Why SharePoint 2016 is Important from the Perspective of Search?

Yesterday, Microsoft announced the public availability of both SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview and the new cloud hybrid search:

“Today we’re excited to announce availability of both SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview and the new cloud hybrid search preview for SharePoint Server 2013 and 2016. As we continue to develop SharePoint Server 2016, we’re paying close attention to trends in content management, team collaboration, user experiences across devices, and how the cloud can be blended into existing on-premises scenarios in new and compelling ways. We’ve been working hard to get this out to you, and we know you’ve been waiting patiently since we announced that it was coming.”

A new release of a product like SharePoint is always exciting, but now let’s focus on it from our perspective: Search and Findability.

Search has gone through a long journey in the past years: with the acquisition of FAST, then SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 (FS4SP), and the first “real” integration in SharePoint 2013 with some very nice, enhanced features. On a different path, cloud has become more and more popular, more and more businesses of all kinds, sizes and geographies moved more and more content and resources there. – It’s not a question: findability in the cloud became more and more critical.

Until now, we’ve been having “semi-hybrid” Search solutions out-of-the-box. If we wanted to have a real, seamless experience, we needed to purchase third party tools. – But now, the real solution is here! Cloud hybrid search is available in SharePoint 2016, as well as in SharePoint 2013 as an update. With this solution, we’re able to send the content crawled on-premises to the cloud index, and not only to provide solid interleaved experience, but also to use the benefits of cloud – for example, Office Graph and Delve.

These new capabilities definitely will help up to have better findability without boundaries between on-prem and cloud, and to help our users achieving more.

More about these awesome features soon! – Stay tuned, and share your SharePoint 2016 experiences on our Yammer group. Looking forward to have some very exciting discussions there.