Microsoft made several announcements at the SharePoint Conference North America in Las Vegas last week, and one of the biggest announcements that everyone wants to hear about is; what is happening with SharePoint Server 2019.

Well, I have some hot-off-the-press information about what Microsoft is saying we can expect in SharePoint Server 2019. Microsoft Senior Product Manager Bill Baer delivered a session the first day of the conference to share the exciting news about what’s in store for SharePoint on-premises Admins, and developers. We can summarize it in one word: Modern.

I’ll be focusing on the IT Pro information, but provide a smidge of developer info, and I will begin by discussing what the IT Pros can expect in the realm of modern; Communication, Modern Team sites, and OneDrive personal sites will be available and include modern lists, libraries, and pages. There is also a modern search experience, with type ahead contextual results in the search box, as well as a modern search result page for your SharePoint Home and Site searches.

SharePoint Server 2019, will include Project Server 2019 with several enhancements including improve accessibility, time-phased reporting, unique project IDs, and no blog post can go without the mention of GDPR, so yes that is supported in Project Server 2019.

If you’re wondering about Office 365 specific products like PowerApps and Flow, Microsoft has got you covered, because there will be integration with those two products, along with support for existing Workflow Manager designed 2013 workflows.

Like with the last two SharePoint Server releases, there are also enhancements to how we implement a hybrid environment by using the Hybrid Configuration Wizard straight from Central Administration.

We will also have the following infrastructure improvements:

Expanded support characters – # and % can be used in file and folder names

MAXURL is now 400 characters

Recycle Bin recovery  – recovery of content, deleted by others, from your recycle bin

Modern IIS Integration – IIS6 dependencies are removed, by switching to modern IIS APIs

At this point you’re probably curious about deployment. Let’s begin with just a few of the prerequisites:

.NET Framework 4.7.2

SQL 2012 SP4 Native Client

Microsoft Identity Extensions

WCF Data Services

Windows App Fabrice 1.1 CU7

The software required for installation include:

Windows Server 2016, or 2019

SQL Server 2016, or 2017

If you’re wondering what we are losing, I’ll list a few deprecated features, and a few features removed.

Deprecated features include;

Access Services 2010 and 2013

InfoPath Client / InfoPath Services

Machine Translation Services

PerformancePoint Services

SharePoint Designer

Removed features include;

Automatic mode in incoming email

Code-based sandbox solutions

Digest authentication

Silverlight rendering in PerformancePoint and Visio Services

For those interested in new developer features and functionality, SharePoint Framework will include Client side web parts and extensions.

When is this all happening? Soon!

The Public Preview will be this summer, I’m hearing the June timeframe, and the RTW will be in Fall of 2018, so this release isn’t too far way, and if you’re considering upgrading to SharePoint 2016 in the 3rd or 4th quarter of this year, you may want to downshift and do some research to see if it may be more beneficial to upgrade to SharePoint Server 2019 instead. Similar to the upgrade process to 2016, there won’t be a leapfrog upgrade available, you will have to upgrade from SharePoint Server 2013 to SharePoint Server 2016, then upgrade to SharePoint Server 2019.

Be sure to research what SharePoint Server 2019 has to offer, as I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised and excited for these new features coming soon to an on-premises server near you.