Announcement: SharePoint 2019

Announcement: SharePoint 2019

This week, Microsoft has announced the availability of SharePoint 2019. It has been released  to manufacturing (RTM).   Microsoft has said that GA (general availability) to customers in the second half of this year with a preview available by summer 2018.  

Microsoft has stated as recently as Build 2018 that they are committed to their on premise customers.  Most will agree that SharePoint Online is a great SaaS (Software as a Service), but for organizations that like to run their own farms (either for security reasons or because of investments that they have made to their on prem environment) this is great news

New for SharePoint 2019
SharePoint 2019 includes Modern UI, modern team sites, and modern communication sites.  SharePoint pages are responsive by default.  This release also brings improved hybrid capabilities and new development options

OneDrive for Business
Adoption of OneDrive for Business (OD4B) has seen a big increase over the last few years and is now an integral part of business.  SharePoint 2019 will bring the improvements seen in the Office 365 version to on premise including the new Sync Client.

Improved Sharing Experience
Previously, SharePoint 2013 users had to either open the browser or send an email to share a file stored in OD4B SharePoint document library.  Now users can simply right click on the file and share using a secure URL.  Users will also be able to share the documents from within office applications such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.  SharePoint 2019 will also provide statistics on shared files.  This will be analytics reports for file views such as who has viewed the shared files.

Shorter URLs
SharePoint 2019 will now create shorter URL’s for shared documents.  This will remove the worry of 255 character limitations when embedding the URL within SharePoint content

New WebParts
Microsoft has introduced new webparts based on uservoice feedback:

• Yammer – Better feeds integration
• 3D File Viewer – Interact with 3D models
• Connector – To connect various data sources to render data in pages
• Activity Webpart – Similar to Delve, shows what other users are working on
• Planner – Scheduler
• Microsoft Forms – Create user surveys

Infrastructure / Admin Improvements

• PowerApps and Flow integration
• Workflow Manager 2019 – Replacement for Workflow Manager 1.0
• SMTP Authentication for emails – Instead of setting up relays, we can use SMTP authentication while sending out emails
• Hybrid environments

New For Developers
SharePoint Framework (SPFx) including SPFx extentions, Node JS, Angular JS, and React JS is the new development environment for SharePoint.  Microsoft will be adding governance to where and how JavaScript is deployed in SharePoint.  

How SharePoint 2019 Is Different from Office 365
You can think of SharePoint 2019 as a subset of Office 365’s features. Here is what’s not included in SharePoint 2019

• Hub sites – Not available at launch
• PowerBI – PowerBI parts will not be able available in SharePoint 2019
• New O365 WebParts – Preview webparts in O365 will not be available in SharePoint 2019

Depreciated Features

• Newsfeed
• Authentication – ADFS, SAML.  SAML 2.0 is the new standard

Microsoft will be releasing new tools in the near future to help clients migrate to SharePoint 2019.  These will include new assessment and migration tools