Free ebook: Configuring Microsoft SharePoint Hybrid Capabilities

We’re happy to announce the availability of our newest free ebook, Configuring Microsoft SharePoint Hybrid Capabilities (ISBN 9781509302437), by Jeremy Taylor, Neil Hodgkinson, and Manas Biswas.

ERRATA UPDATE – Aug 10, 2016

NOTE TO OUR READERS: On page 10 of this ebook, there is an error in the instructions for On-Premise STS in the PowerShell script. The value of the AppID is wrong.

$spoappid = "00000001-0000-0000-c000-000000000000"

It should be:

$spoappid = 00000003-0000-0ff1-ce00-000000000000

Forewords

By Jeff Teper, corporate vice president, Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint

In spring of 2016, Microsoft announced the general availability of SharePoint Server 2016, which includes new hybrid capabilities that make it possible for on-premises customers to tap into the innovation the company is delivering in Microsoft Office 365.

For more than a decade, Microsoft’s customers have relied on SharePoint to power teamwork, to automate business processes, to create business applications, and to build company-wide intranets. As a core part of Office 365, SharePoint provides content management and collaboration capabilities that are seamlessly integrated with the other applications people use every day to create and coauthor documents, meet and work with their teams, brainstorm, analyze, and make decisions. SharePoint is also integrated with the powerful cross-suite capabilities of Office 365, such as Office 365 Groups, the Office Graph, and governance controls for security, privacy, and compliance.

Our vision for SharePoint Online in the cloud and SharePoint Server on-premises extends into a connected extensible hybrid experience in which users can take advantage of the powerful features of both SharePoint Server on-premises and the innovation we are delivering in SharePoint Online. Device-independent collaboration and file sharing through Microsoft OneDrive for Business, coupled with intelligent intranets driven by modern team sites, publishing and business applications on your desktop, and mobile device lead the charge in providing new ways to work.

SharePoint Server also delivers cloud-born innovation through hybrid capabilities and experiences that span, integrate, and unify on-premises farms and Office 365. With hybrid search, we have delivered an improved user experience that unifies the index, query results, and search experience across Office 365 and on-premises farms running SharePoint 2016, SharePoint 2013, and even SharePoint 2010. Hybrid search also makes on-premises content available within Office Graph– powered applications such as Delve.

Hybrid OneDrive provides businesses with a stepping stone into the Office 365 experience, paving the way for the gradual migration of personal sites to SharePoint online. With the Hybrid Sites feature, you can connect users to their favorite teamsites, whether on-premises or cloud based. External sharing polices provide granular control of the sharing experience, providing businesses with the ability to securely collaborate with partners. IT professionals can also use hybrid configurations to unify compliance policies and auditing.

With these and other integrated, unified, and hybrid experiences and services, you can take advantage of innovation and capabilities in Office 365 while maintaining workloads on-premises that are not suited to Office 365. You can move workloads to Office 365 at your own pace, based on your own requirements, and still take advantage of Office 365 where it best meets your needs. Additionally, the SharePoint mobile app will support both on-premises and Office 365 sites for hybrid customers.

This ebook draws together the SharePoint Server and Office 365 hybrid workloads and user experiences in one place, providing solid guidance to meet business needs and achieve productivity goals in the cloud-enabled workplace.

By Seshadri Mani, principal program manager, Office 365 SharePoint, Microsoft Corporation

Working at Microsoft, I get to see our work empowering millions of users and thousands of enterprises to achieve more, which drives our passion for more innovation. At Microsoft, we strive for a cloud-first/mobile-first vision, and now, today, more and more enterprises and small businesses have begun to realize the benefits of cloud computing to meet their modern productivity needs. We also have strong on-premises server products, as on-premises deployments continue to have their own merits, even in the era of cloud computing. Many customers prefer to keep some of their data on-premises for a variety of reasons, ranging from regulatory controls to richer on-premises customizations.

But, the millennial era demands modern productivity needs from IT, such as access anywhere from any devices. These needs are efficiently satisfied by cloud deployments; however, as just mentioned, there is an ongoing business need to maintain some parts on-premises. How do we reconcile this? The clear answer is hybrid.

