SharePoint 2016 Preview was released yesterday on Aug 24.

Download from here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=48712

Announcement: https://blogs.office.com/2015/08/24/announcing-availability-of-sharepoint-server-2016-it-preview-and-cloud-hybrid-search/

After installing, here are my comments as I walk through for noticeable changes:

1. Similar to Office 365, there is a similar ‘App Launcher’ at the top left.

Newsfeed, OneDrive and Sites sit under your personal My Site.
http://<hostname>/my/personal/<username>/&#8230;

2. Under List Settings, there is a new setting ‘Automatic Index Management’:
This may help with the list view threshold constraint where default  5,000 items for a list.

There is a new ‘Large list automatic column index management job’ timer job that may support this setting on the configured lists.

After running this timer job, I went to the List Settings > Indexed columns and haven’t noticed any indexed columns. Perhaps the “indexing” can be seen elsewhere. I will have to continue to investigate.

3. Central Administration > Office 365 > Configure hybrid OneDrive and Site Features

SharePoint Hybrid Solutions Center: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=613711

4. There are many more new timer jobs at a total of 228. In this screen shot, you may notice some that are new such as DeleteUnusedAbs, Document Changed Anti-virus Processing, DrainInlineStreams and Dump site information. Not sure what these do, but get ready to understand them and leverage accordingly.

To compare to a list of SharePoint 2013 timer jobs, read https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc678870.aspx

5. “layouts/15” in URL and SharePoint Root Folders

For example, http://<hostname>/_layouts/15/start.aspx#/Shared%20Documents/Forms/AllItems.aspx

The URL contains “_layouts/15” rather than “_layouts/16” taking after the production major version number. Maybe that is why we are seeing the 2013 UI and perhaps in future there could be a change in the UI look.

Also in the the file system there is still the SharePoint 14 root folder (i.e. SharePoint 2010). Maybe this will go away in final release.

6. New Video thumbnails and playback.

I uploaded a 475mb video I grabbed from channel9.msdn.com into the Documents library. I happened to be running a PowerShell script adding 10,000 list items to a custom list and when playing the video in this thumbnail, the playback was a little choppy and slow. So even though this is a single server farm setup, one has to consider scalability and performance of playing videos. This video is surely stored in the content SQL database.