SharePoint Online and Office 365 will continue to have their monthly automated updates.
Concerning SharePoint 2016 on premise, the release cycle stays the same as previously: major releases are approximately into a 2-3 year cycle with interim Service Packs.
Key next releases:
– Public Beta: end of 2015 (Quarter 4)
– General Availability/RTM: spring of 2016 (Quarter 2)
I created the diagram below to visualise the road-map and interaction of both the On-Premise and Online versions of SharePoint.
As Bill Baer (Senior SharePoint Product Marketing Manager) explained into his presentation at Ignite, SharePoint 2013 is actually a sort of kernel/genesis from all futures versions of SharePoint.
- They took SP2013 version to build the SP Online version
- They made some major developments to improve both the infrastructure and front-end visible features:
- Backend optimised for the cloud: MinRole topology, no downtime patching…etc.
- Lots of new end-user experiences: Delve, Video portal, Hybrid search, OneDrive For Business, new APIs…etc
- They then took a SP Online point in time snapshot to build SharePoint 2016. The services which were not available in SPO were backported from SP2013 to SP2016. For example: PerformancePoint service.
To know more: roadmap.office.com
