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Hybrid Content Management with SharePoint 2016
SharePoint 2016 is an on-premises server release of Microsoft's popular platform for intranet-based information management and sharing. A major new feature of SharePoint 2016 is deep integration with SharePoint Online to enable hybrid deployments that seamlessly combine on-premises and cloud resources. Other enhancements over previous editions of SharePoint include easier provisioning, unified management, additional features for high-availability, increased scale and performance, broader compliance, expanded mobility support, improved reporting and analytics, and a modernized user experience for collaboration and sharing.

Progent has provided top-tier consulting support for Microsoft's SharePoint platform for almost two decades. Progent's Microsoft-certified SharePoint experts can provide affordable online and onsite consulting, software development, and troubleshooting services for organizations of all sizes who want to migrate to SharePoint Server 2016. Progent can also help you enhance or verify the security and compliance of your SharePoint 2016 deployment, tune SharePoint performance, troubleshoot configuration problems, or streamline the management of your SharePoint 2016 ecosystem.

Progent can provide guidance for following best practices when you set up SharePoint 2016 server farms, intranets, extranets, sites, portals, blogs, wikis, data warehouses, BI and analytics, federated search, and workflows. Progent can help you integrate SharePoint 2016 with SQL Server, Exchange, Power BI, and the Office family of applications like Outlook, Excel, Project, Skype for Business, and Microsoft Teams. In addition, Progent can help you assess the business value of various and architectural models for your SharePoint Server 2016 solution including on-premises, in a private or public cloud, or in a hybrid environment. If you want to move to the latest on-premises release of SharePoint from a legacy version, you must first upgrade to SharePoint 2016. Progrent can help you set up SharePoint 2016 as an intermediate step in a migration to SharePoint 2019.

SharePoint Server 2016 Editions and Deployment Models
SharePoint Server 2016 is available in Enterprise, and Standard editions. Microsoft has discontinued the free Foundation version of SharePoint. The Enterprise edition of SharePoint Server 2016 offers unlimited virtualization, expanded search capabilities, plus a wealth of Insight features including the Business Intelligence Center, Excel Online, Power Pivot and Power View for Excel, PerformancePoint Services, scorecards, dashboards, and Visio Services. The Standard edition is a pared down version designed to allow smaller organizations or departments to manage information productively with minimal network resources.

There are three common deployment architectures available for SharePoint 2016:

• On-premises or in a private cloud
• In a public cloud offering IaaS services such as Microsoft Azure
• In a hybrid model that combines SharePoint Server 2016 with SharePoint Online cloud services

The hybrid model for deploying SharePoint Server 2016 is popular because it allows you to expand your SharePoint server farm without incurring the upfront hardware costs and ongoing maintenance hassle associated with adding onsite equipment. Also, best practices call for implementing a hybrid architecture for SharePoint 2016 as a prudent step toward a full migration to a SharePoint Online solution.

Progent can help you determine which deployment model makes sense for your organization and can help you transition from one deployment model to another.

New and Enhanced Features of SharePoint Server 2016
SharePoint 2016 offers a broad range of new or improved capabilities, many of which are influenced by the Online version of SharePoint and some of which are available as upgrades to SharePoint Server 2013. Key improvements to SharePoint Server 2016 cover provisioning, hybrid integration support, mobility, security and compliance, business intelligence, collaboration, and scale.

Progent's SharePoint integration and development experts can help you assess the potential value of these enhancements for your organization and assist you to create and carry out an efficient migration plan to upgrade from an older in-market or a legacy version of SharePoint to SharePoint Server 2016.

Significant enhancements incorporated in SharePoint Server 2016 include:

• MinRole Topology
  MinRole is a role-based installation architecture that streamlines server farm provisioning and management, improves performance and reliability, and simplifies capacity planning. MinRole is built around predefined collections of server roles and associated services. When you configure a server farm in SharePoint, you specify each server's role or roles. MinRole automatically starts the set of service instances associated with each role. MinRole topology includes eight pre-defined server roles in three categories. For example, the Front-end server role for a server is associated with about 30 services. The topology recommended by MinRole is designed to optimize performance and availability and can be applied to farms of any scale and to redundant HA deployments. You can access MinRole via the SharePoint Products Configuration Wizard, the PSConfig.exe command line tool, or PowerShell.
  
