SharePoint Online is a cloud-based collaboration platform, a corollary to SharePoint Server. Just like SharePoint Server, it's comprised of sites, storage, and apps. In a SharePoint hybrid configuration, you can connect your on-premises SharePoint deployment to Office 365 to extend your infrastructure into the cloud. As a best practice, Microsoft recommends planning new workloads in Office 365, so configuring your existing environment to integrate with SharePoint Online is important.

SharePoint Hybrid has several core components:

• Hybrid Sites features: Redirect SharePoint Server OneDrive or My Sites to Office 365 OneDrive for Business, configure hybrid user-profiles, and hybrid site following.
• Hybrid search: Enable users to search for content in both on-premises and SharePoint Online.
• Hybrid App Launcher: Configure the Office 365 App Launcher to help users navigate between on-premises and online environments.
• Hybrid taxonomy: Extend managed metadata and content types from SharePoint Server into SharePoint Online.
• Business-to-Business (B2B) extranet sites: Create members-only partner sites on the Office 365 platform to allow external users access to relevant online content.
• Hybrid self-service site creation: Configure self-site creation tasks to a corresponding SharePoint Online process.

In this chapter, we're going to discuss, at a high level, how to determine what SharePoint Hybrid solutions are right for your organization by means of the following approaches:

• Evaluating hybrid scenarios
• Planning for hybrid service integration

By the end of this chapter, you should have an understanding of the high-level capabilities of SharePoint hybrid scenarios and a framework for evaluating which services to deploy.

Let's go!

Evaluating hybrid scenarios

Any deployment plan should begin with business goals—you need to understand what the goals are so that you'll be able to see whether you're successful. In evaluating SharePoint Hybrid scenarios, you need to understand what SharePoint Hybrid features are available, what benefits they bring, and whether they are valuable to your organization.

Examples of mapping business goal requirements may include the following:

• Maybe your organization is trying to avoid investing in more on-premises storage for home directories, so transitioning on-premises file storage to the OneDrive for Business is a possible solution.
• If you are extending your presence into Office 365 and are concerned about users being able to easily find data, configuring hybrid search can help users to locate content on either platform.

The following sections will help you evaluate the capability of the features.

Sites

Sites are the primary content component of SharePoint Server. There are several site-centric features that are possible with SharePoint Hybrid, including configuring redirection, site and document following, and self-service site creation.

The following features are included as part of Hybrid Sites:

• Site following
• OneDrive for Business
• Self-service site creation
• App Launcher

Site following

In a SharePoint Server environment, users can follow sites and documents. Hybrid sites enable a consolidated site following view in SharePoint Online, bringing together the lists of sites followed from both SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online. While this feature doesn't migrate the on-premises followed-sites list to Office 365, users can re-follow on-premises sites and the followed sites list in Office 365 will update accordingly.

OneDrive for Business

Hybrid OneDrive for Business enables you to shift data consumption from your SharePoint on-premises deployment (if it exists) to OneDrive for Business in Office 365. Hybrid OneDrive for Business enables your users to combine on-premises SharePoint site usage and OneDrive for Business in SharePoint Online.

While configuring hybrid OneDrive for Business does enable you to redirect users accessing their on-premises My Site, it does not migrate or synchronize data.

Configuring Hybrid OneDrive for Business also enables hybrid user profiles. Hybrid user profiles redirect on-premises profile views to the user's Office 365 profile.

Self-service site creation

Configuring hybrid self-service site creation redirects users from the on-premises site creation tools to the self-service Office 365 group configuration. An Office 365 group (previously known as a modern group) is a construct that combines a group, a group mailbox, a cloud-based OneNote service, and a SharePoint team site as one unit.

App Launcher

The extensible hybrid App Launcher enables you to create a more seamless navigation experience for users moving between SharePoint on-premises and SharePoint Online environments. The App Launcher experience exposes Office 365 apps and custom tiles through the on-premises SharePoint Server app launcher interface.

Search

After Sites, the search is the most commonly used SharePoint feature. SharePoint hybrid search has two options available: cloud hybrid search and hybrid federated search.

