Preparing for a Hybrid SharePoint World Nico Martens

Nico Martens Infrastructure Engineer @martensnico sharepointrelated.com Infrastructure Engineer @ Portiva, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner. Our passion is to streamline the process of sharing knowledge and collaboration within organizations using Microsoft technology. These days SharePoint isn’t the only way to collaborate, as Microsoft is putting more and more investments in the cloud. One great example of this is Microsoft Teams. Our job is to help organizations get the most out of all the features Microsoft offers.

What is Hybrid SharePoint? Integration of services between 1 or more “on-premises” SharePoint farms and SharePoint Online Hybrid SharePoint is about using both SharePoint on-premises and Office 365 to achieve your business goals. I’ve quoted on-premises, because these days, on-premises might also mean any IAAS platform, for instance hosting your SharePoint Server in Azure.

This is NOT Hybrid SharePoint

Why Hybrid? Reasons to have on-premises SharePoint Customizations that are not possible in SharePoint Online Compliancy obligations Control over updates

Why Hybrid? Reasons to use Office 365 Automatically scaled No hardware maintenance Cloud-first strategy – All new features in Office 365

Hybrid OneDrive for Business Using Office 365 OneDrive for Business instead of the “My Site / OneDrive” in SharePoint on-premises 1TB – Unlimited storage in Office 365 Backups are handled by Microsoft Seamless integration through redirect Can be scoped through audiences Without hybrid: OneDrive on-prem, have to handle storage, backups etc. With hybrid: Depending on the license assigned, users can store anywhere from 1TB to 5TB. If for some reason this is not enough, it is possible to contact Microsoft Support to have it expanded even further You don’t have to worry about storage or backups anymore, as this is all handled by Microsoft.

Profile redirection Have a central user profile repository in Office 365. If you have Delve in your organization, users will be redirected to the new Delve expierence. Together with Hybrid search, which I’ll talk about in a bit, users will also be able to find on-premises documents in Delve. Hybrid profile redirection can be scoped by creating an audience. Clicking a user link for someone in the audience, you will be redirected to Office 365. If the clicked user is not in the audience you will be redirected to the on-premises profile page. Picture: Vlad Catrinescu: https://absolute-sharepoint.com

Site following When a user follows a site, a link to that site is added to the user's Followed Sites list. If you're using both SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online, your users will have different followed lists for sites in each location. With SharePoint hybrid, you can consolidate the information from both locations into the SharePoint Online list in Office 365. When a user follows an on-premises site, it will show up in the Office 365 “SharePoint” Page. This makes it very easy to find information from a single dashboard. Picture: Vlad Catrinescu: https://absolute-sharepoint.com

Extensible App Launcher Picture: Vlad Catrinescu: https://absolute-sharepoint.com SharePoint 2016 introduced the new App Launcher. With this, Microsoft tried to close the gap between navigating an on-premises SharePoint 2016 farm and navigating through SharePoint Online. After configuring the Hybrid Extensible App Launcher, you will see both Delve and Video and any additional custom tiles you have added in Office 365. You can add custom tiles in the Office 365 Admin center. Either search for “tiles” or go to Organization settings, which can be found under “settings”

Hybrid search Hybrid federated search When searching, query against 2 indexes A lot of configuration Separate result blocks Cloud hybrid search 1 index in Office 365 Relatively easy to configure Mixed results with ranking Delve features Less hardware required? In my eyes one of the most impressive hybrid features that Microsoft released. Without hybrid: 2 separate search indexes, you have to manually search in both environments Hybrid federated search: Have to put in a lot of effort to configure it, still have 2 indexes. Queries are sent to both indexes which result in having separate result blocks in your search results. Cloud hybrid search: 1 unified index in Office 365,

User Experience - Hybrid Federated Search As the queries are sent to both indexes, there is no way for SharePoint to know which result is more relevant to the user. Picture: Vlad Catrinescu: https://absolute-sharepoint.com

User Experience - Cloud Hybrid Search Single index, so 1 query. Relevancy is still intact. All results are still security trimmed to make sure you only see what you are allowed to see. Picture: Vlad Catrinescu: https://absolute-sharepoint.com

Hybrid Taxonomy and content types Hybrid SharePoint taxonomy allows you to have a shared taxonomy between SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online. Hybrid content types allows you to have a shared set of content types between SharePoint Server and SharePoint Online. Copy term groups to Office 365 (3 term groups in this example, I can choose which one it copies). System term group cannot be replicated with hybrid taxonomy You can do this through PowerShell (Copy-SPTaxonomyGroups / Copy-SPContentTypes) 2. Run the Hybrid picker wizard. This creates a timer job that will by default replicate SharePoint Online term groups on a daily basis. You can change the frequency, or run it on demand as needed. In my experience, if the change set is small, it takes only up to a minute before the changes have been replicated after running the timer job.

Hybrid Auditing (preview) On-premises Office 365 SPRelated\Kimakers kimakers@sharepointrelated.com Without hybrid auditing: Use out of the box SharePoint 2016 audit logging (requires setting up per site collection). This produces an Excel file per site collection, which for most end users isn’t understandable. With hybrid auditing you can leverage the Security & Compliance Center in Office 365 to perform audit log searches. Can be found by going to the Office 365 Admin Center (https://protection.office.com), then open up “Search & Investigation” -> Audit log search **After patching your farm, make sure to Stop and Start the “Microsoft SharePoint Insights” Service.

Hybrid features update requirements SharePoint 2013 SharePoint 2016 Cloud hybrid search January 2016 RTM Extensible hybrid app launcher July 2016 Hybrid auditing - November 2016 Hybrid federated search May 2014 Hybrid OneDrive for Business September 2015 Hybrid profiles Hybrid site following Hybrid taxonomy Hybrid content type June 2016 June 2017 Hybrid self-service site creation March 2017 October 2017 Reference: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Minimum-public-update-levels-for-SharePoint-hybrid-features-eafa9e37-1433-42ff-a842-a72d6ebe2a07 Not all hybrid features work out of the box. This diagram shows the minimum requirements for setting up specific hybrid features. With SharePoint 2016 Microsoft encourages to deploy the latest PU available.

Configuring SharePoint Hybrid Identities are key in any hybrid feature *** Licenses On-premises Office 365 Sprelated\kimakers kimakers@sharepointrelated.com

Configuring SharePoint Hybrid Done through the Hybrid Configuration Wizard* Before you start configuring any hybrid feature, I would strongly advise you to read the roadmap for the feature you want to enable, as Microsoft is constantly improving these features. The SharePoint Hybrid Configuration Wizard can be downloaded from the SharePoint Online Admin Center. Make sure you do this on the SharePoint server, as it checks which version of SharePoint is installed. This server needs an active internet connection, if you use a proxy for internet access, additional configuration is required.

Hybrid SharePoint strategy Always have a clear business case when configuring Hybrid Examples: - Configuring hybrid OneDrive for Business saves our company 30TB of storage (including back-ups) - By configuring hybrid auditing I do not have to buy any 3rd party tools to have readable audit logs Try it in a dev/test environment first!! (Found out why first-hand)