What's new for SharePoint Server

[Bill Baer]

Bill Baer

Senior Product Manager

@williambaer

Today at the SharePoint Virtual Summit, we unveiled the latest innovations for SharePoint and OneDrive, including powerful integrations across Office 365, Windows and Azure – and while we continue to drive forward with a cloud-first, mobile-first vision – we’re excited to also announce new innovation for our customers on-premises.

When we launched SharePoint Server 2019 in November of 2018, we shared a vision of a server that was cloud-born, future-proof, and built on the success of SharePoint Server 2016.  A new, modern version of SharePoint that shared a codebase with SharePoint Online enabling us to deliver at a more rapid cadence.  Innovation that is born in the cloud, innovation to help you succeed with the cloud, and most importantly, innovation based on your feedback.

Over the past year, we’ve made significant progress against those goals and today we're announcing additional improvements for SharePoint Server 2016 and SharePoint Server 2019 to help your organization meet your business challenges, enabling the freedom to build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive, global network using your favorite tools and frameworks with Azure.

Now with SharePoint Server 2019 we're providing more flexible deployment options to include support for Azure Stack and SQL Managed Instances.

In addition to our existing support for Azure virtual machines, these new support options allow you to create a truly consistent experience across your hybrid cloud using comprehensive Azure cloud capabilities so you can reduce complexity and risk with the platform, tools, and services designed to work together across your on-premises and cloud environments. Through combining our existing support for SharePoint implementations in Azure with these new options for deployment, you can build and deploy your SharePoint environments and applications consistently, seamlessly, and deliver integrated security and management across on-premises and the cloud.

Managed Instance

A managed instance in Azure SQL Database is a fully managed SQL Server Database Engine Instance hosted in Azure cloud. This is the best PaaS option for migrating your SQL Server database to the cloud.  New managed instance support for SharePoint Server 2019 allows you to leverage the benefits of managed instances with SharePoint environments hosted in Azure.

To learn more about managed instances, benefits over traditional deployment models, and how to get started see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/sql-database/sql-database-managed-instance.

Azure Stack

In addition to new support for managed instances with SharePoint Server 2019, we're also extending support for deploying SharePoint Server 2016 (SharePoint Server 2019) on Azure Stack so you can build and run SharePoint environments using consistent Azure services on-premises to meet regulatory or technical requirements.  Learn more at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/overview/azure-stack/.

Resources
Get technical resources for SharePoint Server at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/sharepoint-server.

[itebe780]

Sorry, but this is not really impressive for users who have already set up local OnPremises farms.

Are you going to catch up some cloud functionalities (Hub-Sites, MegaMenu, Footer, enhanced WebParts configuration options...) to SharePoint 2019?

What's the upgrade police for SharePoint 2019? It's going to be improved with cloud functionalities or it will rest as it is until "SharePoint Server 2022" will come?

[hackee]

Sad that NO news for sharepoint on-premise. Seems on-premise versions have been abandoned., leaving a semi-finished product for good.

No upgrades plan for spfx dev, for modern site, for any good online features...

[Aleksandr Sapozhkov]

Hi, thanks for the news. Will this be shipped as a SharePoint 2019 Service Pack?

[Brian Laws]

I think this is really great, and I'm glad to see it finally come around. I was wondering when it would happen. :) Just wanted to give you my thoughts on the managed instances. 

How would you do DR testing in a farm that uses SQL Managed Instances? 

I'm currently in a project where we're designing a large, consolidated SharePoint environment in Azure Gov with multiple business-critical large farms. I would be very interested in consider putting this in the design vs. building our own AAGs, but I'm concerned about how we'd test DR. I know that SQL Managed Instance is a managed service and thus DR is Microsoft's problem. However, they're being married to IaaS VMs which are owned, managed, and protected by the customer. How do we test the recovery of the SharePoint farm if the databases are in a Managed Instance?

I think it can be a great solution for DR itself. After all, you would only need to worry about protecting the application servers. However, how would you perform full DR tests? Unless I'm not seeing something, you'd have to do a live DR test in production since you only have the Managed Instances. I'd posit that this simply is not realistic. None of my customers would risk doing a live production DR failover just for the sake of testing DR; there must be no risk to production. So it appears a SQL Managed Instance could significantly hamper a customer's ability to perform full-environment SharePoint DR tests without live failovers. Perhaps there's a way to restore from one Managed Instance to another?

I'm sure I'm not seeing some option, so I'd be interested in solutions to the (perceived) DR problem. Yes, we should be able to trust our DR solution, but it takes another level of faith to actually perform it in production. Anyway, this topic is something to consider going forward as you build customer guidance.

HTH!

[Aleksandr Sapozhkov]

I wonder why SQL managed instance should be any different for application disaster recovery. What exactly disaster recovery scenario are you considering? You mean an issue that if you have a cold disaster recovery farm on a separate instance, it would be nice to be able to shut it down until it is needed? On the other hand, you can use the same SQL instance for running both production and DR farm

[Brian Laws]

My concern isn't for DR itself. Like I said, it would be terrific for that since it would simplify protection. My concern is for testing DR without affecting production. If you're willing to do a live failover of production then this is a great solution. However, I don't have any customers who would be willing to take that risk. Testing SharePoint DR usually involves a temporary (or even permanent) duplication of the environment, either as a cold/warm/hot environment or via a replication technology like Azure Site Recovery (which is what we're looking to use with my current customer). These DR tests would need a copy of the SQL instances as well to operate, and it looks like this would be a big challenge when using SQL Managed Instances. But again, maybe not. I'm probably just not seeing something obvious.