Cloud hybrid search is the simplest hybrid search option to configure. A search application crawls on-premises content and stores the search index along with cloud content in SharePoint Online. This single index exposes all SharePoint content (both on-premises and that already in SharePoint Online) to the Microsoft Graph and search services. Results are displayed and ranked based on their relevance, regardless of the source of the content, and presented in a single result block. Additionally, users can filter searches to only include online or on-premises content. Users access cloud hybrid search from SharePoint Online.

For most organizations, cloud hybrid search is recommended. Cloud hybrid search has the following advantages:

• Users can see unified search results from multiple sources.
• Cloud hybrid search doesn't require an upgrade for the SharePoint farm environment to 2016 or 2019.
• No on-premises upgrades are required for the search index.
• A lower total cost of ownership for search, since no additional on-premises hardware or capacity needs to be deployed moving forward. The enterprise search index is stored in SharePoint Online.
• Microsoft Graph applications such as Delve can surface content to users.
• It is simpler to deploy, maintain, and troubleshoot.

The hybrid federated search returns content from two separate indices (Office 365 and on-premises SharePoint Server). Results are grouped and ranked independently according to their source and then displayed in separate result blocks, whereas cloud hybrid search uses a single result block. The hybrid federated search may be a good option when your organization has potentially sensitive content that it wants to keep separate from Office 365, but still wants users to be able to search for it from a single plane of glass.

Microsoft recommends configuring cloud hybrid search, although you might wish to implement hybrid federated search or use a combination of hybrid federated search and cloud hybrid search (such as for sensitive content sets or unavailable features). The MS-301 exam primarily focuses on cloud hybrid search, though it's important to know when to use which.

When planning a hybrid search deployment, it’s important to understand what features are different or unavailable, or what technologies and features have superseded what you currently have deployed. With an adoption and change management mindset, it's also important to focus on usability and the best end user experience.

From an on-premises planning perspective, when configuring cloud hybrid search, the on-premises SharePoint server that hosts the cloud search service application needs at least 100 GB of storage space. From a cloud storage planning perspective, SharePoint Online can index 1 million items in every 1 TB of space.

Taxonomy

Hybrid taxonomy allows you to define a single SharePoint taxonomy to span on-premises SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online environments. The benefit is that you can use a single metadata set between both platforms.

Unlike other hybrid configurations, taxonomy is different in that the shared component is mastered online. With other hybrid solutions (such as hybrid identity with Azure Active Directory (AD) or Exchange Hybrid), the on-premises system is the source of truth or authority, and the cloud receives a synchronized copy of this on-premises environment.

When you configure hybrid taxonomy and content types, your on-premises term store configuration and content types are copied to SharePoint Online. A timer job is then configured on-premises to update the local taxonomy and content types. Moving forward, taxonomy and content types should only be updated in SharePoint Online.

B2B extranet sites

An extranet, generally, is a resource that is available to people outside an organization for the purposes of sharing data. In SharePoint terminology, an extranet is a restricted site or site collection that enables your organization to share information with external users while protecting internal assets. With a SharePoint Hybrid configuration, you can direct external users to sites in Office 365 using the B2B hybrid feature.

There are many advantages to configuring extranet sites in SharePoint Online:

• Site collections can be configured to allow all users or owners to invite external vendor or partner users.
• Administrators can limit the list of external domains to which the organization allows sharing.
• Activity and audit reports can be used to track site access and usage.
• External guest users can be restricted to only a single site, preventing access to unauthorized internal resources.
• External guest users can be restricted to only being able to accept invitations and sign into SharePoint Online from the address that received the email, thereby preventing further sharing with unapproved parties.

In planning your extranet model, you need to make three core decisions:

• Invitation model: This answers the question of how do users get access? You can allow either all users or only the extranet site owners to invite others through the user interface, or prevent all users from inviting anyone and manage the process administratively (or with a third-party application).
• Licensing: This helps answer the question of which features can guests have? By default, SharePoint guest users have limited capabilities governed by the restrictions set for the group into which they are placed. Authenticated external users can use Office Online to view and edit documents, but further features (such as downloading and installing Office 365 ProPlus, being able to create and manage sites, or being able to share resources) require the assignment of additional licenses.
• Identity management and governance: Part of the ongoing management of any resource is the governance of identity and access. You can use the identity and access management tools that are part of Azure AD Premium or develop a custom solution.

