SharePoint Server Subscription Edition (SPSE) General Availability has been announced

Today at Ignite the general availability of the next on-premises version of SharePoint Server (SharePoint Server Subscription Edition aka SPSE) has been announced.

Quoting Bill Baer (Senior Product Marketing Manager for SharePoint): SharePoint Server Subscription Edition represents the next step in the SharePoint Server journey emphasizing the specific needs of our on-premises customers and includes new features to help simplify management, improve your security posture, and streamline your upgrade from earlier versions of SharePoint Server.

You can download SharePoint Subscription Edition from here:

Build Number for SharePoint Server Subscription Edition: 16.0.14326.20450

SharePoint Server Subscription Edition supports upgrades as well from SharePoint Server 2019 and SharePoint Server 2016. (SharePoint Server 2019 and before only supported upgrades from the previous version.)

More information about the features can be found in the following article which was just updated:

Share your feedback and questions in our SharePoint Server Subscription Edition community forum.

21 Comments


  1. Any more information about licensing/pricing?

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    1. In line with JW’s question – will there be any trial licenses available for SPSE?

      Reply

  2. What version of SPFx will it support? 2019 is at 1.4.1

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    1. Hi Gerhard,
      there is no planned end of support date. SPSE is an evergreen product, planned to be updated on a monthly basis.
      Cheers,
      Stefan

      Reply

      1. If SPSE is evergreen, what about the Server OS and the Database Server that supports it. What happens when those servers go out of support?

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        1. Hi Demetris,

          this is not a unique problem of an evergreen product. We had similar challenges also SharePoint 2010 and 2013 when we added support for Windows Server 2012 R2.
          What we did in the past is that we added support for newer software in updates for the specific products and – if required – provided slipstream installs with these patches preapplied.

          My personal assumption is that the same strategy will be applied here – but it is also possible that there will be a different solution.

          Cheers,
          Stefan

          Reply

          1. Thanks for your quick response Stefan. So if we have an existing farm with the evergreen product where the OS and SQL go out of support, which it looks like extended support for Server 2022 will go out in 2031, a long time from now, but assuming we have a farm where the OS is out of support, that means we will need to build a brand new farm with the new supported OS and then do a database attachment migration there?


          2. Hi Demetris,
            what you describe is one option – but very disruptive.
            Usually customers add a new server on the new OS to the farm which should replace one of the other server in the farm and afterwards remove the old server.
            This can be done one by one till all servers are running on a new OS.
            Cheers,
            Stefan


          3. Perfect! I did not actually think of that, and it actually is a great option! Thank you again for your reply.


  3. Thanks Aleksandr, documenting this feature in SharePoint Server Subscription Edition was intentional. We first implemented this feature in SharePoint Server Subscription Edition, and then decided to backport the feature to SharePoint Server 2019 via that Public Update. Note that the SharePoint 2019 implementation only supports thumbnails for image files. Subscription Edition also supports thumbnails for documents like PDFs, Word, and PowerPoint files when connected to an Office Online Server farm.

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  4. What about the (zero downtime) patching approach when it comes to (cumulative) updates for SPSE? I remember it was once announced this update process will be completely in the background meaning there’s really no downtime or more or less anything to do for the administrators. Was this “feature” removed as I cannot find it in the documentation? Will it still be the same process as for SP2019, meaning there’s zero downtime when you follow a certain procedure?

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    1. Hi Michael, thanks for asking this question. I don’t believe we (Microsoft) ever announced that SharePoint Server Subscription Edition’s update process would happen in the background. Right now the update process for Subscription Edition is the same as the update process for 2019, including its support for Zero Downtime Patching if you set up a high availability topology and follow the ZDP process.

      That said, updates are how we’ll keep SPSE customers up to date not only with security fixes and bug fixes like in previous versions, but also with new features. So we’re very interested in making the update process simple and reliable for customers so it’s easy to stay up to date. We’d love hear your feature requests or suggestions for SPSE, including feedback about our update process. You’re welcome to either post them in our SPSE community forum at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2167959 or in our SharePoint feedback portal at https://aka.ms/Feedback/SharePoint. And of course you can also open Design Change Requests (DCRs) with us through Microsoft Support.

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      1. Thanks for clarification, Troy. I don’t know where I read it but it was in the very early days of the “vNext” announcement. As I can’t find it on Google or Bing anymore it might just have been a wet dream of mine 😉

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  5. Can you please explain the pricing model? Does it change from 2013 / 2016 / 2019 on-premise? I am trying to understand if costs will change. Thank you.

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  6. How to differentiate between SharePoint 2019 (16.0.10337.12109) and SharePoint Server Subscription edition(16.0.14326.20450) based on version number?

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    1. Hi Sandip,

      based on the 3rd element in the version.
      2019 is < 14326 while SE is >= 14326

      Cheers,
      Stefan

      Reply

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