Sharepoint Deprecated Feature for SP 2016

With the new release of SP 2016 Microsoft has decided to deprecate few features which are available in the previous version of Sharepoint.

Some of the features which are deprecated were really useful as point of dev perspective.

1) Sharepoint Foundation:

Which is free version of the previous SharePoint that included most of the core functionality and architecture provided by the commercial editions of SharePoint. Not sure about the reason behind may be microsoft looking for more licenced version of the sharepoint which generates the revenue for them :)

2) Stand Alone feature(Sharepoint setup)

Its hard to believe this feature has been deprecated, which is very useful for developer to set up standalone environment in hyper-v/vm. Stand alone feature install and configure every thing for us.

But this has been available in another format as MinRole feature during installation and choose one of the available install options. Using min role we need to install SQL Server and need to run the SharePoint Server 2016 farm configuration wizard.

3) Excel Service

Excel Services functionality is now part of Excel Online in Office Online Server, so this feature has been deprecated but if we migrate the from sharepoint 2013 to 2016 and to retain excel services we need to have Office Online Server with Excel Online

4) ForeFront Identity manager

FIM to synchronize between Active Directory and SharePoint. FIM got replaced with MIM(Microsoft identity Manager) tool to synchronize the data, by default process is Active Directory import. 

5) Sharepoint BI capabilities - Details copied from MSDN

If you want to use Microsoft SQL Server Power Pivot for SharePoint or Microsoft Power View for SharePoint for BI solutions with SharePoint Server 2016 you must install the Power Pivot or Power View add-ins for SQL Server 2016 RTM. The SQL Server 2014 (SP1) Power Pivot for SharePoint and Power View for SharePoint add-ins cannot be deployed or used withSharePoint Server 2016. To deploy these add-ins you need to upgrade to SQL Server 2016 RTM. For more information, see New and improved features in SharePoint Server 2016. The following business intelligence features are available with SharePoint Server 2016 when you download SQL Server 2016 RTM:

6) Tags and Notes

Social feature which was introduced in sharepoint 2010 has been deprecated or microsoft recommends not to use this feature  since it wont be supported from next release onwards

7) STSADM

Those who started working with MOSS are fan of STSADM command until they started using powershell script and its commendlets. Microsoft recommends to use powershell commands to perform daily admin activity.
Support of stsadm will be available for previous version of the sharepoint

Extending Sharepoint WebApplication

What is extending sharepoint webapplicaiton?

Let's take an example to understand this concept.

Assume we have two sharepoint site but the content of both sites are same. Here the question raises do we need to create the same content for both the sites or is there any possibility that sharepoint infrastructure provide us some mechanism to handle this in elegant way.

so here comes the concept of extending the sharepoint web  applicaion:

Expose the same content to two different set of users with different URL's and with different authentication will use  the concept of extending  sharepoint  web applicaiton.

Each  Web  app will assign  to corresponding IIS  web site and when it get extended it will create another web applicaiton and inturn it create new IIS web site as well.
The extended web app will use the same content DB as with  the main web app(here we can call it as parent web applicaiton), since it will create its own  IIS web site it will be having its own Web.config  file.

This concept will be handy when parent site use windows  authentication and extended site uses form based  authentication

Note: By default extended web applicaiton uses the  same authentication as with the parent  site, but we can change  it as per the  requirement.

Uninstall DLL from Gac using Powershell

In some cases we might face issue while deleting the dll from GAC( usually it will say its in use by some process) and it will always annoying, to over come this here is small powershell script which will be handy.

Set-location "Folder path of the DLL"          
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::Load("System.EnterpriseServices, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a")          
$publish = New-Object System.EnterpriseServices.Internal.Publish          
$publish.GacRemove("FolderPath\DLL.dll")          
iisreset