Ever since SharePoint 2016 was mentioned at Microsoft Ignite in May of last year there has been a steady flow of information about the upcoming release on the Office Blogs and technical details have been discussed onBill Baer’s blog (Senior Product Marketing Manager of SharePoint).
Even though Puzzlepart primarily focus on Office 365 these days we have recently received a barrage of questions from organizations running SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint 2013. Should they upgrade to SharePoint 2016 or not?
If you have ever been part of a SharePoint upgrade process you know it’s not without hurdles, and undertaking an upgrade project should be based on technical needs as well as business needs to establish an ROI.
Therefore, we have scrutinized the available information to see what SharePoint 2016 has to offer over SharePoint 2013, and created a somewhat opinionated decision diagram to easily let organizations take a stand. Notice that the diagram does not consider if moving to Office 365 and SharePoint Online might be a better path.
If reading a diagram is too much work, we can sum it up like this:
You should probably upgrade to SharePoint 2016 – at some point. But no need to consider it right away.
IT investment in SharePoint 2016
The majority of changes in SharePoint 2016 over SharePoint 2013 has been made in how to set up and manage the farm. Basically lessons learned from running SharePoint Online brought down to on-premises customers. On an end-user functionality level, the only new feature is bringing the Data Loss Prevention feature from Office 365 to on-premises. For some organizations this might be a reason all by itself to consider upgrading, but for others maybe not. Remember, DLP is available in Office 365.
Hybrid
There has been a lot of talk about running SharePoint on-premises hybrid with SharePoint Online / Office 365. To be clear and remove all smoke and mirrors, as of today, the hybrid features available with SharePoint 2013 (August 2015 PU or later) are equal to that of SharePoint 2016 – and they might not be all that yet either, but we are betting on some goodness in the near or distant future.
Improved features table
If you want to closely examine all the new or improved features of SharePoint 2016, there is a table atTechNet – New and improved features in SharePoint Server 2016 where you can decide for yourself if any of these features is the one to triggers an upgrade for you at this point.
Summary
Deciding on an upgrade process is never easy and there are many factors involved. Before taking the plunge of upgrading to SharePoint 2016 you should also investigate if moving to Office 365 and SharePoint On-line might be a better choice. Moving to the cloud may be worth the investment in the long run.
Download the decision chart here!
References and Further Reading
SharePoint 2016 RTM and the Future of SharePoint event (March 14th 2016)
SharePoint Server 2016 Beta 2 Hybrid Scenarios (November 25th 2015)
Why Hybrid Crawl in SahrePoint is a cold hot potato
About the Author
Mikael Svenson is a Principal Consultant at Puzzlepart where he develops SharePoint Business Apps and consults on SharePoint in general. Mikael is a search enthusiast at heart having authored “Working with Microsoft FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint”. As a SharePoint Server MVP, Mikael is a community contributor blogging on SharePoint, often on the topic of search.
He is on the board of the Norwegian SharePoint Community and part of the organizing committee of SharePoint Saturday Oslo. Mikael is also a SharePoint Trainer, delivering SharePoint end-user courses when time allows.
Follow Mikael on Twitter: @mikaelsvenson
