve added to Office 365 to on-premise users as well.

If you decide to add a custom tile, such as an “Intranet” tile for example, it will also show up for on-premises users.

Cloud Search Service Application

The Cloud Search Service Application is new; however, it will not be exclusive to SharePoint 2016. Companies that have SharePoint 2013 will be able to get this feature as well, as long as they update to the August 2015 Public Update or higher.

Yes, SharePoint had Hybrid Search before, but personally, I really didn’t like it. The reason is that in past Hybrid Search scenarios, we couldn’t see the best content, whatever the origin, in the same search box. We had to either search in SharePoint Online, or on SharePoint on premise, in two different windows, as the image below shows.

Picture Source: https://support.office.com/en-US/article/Hybrid-search-in-SharePoint-1a7269ba-5aa7-481b-b608-030c58fa932e

With the cloud Search Service Application, users can see the best document, whether it’s in the cloud or on premise, without the blocking limits of having two different tabs or result sets.

Picture Source: https://support.office.com/en-US/article/Hybrid-search-in-SharePoint-

1a7269ba-5aa7-481b-b608-030c58fa932e

And to show you a real-life example, you can see the yellow results from SharePoint on premise, as well as the blue results from SharePoint online in the following screenshot.

Furthermore, by enabling the Cloud Search Service Application, documents from on premise will be invisible in Delve, resulting in increased productivity!

The Big Takeaways

SharePoint Server 2016 is the latest release of

SharePoint Server by Microsoft, and it’s recommended

you upgrade to SharePoint 2016, especially if your

company is still on SharePoint 2010… as SharePoint

2010 support ended in October 2015!

SharePoint 2016 introduced a lot of infrastructure

upgrades such as MinRole, Zero Downtime Patching,

SMTP Encryption and features that benefit end users,

such as DLP, Large File Support & Durable Links

SharePoint 2016 is great as a standalone product,

however you can get even more horsepower and

features if you create a hybrid environment between

SharePoint 2016 and Office 365. With a Hybrid

Environment, you can use amazing features such as

Hybrid Team Sites, Profile Redirection and OneDrive

for Business in the cloud, as well as the brand new

Cloud Search Service Application