Microsoft announces SharePoint Server Subscription Edition

Microsoft today announced the preview of SharePoint Server Subscription Edition, the next generation on-premises SharePoint Server for enterprise customers. As the name suggests, organizations should pay a subscription fee to get new features and remain in support for ever. Also, organizations can upgrade directly from SharePoint Server 2016 to this new SharePoint Server Subscription Edition. You can learn more about the new features coming in SharePoint Server SE below.

SharePoint Server SE features:

Continuous updates

Pressure to optimize your IT infrastructure for ever-changing business conditions requires you to be agile, and that means investing in solutions that provide reliability and choice. SharePoint Server Subscription Edition provides the flexibility to tailor deployment based on your unique business needs.

With SharePoint Server Subscription Edition, you’ll end the cycle of long and costly major version upgrades to get new features and remain in support. Microsoft will deliver our latest innovations to customers through updates that can be installed on your SharePoint Server Subscription Edition farms.

Upgrade from where you are

SharePoint Server Subscription Edition makes it easy to get up and running with new upgrade options that allow you to upgrade directly from SharePoint Server 2016 without having to first upgrade to SharePoint Server 2019.

Modern infrastructure support

SharePoint Server Subscription Edition provides scalability, reliability, and security while allowing you to take advantage of the latest hardware innovations and computing technologies—making it capable of handling enormous amounts of data faster, more efficiently, and at a lower cost.

Secure communication

With the support for Windows Server 2022, you not only benefit from the latest in security, but also native support for features, such as TLS 1.3.

TLS 1.3 is the latest version of the internet’s most deployed security protocol, which encrypts data to provide a secure communication channel between two endpoints. TLS 1.3 eliminates obsolete cryptographic algorithms, enhances security over older versions, and aims to encrypt as much of the handshake as possible.

OpenID Connect

SharePoint Server Subscription Edition adds support for the OpenID Connect (OIDC) 1.0 authentication protocol. OIDC is a modern authentication protocol that makes it easy to integrate applications and devices with your organization’s identity and authentication management solutions to better meet your evolving security and compliance needs. For example, you can enforce authentication policies such as multifactor authentication (MFA), conditional access policies based on device compliance, and more.

Enhanced People Picker for modern authentication

In SharePoint Server Subscription Edition, the People Picker has been enhanced to allow resolving users and groups from modern authentication (trusted identity providers), such as SAML 1.1 and OIDC 1.0.  This allows the People Picker to only resolve valid users and groups without requiring a custom claims provider.

Source: Microsoft