As it relates specifically to Microsoft Office 365 SharePoint and OneDrive for Business, we wanted to bring cloud innovations to SharePoint on-premises customers while at the same time lessening the burden on these customers to maintain massive on-premises infrastructure. Hybrid scenarios and experiences is leading us to achieve that goal. Hybrid is about the “best of both worlds—connected”, it is not strictly about migrating all on-premises content to the cloud simply to reap cloud benefits.

Over the past few years, Microsoft has invested heavily in SharePoint hybrid connected experiences. We looked at the core business values and modern productivity needs that confront SharePoint on-premises customers and picked key scenarios to light up in hybrid experience. To name a few, hybrid OneDrive for Business is connecting to OneDrive for Business in the Office 365 cloud from within your SharePoint on-premises, opening massive cloud storage to your end users; Hybrid search experience that spans across your on-premises and online content; and extranet business-to-business (B2B) sites in the cloud where you can work collaboratively with partners and stop opening your firewall to external users, while still keeping your on-premises team and portal sites. With hybrid extensible app launcher, you can connect your end users to Office 365 video service from within the SharePoint on-premises sites.

This ebook provides a deep dive on various SharePoint hybrid capabilities, how to configure them, and considerations to take into account. There is a perception that hybrid deployments are very complex; this book proves that wrong, especially with the highlight on hybrid scenarios picker which provides a few clicks configuration wizard. I have known Neil and Manas for many years now, and Jeremy just recently: they are all highly passionate about SharePoint hybrid, and hence this book was born. In the ebook, they cover nitty-gritty details to the extent that you will be fully prepared for SharePoint hybrid.

I keep this book as a reference for details on configuring hybrid capabilities. I encourage you, too, to read this book and adapt SharePoint hybrid scenarios and use this book as your reference guide.

Have a nice hybrid Journey! I’m sure it will be fun learning for you.

Introduction

Microsoft SharePoint hybrid consists of a growing list of advanced hybrid solutions that empowers organizations to consume benefits of the cloud and maintain their on-premises investments. This book is the second in a series of SharePoint hybrid books in which we show you how to configure, troubleshoot, and manage a SharePoint hybrid environment.

As you move toward configuring a SharePoint hybrid environment, you will soon realize the need for a go-to manual to ensure a successful implementation. This book does exactly that! It contains step-by-step instructions to help you with configuring and managing SharePoint hybrid. Although, it is aimed primarily for a technical audience, it also addresses business benefits that you might need to present to your management.

This book covers configuring these SharePoint hybrid capabilities in detail, along with scenario-based troubleshooting and recommended practices.

Operating a SharePoint hybrid environment requires experience in both on-premises SharePoint as well as Microsoft Office 365 products, such as SharePoint Online and Microsoft OneDrive for Business.

With hybrid capabilities such as search, business connectivity services, OneDrive for Business, sites, profiles, and advanced extranet sharing, you will find yourself surrounded by recommended practices and resources that will help you along the way.

One of the most important capabilities—hybrid search—is the glue that binds the on-premises and cloud data together, making it possible for your users to collaborate and access valuable data and information, whether it resides on-premises or in the cloud. You can choose to securely handle and expose line-of-business application data on SharePoint Online by configuring business connectivity services hybrid. Additional hybrid features such as enhanced profiles, sites, and OneDrive for Business, combined with Delve enhance the collaboration experiences in a SharePoint hybrid environment.

It is our aim to get you started to consider cybersecurity in your SharePoint hybrid roadmap. Cybersecurity is a topic of growing concern and we believe it is necessary for a SharePoint hybrid workforce to be security aware as they collaborate in real time across various regions of the world. We have handpicked topics in cybersecurity to raise your awareness of the risks so that you have a great start to factor these risks and create your risk mitigation plan for a secure and well-performing SharePoint hybrid deployment.