  
  MinRole simplifies SharePoint Server 2016 deployment and optimizes performance and reliability

• Hybrid Integration
  Improved support for hybrid deployments of SharePoint Server 2016 include the ability to view a consolidated list of SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online sites and to have all profile information combined in Microsoft 365. You can also configure the crawler in SharePoint Server 2016 to index all your crawled content, including on-premises content, to your search index in Microsoft 365. You can crawl older releases of SharePoint Server as well, including versions 2007, 2010 and 2013, all without requiring you to update those systems. Hybrid federated search combines results from each search index in a single unified search center.

  SharePoint Server 2016 also provides hybrid users with links to OneDrive for Business in Microsoft 365. In addition, the default SharePoint Server site creation page redirects automatically to the SharePoint Online Group Creation page.

  The new hybrid taxonomy features allow you to have a common taxonomy across SharePoint Server 2016 sites and SharePoint Online. You can specify which term groups are shared between or exclusive to SharePoint Server 2016 and SharePoint Online. The shared taxonomy master is stored in SharePoint Online and a read-only copy is kept in your on-premises on SharePoint Server 2016 site. You can access shared terms, term sets, and groups in either location. You also have the option of automatically propagating updates to SharePoint Online content types to your SharePoint Server site collections.

• Support for Large Files
  The maximum size for uploaded or downloaded documents has been increased from 2GB in SharePoint Server 2013 to 10GB in SharePoint Server 2016. Administrators can configure the maximum file-size limit for each Web Application on a SharePoint farm.

• Data Loss Prevention (DLP)
  SharePoint Server 2016 includes data loss prevention (DLP) tools that allow you to create and enforce security policies to reduce the chances of inadvertently leaking sensitive corporate or personal data to the outside world. Examples of sensitive information include financial data, taxpayer IDs, or credit card, social security, and passport numbers. Unauthorized disclosure of this data may violate industry and/or government regulations.

  SharePoint Server 2016 comes with a set of templates for creating queries to find which SharePoint site collections contain various types of sensitive data. Additional templates help you create SharePoint policies for monitoring and protecting that data. Policies can be set to flag sensitive data, restrict access to it, or block access to it altogether.

• Mobile Device Support
  SharePoint Server 2016 provides a consistent and modern user experience across mobile and desktop screens and bolsters support for mobile push and synchronization as well as device-specific targeting. On a team site, you can tap tiles or links on the screen of a mobile device to navigate the site.

• Information Rights Management (IRM)
  Information Rights Management (IRM) allows SharePoint Server 2016 administrators to encrypt files downloaded from SharePoint lists and libraries and apply various limits to groups of users and applications on a site that are permitted to decrypt these files. IRM lets you control the rights of users allowed to read files containing sensitive information, such as schedules for new product releases, so these users can be blocked from printing or copying text or running embedded code or macros on a document. This helps prevent the unauthorized sharing of sensitive or quarantined information. Because IRM allows you to secure complete lists or libraries instead of just individual files, IRM makes it easier to apply consistent information protection across an enterprise.

• Project Server 2016 for SharePoint Server 2016
  Project Server 2016 runs as a service application in SharePoint Server 2016 Enterprise but requires its own license key for activation. New features in Project Server 2016 include improved heat map functionality to show managers where resources are concentrated, multiple timelines displayed in a single view, multi-tenant storage combined with SharePoint storage to reduce IT overhead, plus enhanced performance and scale.

These changes add complexity to implementing and maintaining a BI-enabled SharePoint 2016 server farm, but bring the advantages of unifying the deployment of Excel Online services for workbook editing and BI functions. Prior releases of SharePoint did not permit online editing of workbooks with Power Pivot data models. SharePoint 2016's new architecture supports this and also allows users to configure Scheduled Data Refresh for Excel workbooks with Power Query connections to import data into a data model. Other Excel client features that have been added to Excel Online include search in filters, value field settings, freeze panes, print a selection, and comments.