Now that you have an understanding of the features available in SharePoint Hybrid, let's look at some of the things to consider when planning the integration.

Planning for hybrid service integration

Hybrid feature deployments can provide a path to the cloud for many services and workloads. While you may have learnedwhat options are available, you'll still need to work with business stakeholders to determine whether the features are valuable. These stakeholders will depend on the services being deployed, the types of applications supported, the location of other business data assets, and the impact on users. They may include directors and other executives,service desk managers, call-center representatives, or other users. And, you may need to engage with people such as enterprise architects and application integration specialiststo determine what (if any) portions of your SharePoint Server platform are well suited for a hybrid topology.

If your organization has developed custom solutions or forms, configured integrations with other on-premises applications or data sources, or deployed plugins and workflows to interact with other on-premises applications, you’ll need input and direction from those responsible for managing those solutions.

After you have identified the organizational goals and capabilities of the platforms, it’s important to become familiar with the process and prerequisites of any implementation. SharePoint hybrid features have several dependencies, as the following list indicates:

• Configuring any hybrid service scenario that includes SharePoint Server 2013 requires SharePoint Server 2013 Service Pack 1 at a minimum. As a general rule, all SharePoint environments should be configured with the most recent updates. For a list of available updates, see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/officeupdates/sharepoint-updates.
• My Sites must be configured for Hybrid One Drive.
• The Subscription Settings service application must be configured for Hybrid Sites features.
• The User Profile service must be configured to synchronize from AD, either via SharePoint AD Import or Microsoft Identity Manager.
• At least one managed metadata service application must be configured.
• The App Management service application must be configured.
• You must have already configured Azure AD Connect for identity synchronization between AD and Microsoft Azure AD. For more information on configuring Azure AD Connect, refer to: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/hybrid/

Finally, if your current SharePoint Server environment is underutilized, very outdated, or hasn't undergone a lot of customization, it may be more worthwhile to investigate whether migrating content directly makes more business sense. SharePoint Online migration options are discussed in Chapter 14, Overview of the Migration Process, and Chapter 15, Migrate Data and Content.

Summary

In this chapter, you learned about the capabilities of various SharePoint Hybrid scenarios, including Hybrid Sites, taxonomy, B2B extranets, and Search. Configuring these features will allow an organization to extend into the SharePoint Online platform at their own pace and position features in a way that best helps drive successful adoption by end users.

Most importantly, you learned about the importance of considering the interests of business owners and stakeholders as part of a SharePoint Hybrid strategy.

In the next chapter, we'll begin configuring common SharePoint Hybrid features.

Questions

Use the following questions to test your knowledge of this chapter. You can find the answers in Chapter 16, Assessment Answers:

1. You are the senior SharePoint Administrator for your organization and you have configured hybrid taxonomy and content types. A junior administrator makes a change to the taxonomy, but the update is not propagating. What are the two potential causes?
   1. The update was made on-premises instead of in SharePoint Online.
   2. The update was made in SharePoint Online instead of on-premises.
   3. The timer job to update the SharePoint Online environment has not yet run.
   4. The timer job to update the SharePoint on-premises environment has not yet run.
2. You are the SharePoint administrator for your organization. You configure SharePoint Hybrid Sites and OneDrive, but the user data has not synchronized. What should you do?
   1. Wait for the synchronization time job to complete.
   2. Configure OAuth integration.
   3. Migrate the data manually, since the hybrid OneDrive feature does not synchronize or migrate data.
   4. Rerun the SharePoint Hybrid Picker application.

3. Users are reporting that they are experiencing problems locating data between SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online environments. What should you configure?
   1. Hybrid Sites
   2. Hybrid App Launcher
   3. Hybrid search
   4. Hybrid taxonomy

4. You are the SharePoint administrator for your organization. Users have reported that they need a consolidated search view across SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server environments, but the research and development department doesn't want any of their data indexed in SharePoint Online. What should you configure?
   1. Cloud hybrid search
   2. Custom search
   3. The enterprise search portal
   4. Hybrid federated search
5. You are the SharePoint administrator for your organization. Users have reported that they need to collaborate with external vendors. What SharePoint Hybrid feature should you configure?
   1. Search
   2. OneDrive
   3. B2B extranet
   4. App Launcher