Microsoft has started leaking news about SharePoint 2016 — and they suggest the company plans to showcase an early edition at Ignite, its upcoming all-in-one conference for everyone from senior decision makers, IT pros and "big thinkers" and to enterprise developers and architects.

In a just released podcast, Bill Baer, senior product manager for SharePoint, said the company will offer a look at the latest version of SharePoint at the conference, which will be held in Chicago from May 4 through 8.

All Fired Up

The podcast was put together by Todd Klindt, a SharePoint Consultant at Rackspace Hosting. In it, Baer indicates Microsoft will "use Ignite to show the world what SharePoint 2016 is."

In a related blog post, Baer lists the top three sessions to learn more about SharePoint Server 2016 at Ignite, including one on hybrid search. That's a sure indication Microsoft is putting its eggs in the hybrid basket, at least with SharePoint.

Hybrid seems to be the flavor of the day with vendors, too. Only last week, AvePoint announced the release of DocAve 6 Service Pack (SP) 5, which enables centralized management of SharePoint farms hosted on-premises or in private clouds like Office 365 or Azure.

But it seems that Microsoft only plans to offer an early view of SharePoint 2016 at Ignite. The full edition does not look like it will be ready for the company's biggest show of the year.

Earlier this month Julia White, general manager for Office product development, outlined some of the directions Microsoft will be going in the medium term. Microsoft, she said, will continue to build and develop the on-premises version as long as people are using it. She added that the new on-premises version this year will be “the most secure, reliable version to date allowing organization to take advantage of cloud innovations on their terms.”

Microsoft also aims to develop and improve the experiences across all office technologies, while adding new ones like Office Delve and Office 365 Video, as well as email, instant messaging and other SharePoint functionality.

The new SharePoint 2016 product is being built on Microsoft's Office 365 learnings, Baer added, which has given it insights into things like scalability and hybrid environments.