Progent can help you understand the dependencies and restrictions associated with implementing SharePoint 2016's new BI-enabled architecture and can guide you through a deployment plan that brings maximum business value to your BI solution. (Learn about Progent's Power BI consulting and training services for using SharePoint data to create visualizations for Power BI analytical reports and dashboards.)

How Progent Can Help You with SharePoint Server 2016
For over 15 years, Progent has helped organizations of all sizes to design, integrate, manage, and troubleshoot content management and collaboration solutions based on Microsoft's SharePoint platform. As businesses have moved to cloud-based and hybrid cloud networks, and as mobile end-points have become the rule rather than the exception, the technical issues associated with deploying, maintaining, and protecting SharePoint environments have become increasingly complex. Progent's team of Microsoft-certified consultants has the breadth and depth of expertise to help businesses with any facet of creating a productive SharePoint ecosystem and can help you manage a legacy version of SharePoint, migrate efficiently to a current version, or tune and troubleshoot your SharePoint environment. Progent offers online and on-premises consulting services, and is unique in being able to offer both new and existing clients fast access to a top tier expert. Progent can provide as-needed guidance and troubleshooting or comprehensive project management services to make sure your SharePoint 2016 initiative is completed on time and on budget.

Progent can help you plan and configure a hybrid deployment of SharePoint 2016 that seamlessly combines your on-premises server farm with SharePoint Online, Microsoft 365, and OneDrive for Business. Progent can help you with any or all phases of planning and deploying your SharePoint 2016 system. As examples, Progent can show you how to create hybrid profiles that can be managed from a single point, configure the hybrid app launcher for navigating between SharePoint Server and Microsoft 365, integrate SQL Server Reporting Services, set up hybrid site following for consolidating links, configure server-to-server authentication, set up the SharePoint Server Search Center or the SharePoint Online Search Center to display hybrid search results, choose a site collection strategy, manage SSL certificates, develop and maintain governance policies, create a unified taxonomy for your server farm, design a secure document management solution, and model and automate busienss processes with Workflow Manager.

SharePoint 2016 server farms run on Windows Server 2012 R2 or later and require SQL Server 2014 SP1 or later. Progent's Microsoft-certified Windows Hyper-V consultants, SQL Server 2019 migration experts and SQL Server 2017 integration consultants can help you design and implement a virtualized deployment of SharePoint 2016 that makes efficient use of your on-premises resources while offering performance, high availability, security, and manageability. Progent's data protection experts and disaster recovery planning consultants can help you configure and validate a solid backup/recovery strategy that maximizes uptime and minimizes the risk of data loss. Progent's cybersecurity consultants can help you follow industry best practices for defining and implementing consistent security policies that span on-premises systems, mobile end points, and cloud-based resources. Progent's business intelligence consultants can help you integrate Microsoft's BI stack and visualization tools, including Excel Online, with SharePoint Server 2016 to create a modern BI environment that delivers maximum business value.

Progent's Cisco-certified CCIE network infrastructure consultants can help you to create and manage a secure, high-performance network architecture that provides reliable connectivity for your SharePoint 2016 users to access IT resources located on premises and in the cloud. Progent can help you configure and troubleshoot VPN access to SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365 and can assist you to set up and tune Cisco devices including switches, routers, firewalls, VoIP systems, Wi-Fi access points and controllers, and other appliances required for a cohesive, modern information network.

Save Time and Expense with Progent's Online Consulting Services for SharePoint 2016
For two decades, Progent's IT experts have provided online consulting, development, and troubleshooting services to businesses of all sizes throughout the U.S. (Refer to Progent's customer testimonials). Progent also offers onsite support in major metropolitan areas across the United States and in Canada.

Contact Progent for Help with SharePoint 2016
For more information about Progent's consulting, troubleshooting, or software development services for SharePoint 2016, call 1-800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.