Bill Baer /bɛːr/

@williambaer At the center of collaboration is the site and modern Team Site in Office 365 are core to discovering and showcasing the most relevant and important information to you and your business. While SharePoint Online in Office 365 is an attractive alternative to on-premises business solutions with SharePoint. You might want to or need to deploy specific solutions in the cloud while still maintaining your on-premises investments or gradually move to cloud using a staged, workload-driven approach.

Cross-posted from my post on the Microsoft Technical Community at https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Blog/Hybrid-Scenarios-with-SharePoint-and-Office-365-Updates-and/ba-p/47571#M204. Ubiquitous connectivity, the proliferation of devices – the rise of the cloud. The cloud has become mainstream and services such as Office 365 are an attractive alternative to on-premises business solutions with SharePoint. However, for a variety of reasons, you might want to or need to deploy specific solutions in the cloud while still maintaining your on-premises investments. For some organizations, you may wish to gradually move to cloud using a staged, workload-driven approach.

SharePoint Server 2016 Beta 2, released on November 18th, 2015, introduces several new hybrid capabilities that drive end-user familiarity and provide further abstraction of Office 365 when coexisting with SharePoint on-premises to include a new hybrid extensible App Launcher and profile redirection. 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.

This month we continued to invest in simplifying the Office 365 and SharePoint 2013 hybrid experience with the new hybrid scenario picker available in the Office 365 Administration Center. Overview The hybrid scenario picker is designed to help customers get up and running quickly with in-market and future hybrid scenarios by providing quick access to hybrid scenarios such as OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Sites in addition to programmatically configuring hybrid prerequisites to include Server-to-Server (S2s) and OAuth connections.

The English philosopher Alan Watts once said “The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance”. A recent #CollabTalk topic was that of the changing role of SharePoint IT…as the cloud becomes mainstream, this conversation will inevitably thrive as a broader topic that transcends SharePoint. And while change may be to exist, opportunity continues to rise – the cloud has given way to capabilities previous impossible behind the firewall, from predictive analytics to machine learning, to infinite storage, and on-demand access to content and conversations.

Overview NOTE (8/26/2014) With any solution that externalizes the unstructured content with SharePoint you need to understand the limitations and optimal use of those solutions as documented at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff628583(v=office.15).aspx to include related latency and performance requirements. With any application organizations face consistent key challenges such as high efficiency and business value, complex configuration, and low total cost of ownership. Extending applications to the cloud in hybrid scenarios addresses many of these challenges, whether distributing SharePoint content across on-premises and Office 365 while leveraging search as a service (hybrid search) or externalizing data, extending it to the cloud with Remote Blob Storage or related technologies.

The French philosopher, Henry Bergson, once said “to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.” While the Nobel Prize winner wasn’t talking about the software and services world, the thought is extremely applicable to technology- from development to administration to use. The adoption of, and change to, cloud computing is maturing at a rapid rate…but the move needs to be thoughtful.

Over the past several weeks since we’ve released Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2013 I’ve configured several PoC and demo environments with OneDrive for Business redirection to Office 365 with an outbound hybrid search topology. Over the course of configuring these environments I found it to be easier to programmatically configure the more complex aspect (outbound infrastructure) and hopefully will be able to share the solution soon… The solution I put together is a Windows Form (makes it easy to redistribute and iterate upon), simplifies the configuration and scripting of outbound infrastructure (example below).

Recently we introduced a number of new coexistence scenarios in Service Pack 1 including redirection of OneDrive for Business and Yammer. Redirection of OneDrive for Business enables IT to provision cloud storage for users OneDrive for Business document libraries; however, in a hybrid scenario the content in that storage should be discoverable both on-premises and online. The most common configuration to support OneDrive for Business redirection is an outbound search topology where users can return results from both on-premises and online within the on-premises search portal.