Microsoft rolls out SharePoint Server 2016 IT preview with cloud hybrid search, app launcher

Microsoft today announced the availability of the IT Preview for its SharePoint Server 2016 document-sharing and collaboration software for deployments in companies’ on-premises data centers.

Updates include a new 10GB maximum for files that users upload, a new app launcher, a simpler file-sharing mechanism, and a tool that keeps users from sending certain documents outside SharePoint for a set period of time. But perhaps the most interesting part of the software is its inclusion of a feature called cloud hybrid search. Now when users search in Office 365, search results feature files from Office 365 and SharePoint. The search index is hosted in Office 365.

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“With the cloud hybrid search solution, you index all your crawled content, including on-premises content, in your search index in Office 365,” Bill Baer, Microsoft SharePoint senior technical product manager wrote in a blog post today. “When users query your search index in Office 365, they get unified search results from both on-premises and Office 365 cloud services with combined search relevancy ranking.”

The new feature, which surfaces content into Office Delve, can crawl SharePoint 2007, 2010, and 2013, too, Baer wrote.

SharePoint might not get headlines to the same degree that cloud-only services like Box, Dropbox, and Google Drive do, but as one of Microsoft’s commercially focused Office applications, SharePoint brings in major revenue for Microsoft alongside Windows. Microsoft’s commercial licensing revenue, of which SharePoint is a part, came in at $41 billion for the company’s 2015 fiscal year, which ended on June 30.

This marks the first time that Microsoft has brought together the code base for the cloud-based SharePoint Online service and the on-premises SharePoint Server software, Baer said in a video about the new release, which is embedded below.