About the authors

Jeremy Taylor is a SharePoint technical specialist based in Canberra, Australia, who has more than 11 years’ experience in designing, building and supporting SharePoint farms across the Australian Federal Government, large enterprises, and small- to medium-sized businesses. Jeremy’s skillset is a unique blend of IT and business management. He holds a Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) degree and Master of International Business (MIB) degree from Macquarie University, Australia, as well as a number of IT certifications since 1999.

Jeremy has a solid infrastructure background in systems administration, architecture, and network infrastructure experience, primarily with Microsoft and Cisco. He is a Microsoft Certified Trainer, Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert in SharePoint, and draws on the depth of his SharePoint, Office 365, and Azure learning at the Microsoft Certified Solutions Master (MCSM) SharePoint training in Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, facilities.

Jeremy has authored his own SharePoint training courseware for LearnHaus (www.learnhaus.com), an IT training company. He also blogs about SharePoint Administrator–related topics at www.jeremytaylor.net and he is a co-organizer of the Canberra SharePoint User Group. Jeremy spends his free time with his wife, Sylvia, two daughters, Nasia and Amarissa, and still finds time to learn new technologies.

You can contact Jeremy at jeremy@jeremytaylor.net, https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremyptaylor, or follow him on Twitter @jeremytaylor.

Neil Hodgkinson (PhD, MCSM: SharePoint) is a senior program manager in the CXP, CAT team within the Applications and Services Group at Microsoft. Starting his IT career as a SQL and ASP developer almost 18 years ago, Neil naturally transitioned to SharePoint technologies back in 2000 when Microsoft launched SharePoint Team Services. He then worked for a global outsourcer as a SharePoint consultant and engineer before joining the PFE organization at Microsoft in 2005. From 2005 onward, as PFE expanded, Neil was the technology lead for SharePoint in EMEA and helped recruit a number of topclass engineers, many of whom are still with Microsoft today. After five years in PFE, Neil spent three years in the Office 365 escalation team as the EMEA lead, during which time he helped transition Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS)-S and BPOS-D off the SharePoint 2007 platform and onto SharePoint 2010, and then eventually to SharePoint 2013 and Office 365.

Neil’s passion for customer satisfaction has been a fixture throughout all his roles at Microsoft, and in his current role, he is still heavily engaged in the Office 365 service, helping with customer escalations and acting in an advisory capacity for field teams engaged in customer projects, especially in the areas of hybrid, disaster recovery, search, and Azure. Neil was content owner and instructor for Search, SQL Operations, and Business Continuity Management for MCM and MCSM, delivering this training on multiple rotations.

Neil hails from Manchester, England, and outside of work he is a fan of classic rock music and modern heavy-metal bands. He also plays Association Football and is an active member of his local karate dojo. He is an annual Tough Mudder runner and enjoys the camaraderie of the mudder nation. Most of all, he enjoys making the most of time at home with his wife of 13 years, Julie, and their three children, Luke, Cerys, and James, having fun and living life.

Manas Biswas is an Office 365 service engineer with more than 12 years’ experience in the industry. Manas has worked with SharePoint and related technologies extensively. In 2005, he joined Microsoft and then later became a member of SharePoint Escalation Services, where his primary area of focus was SharePoint Technologies, assisting customers with technical analysis, deployment, and problem solving. As progress in cloud strategies at Microsoft developed, Manas shifted his attention to Office 365 and Azure, specializing in beta testing and product releases. Eventually he trained his concentration on hybrid infrastructure, deployment, and readiness. Most recently, training, content creation, and readiness for SharePoint and its cloud workloads have been his key areas of expertise.

Currently Manas is a member of the Office 365 Service Engineering team, focused on search and hybrid configurations. He speaks frequently at technical sessions in conferences like SharePoint Conference, Ignite, MVP Open days, and many Microsoft internal conferences. In addition, Manas is a regular contributor to TechNet and MSDN forums and blogs about Hybrid features at https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/beyondsharepoint. Manas is based in India. When not working on SharePoint, he is busy either playing Xbox with his son, Manab, or travelling around with his parents as well as his wife, Sabita, enjoying different cultures and experiences.