What is New for Web Applications in SharePoint 2016

The main reason why I love PowerShell so much, is that it allows me to surface information that is kept deep into the application’s model and find interesting jewels that are kept in the background (or hidden).Today, I decided to dig deeper into the SharePoint 2016 Web Application. I went ahead and created two identical web applications, one on my SharePoint 2013 environment, and the second on my SharePoint 2016. After extracting the value of each property, I went ahead and compared the defaults between SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2016 using PowerShell. I ran the following lines of PowerShell on both environment and compared the resulting tab delimited files:

Add-PSSnapin Microsoft.SharePoint.PowerShell

$webApp = Get-SPWebApplication http://localhost

$webApp | Select -Property * | Export-CSV <FilePath>.csv

So what differs? The following table compares all properties that differ between SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2016:

SPWebApplication:

While some properties names are intuitive, others are more “obscure” and we don’t have all the details as to what they actually do. I will be posting more details as they become available.