Microsoft releases SharePoint Server 2016 preview with 10GB file support, app launcher, and cloud hybrid search
Mary Jo Foley / ZDNet :
Context & Ripple Effects
A month after the public preview of Exchange Server 2016, Microsoft is doing the same for its other flagship on-prem server: SharePoint Server 2016 enters preview with 10GB file uploads, an Office 365-style app launcher, and — most tellingly — cloud hybrid search that lets on-prem farms index content stored in Microsoft's cloud.
The hybrid-search hook is the strategic part of this release. It foreshadows the direction SharePoint then took: the Office Graph feature added to SharePoint the next year analyzed data across Office apps, and by 2018 Microsoft had folded these threads into Microsoft Search, a single smart search box spanning Bing, Windows, and Office. The 2016 preview is where on-prem search started bending toward the cloud.
First-order effects
- On-prem SharePoint administrators get a concrete reason to plan upgrades: 10GB file support removes a long-standing ceiling, and the app launcher brings the server console in line with what their users see in Office 365.
Second-order effects
- Cloud hybrid search changes the migration calculus for enterprises sitting on SharePoint farms — they can keep infrastructure on-prem while indexing cloud content, easing the path Microsoft wants them to walk toward Office 365 rather than forcing a rip-and-replace decision.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, on-prem servers stop being products in their own right and become on-ramps whose features exist mainly to interoperate with Microsoft's cloud — a trajectory visible later in SharePoint's growth to hundreds of thousands of organizations and in unified offerings like Microsoft Search.
The trend: Microsoft's server business is shifting from standalone on-prem releases to hybrid bridges designed to pull enterprise workloads into its cloud services.