Innovating to cloud-accelerate your SharePoint on-premises investments

Technology is evolving, it’s helping us drive more intelligent social connections, empowering a more mobile workforce - providing boundless potential for scalable, always available services with the cloud.

Cloud services like SharePoint Online in Office 365 are shaping these trends and provide an attractive alternative to on-premises business solutions; however, for a variety of reasons, organizations might want or need to deploy specific solutions in the cloud while still maintaining their on-premises SharePoint environment, whether corporate and/or regulatory compliance, data sovereignty or sensitivity concerns, or even a significant investment in customization.

On the other hand, some organizations may wish to gradually move their existing on-premises SharePoint services to the cloud, using a staged migration in which on-premises SharePoint workloads are moved to SharePoint Online one at a time. Hybrid functionality balances these needs and enables and organization to maximize ROI and extend their on-premises investments to the cloud by integrating services like people and content discovery, data connectivity, compliance and more that empower users and drive greater business mobility.

SharePoint provides a broad array of hybrid capabilities that enable organizations to take advantage of cloud innovation, at your pace, on your terms, and without the cost of a wholesale migration to Office 365. Over the past year we’ve delivered a number of new and exciting capabilities that enable you to quickly get started with innovation in Office 365 from cloud hybrid search to recently announced SharePoint Insights.

Cloud Hybrid Search

The Cloud Hybrid Search scenario represents the next generation in hybrid search and discovery. With the cloud hybrid search solution, both your on-premises and Office 365 crawled content is unified in a search index hosted in Office 365. When users query your search index in Office 365, they get search results from both on-premises and Office 365 content. The content metadata is encrypted when it’s transferred to the search index in Office 365, so the on-premises content remains secure. Cloud Hybrid Search provides a unified set of results and empowers organizations to apply the capabilities of the Office Graph and Delve, as well as their respective mobile applications, to their on-premises and cloud content.

Learn more about Cloud Hybrid Search at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Learn-about-cloud-hybrid-search-for-SharePoint-af830951-8ddf-48b2-8340-179c1cc4d291?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US.

B2B Collaboration

An extranet site in SharePoint is a site that organizations create to let external users have access to relevant content and to collaborate with them. Extranet sites allow a way for partners to securely do business with your organization. The content for your partner is kept in one place and they have only the content and access they need. They don’t need to email the documents back and forth or use some tools that are not sanctioned by IT. Traditionally, deploying a SharePoint on-premises extranet site involves complex configuration to establish security measures and governance, including granting access inside the corporate firewall, and expensive initial and on-going cost. But with Office 365 SharePoint hybrid extranet, partners connect directly to a members-only site in Office 365, without access to the corporate on-premises environment or any other Office 365 site. Office 365 extranet sites can be accessed anywhere.

Learn more about B2B Collaboration at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/SharePoint-Business-to-Business-Collaboration-Extranet-for-Partners-with-Office-365-7b087413-165a-4e94-8871-4393e0b9c037?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US.

Scenario Picker

The hybrid scenario picker is a new feature in Office 365 that simplifies the configuration and deployment of hybrid capabilities with SharePoint Server 2013 and SharePoint Server 2016. You can use the scenario picker wizard to redirect OneDrive for Business to SharePoint Online, and/or to make a Server-to-Server (S2S)/OAuth connection for your SharePoint Hybrid features.

Learn more about the hybrid scenario picker at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt346117.aspx.

Extensible App Launcher

The App Launcher is a familiar feature in Office and it’s now been extended to SharePoint Server 2016. The App Launcher provides a common location to discover new apps and navigate SharePoint on-premises and Office 365. The extensible hybrid app launcher is designed to help you get to your Office 365 apps and services from SharePoint Server 2016. The extensible App Launcher is enabled when enabling hybrid Team Sites and/or OneDrive for Business, once you enable this feature, you’ll see the Office 365 Delve and Video apps, along with your custom Office 365 tiles, appear in your SharePoint Server 2016 app launcher.

Learn more about the Extensible App Launcher at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/The-extensible-hybrid-app-launcher-617a7cb5-53da-4128-961a-64a840c0ab91.

Profile Redirection

Profile redirection is a component of the hybrid Team Sites feature introduced in SharePoint Server 2013 Service Pack 1 and available in SharePoint Server 2016. Profile redirection, in a hybrid Team Sites configuration redirects cloud (hybrid) users to their profile in Office 365 powered by Office Delve ensuring hybrid users have a single place for their profile information.

Learn more about Profile Redirection at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Plan-hybrid-profiles-96d1eaf0-94eb-40c5-ab76-c82907777db4.

OneDrive for Business and Sites

In SharePoint Server, you can redirect users to OneDrive for Business in Office 365 when they choose OneDrive in the navigation bar (SharePoint Server 2010 and SharePoint Server 2013) or in the app launcher (SharePoint Server 2016). This is known as hybrid OneDrive for Business.

With this feature, you can continue to use your on-premises SharePoint farm while providing your users with an easy way to store, share, and collaborate in the cloud with OneDrive for Business in Office 365. This best-of-both-worlds approach lets you keep your key business information in your own environment while allowing users the flexibility to access their documents from anywhere.

Learn more about OneDrive for Business and Sites at https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Hybrid-sites-features-and-OneDrive-for-Business-5ff7e56a-7af2-4511-adec-1e043afe244e#sitesfeatures.

Looking ahead

We’re always looking for new ways to innovate with hybrid, whether across on-premises and Office 365 or across Office 365 itself. As we lead into Microsoft Ignite we’ll have some exciting new hybrid capabilities available that provide a data layer experience to drive broader security and compliance and content management scenarios.

SharePoint Insights

A new hybrid feature that is currently in progress for SharePoint 2016 is Microsoft SharePoint Insights. Microsoft SharePoint Insights aims at helping SharePoint administrators manage their infrastructure more efficiently. With SharePoint Insights, Office 365 reports are generated using your SharePoint 2016 on-premises diagnostic and usage logs. Configuration is simple and you can start viewing regularly updated reports in the Office 365.

To learn more about SharePoint Insights as it becomes available see also https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/mt622371(v=office.16).aspx.

In addition to SharePoint Insights we’ll also have more new capabilities to enable you to bring th cloud to your business. Follow http://hybrid.office.com/ to keep informed as to what’s coming.

We’re excited about the opportunity and benefits of the cloud. The cloud allows us to be more agile in our development, increases the speed with which we can bring innovation to market, and enables us to create new experiences that leverage the computational power and integrated aspects that come only with Office 365. We understand that not all of you are able to move to the cloud all at once. That’s why you’ll continue to see us deliver more hybrid and coexistence innovation through cumulative updates and our upcoming on-premises release planned for 2015, as well as more training, readiness material, and guidance.

For those of you ready to take the leap, hybrid computing can help you get there. For more information and to understand what hybrid scenarios can do for your business, check out these resources:

Hybrid Resource Center on Office (http://hybrid.office.com)