On August 24th, 2015, Microsoft announced the availability of SharePoint Server 2016 IT Preview with a blog post by Bill Baer, senior technical product manager for the SharePoint team.
I of course started downloading the software and began the SharePoint farm build. I built a small environment to begin testing: I am using two servers running Windows Server 2012 R2 – one with the Active Directory role & SQL Server 2014 with Service Pack 1 installed & on the second server I performed a simple install using the GUI.
![SharePoint 2016 Preview Installation GUI](http://danielglenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/installscreen.png)
There is plenty of coverage on the web describing the different installation options (MinRole), so i won't go into a lot of detail in this post. For my first test, I selected Single-server farm and used minimal service accounts. I also selected to install every service just to get a feel for the process and functionality.
For this first post, I want to mention the experience of managing the services has been improved – especially in knowing their health.
![SharePoint Server 2016 Preview: Services On Server](http://danielglenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/services.png)
The image above shows the addition of an In Compliance column and the configured Role to the listing of the services on the current server. For comparison, I have included the Services on Server view on SharePoint Server 2013 below.
![SharePoint Server 2013: Services On Server](http://danielglenn.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/services13.png)
More to come – stay tuned!