Seth Patton, Senior Director of Product Management for SharePoint and OneDrive, announced at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference that the first public preview of SharePoint Server 2016 will be released next month. That’s very surprising because Microsoft postponed the release dates right before the Microsoft Ignite (more information in this post).

Microsoft also announced the release of the Cloud Search Service Application Preview for SharePoint 2013 in August 2015. The new Cloud Search Service Application, which is natively built in SharePoint 2016, crawls on-premises content sources and feeds the Office 365 search index to create a unified search experience for users in hybrid environments.