Usually any discussion in regards with SharePoint 2016 is focused towards easing the life developers and enabling in developing better applications. Last year, when SharePoint 2016 was released the SharePoint team addressed issues of the business users along with the developers.
The business users and the reason they use SharePoint 2016
IT professionals and developers are not only the users. Instead, the business users play a huge role in supporting SharePoint application development. These users are the administrators, end-users etc. These are the special ones who consume information and provide data with special sort of demands. These folks are known as SharePoint business users.
The group of business users require extremely less amount of support as compared to the developers. However, the challenges they face and queries they have can be quite difficult. This group is highly dependent on spreadsheets, client side databases and mail merges that are highly complex functions.
If the functionalities of these tools are not up to the mark or if they are unable to manage the data then they can jeopardize business user’s job. These issues are encountered irrespective of the designation or the industry they are working in.
What steps SharePoint team have taken to simplify the life of SharePoint business users?
The previous versions of SharePoint offered multiple features to the business users such as introduction of content types, site creation in SharePoint 2007, developing Office Web Applications and Application Services in SharePoint 2010.
With the introduction of SharePoint 2016, it was essential to contemplate the SharePoint business user’s needs and act accordingly.
Here are the new additions in SharePoint 2016 for business users
- Extended limits: The previous versions of SharePoint included list with 5k limit in a particular view. But, in the newer SharePoint version there are more index items in the search including higher list capacity.
- Site Creation with simplicity: Usually, the users find it extremely difficult to develop custom sites. The SharePoint 2016 latest cloning site feature can eradicate the need of site configuration that can accelerate the site creation process, which is excellent.
- Common connection to all repositories: With OneDrive for business one can have access to all of their folders irrespective of where they are stored.
- Search via cloud: This is one of the best feature. With cloud search, users can easily find all of their items using a single search option instead of searching separately on SharePoint on-premises and Office 365. This feature was introduced with the intention of increasing the productivity for the companies who are planning for cloud migration. Microsoft names this combined search feature as ‘Hybrid Search’.
- Extended file size for uploads: With the launch of SharePoint 2016, the upload file limit was increased from 2GB to 10 GB. Apart from that, the SQL database limit was enlarged to offer a more robust functionality for file sharing process.
- Improved user interface: The new user interface of SharePoint 2016 includes the Office 365 app-launcher and the Office 365 top bar. This feature was introduced to improvise the appearance, look and feel of SharePoint On-premise and Office 365 and provide a user-friendly experience to users.
- Improved reliability: All new SharePoint 2016 was introduced to maximize the uptime and reliability. Furthermore, the infrastructure was designed in such a way so that it can work with cloud services and provide a workable business solution.
- Mobile-friendly interface: Earlier versions of SharePoint were not fully compatible to work with mobile devices. In short, the previous versions were not that mobile-friendly. Thus, the new version was aimed towards improving the glitches by offering a mobile-first view by presenting tiles and menus along with responsive touch.
- Durable links: This feature entails a permanent link to a specific document no matter if its moved, renamed, edited or modified in some way or the other.
- The new compliance center: When the users think of cloud migration, the first concern to them is data loss. With SharePoint’s robust and powerful compliance center, one can have access to eDiscovery templates and queries, which is a big enhancement in itself.
