Forum Discussion
Frank Chen
Aug 14, 2017Brass Contributor
Cloud Hybrid Search leverage Azure AD Proxy to access on-premises content
We recently setup Cloud Hybrid Search for our on-premises SP2013. The Cloud SSA is able to send search index to the cloud and our SPO search center is able to return the result from on-premises content by using "IsExternalContent:true". When we looked the result from on-premises, the result actually shows the short name format like "https://itweb/sites/site1/aaa.doc" since we crawl the on-premise web application using https://itweb format because it's default zone. On the othe hand, we setup a Azure AD Proxy to bridge the user to on-premises content using https://itweb.contoso.com and the URL like https://itweb.contoso.com/sites/site1/aaa.doc is able to get through our on-premises content https://itweb/sites/site1/aaa.doc. My question is how to make search result shows something like https://itweb.contoso.com/sites/site1/aaa.doc instead of short name? I know Display hybrid federated search results in SharePoint Online at Configure hybrid federated search from SharePoint Online to SharePoint Server 2013 - roadmap mentioned to create a result source and specify "Remote Service URL" to external url of on-premises sharepoint server. However that's for "hybrid federal search" not for "cloud hybrid search" which allows user to have unified the result from both SPO and on-premises without showing any search verticals. We have done the following approaches:
- For those internal web application like https://itweb, we extend it to https://itweb.contoso.com and then crawl https://itweb.contoso.com in Cloud SSA. I think this approach is kind violate the SP crawl guildance that it's best to crawl a default zone. The reason why we consider this way is because once we setup correct Azure AD Proxy to use https://itweb.contoso.com, with extended web application being crawled, the result will be accessed both users no matter if they have VPN or not.
- Customize the search display template and replace the https://itweb url to use https://itweb.contoso.com if the result's IsExternalContent is true in search result.
We actually implemented above two approaches and it seems they are working, but would like to see
- If above approaches are recommended
- if there are better solutions out there.
Thanks
- I think the guidance is always use SSL-enabled FQDNs. If you have to swap the Default Zone, then go for it and add your hostname URL to a secondary zone.