Things to know about SharePoint Hybrid Search

Things to know about SharePoint Hybrid Search:

This post is mainly intended for those who want to understand about those services that can go Hybrid on SharePoint Server 2013 and I’ll be mainly discussing specifically about “SharePoint Server Hybrid search” here ….

The below mentioned SharePoint services can go hybrid:

One drive for business
SharePoint Search
Business Connectivity service
Duet for enterprises

TechNet link for Hybrid SharePoint Services: _ https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn197168.aspx

Now as mentioned before I’ll be discussing about “SharePoint Hybrid search” alone in this post and will be discussing about other SharePoint services that can go hybrid in a different post.

I’m going to keep this post simple by discussing only about what “SharePoint Hybrid search” is all about and the different topologies it has. The configuration part will be discussed on an upcoming new post.

What is SharePoint Hybrid Search?

To put it in simple words the term “Hybrid “here refers to using both on-premises + office 365 (SharePoint online) in your SharePoint deployment .If you have an environment where both your SharePoint server and office 365 (i.e. SharePoint Online) is integrated then it’s likely to be called as a “Hybrid SharePoint environment “.

Different topologies available in SharePoint Hybrid search:

There are three different topologies to speak about that are available for configuring SharePoint Hybrid search and it’s up to you as a SharePoint administrator to choose the right topology that suits the business requirement .

The 3 different topologies are …..

One-way outbound search
One-way inbound search
Two way (bidirectional) –> (I’m not sure if this is supported by Microsoft as of now .However I’ve discussed about this method also )

One-way outbound search:

In this model the user executes a search query in the SharePoint on-premises search center site and the query component looks for the results from the SharePoint on-premises site as well as from Office 365 and displays it for the user in the search results .

Note: The users should SharePoint online license assigned to them to be able to get the search results from SharePoint Online.

One-way inbound search:

In this model the user executes a search query in the SharePoint online search site and the query component looks for the results from the SharePoint online sites as well as from SharePoint on-premises site and displays it for the user in the search results.

Note: The users should SharePoint online license assigned to them to be able to get the search results from SharePoint Online.

Two-way (bidirectional) topology:

The name speaks for itself. In this model the user will be able to execute a search query in the SharePoint on-premises search site and get results from SharePoint server as well as from Office 365 (i.e. SharePoint online). Similarly, a user who executes a search query in SharePoint online will be able to get search results from SharePoint online as well as from SharePoint Server.

Note: The users should SharePoint online license assigned to them to be able to get the search results from SharePoint Online.

End user experience in the search center:

The below illustration shows how a user will see the results in the search center when his SharePoint environment is configured for Hybrid search ….

Search model for a Hybrid-search environment:

Also, if you haven’t gone through the video in the link below, I highly recommend you to take a look at this to understand about SharePoint server Hybrid search and how it works :

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/SharePoint-Conference/2014/SPC320