SharePoint Server 2019 Hybrid: What do you actually get?

What Is a Hybrid Deployment?


Before going into more details, let’s first understand what a SharePoint hybrid deployment is. A hybrid SharePoint deployment is a link between a SharePoint Server farm and Office 365. The SharePoint Server farm can be hosted in our own datacenter, in a private cloud, or in a public cloud such as Azure or even AWS.


There are multiple reasons to deploy a hybrid SharePoint Server 2019 Infrastructure. As you probably heard countless times already, Microsoft’s vision is Cloud-First, meaning that all the newest features come in the cloud first, and then (maybe) make their way in the next On-Premises release. Furthermore, some features such as Delve, Office 365 Groups, Flow, PowerApps, Stream will not be available as purely on-premises servers.

At the same time, there can be multiple reasons to keep using SharePoint On-Premises. Most popular reasons are the level of customization and integration of SharePoint with other On-Premises system, and legal/compliance reasons where the data must remain in a certain geographical area such as a State or a Province!

This is why a Hybrid deployment is the best of both worlds. By using the right system for the right business need, your business users will be able to have the custom SharePoint solutions and control they need On-Premises, as well as the latest and greatest features in the cloud.

Hybrid Features Overview


Before starting the configuration, we will do an overview of what features are available in hybrid, and what each one offers!

 

Hybrid app launcher


The Hybrid App launcher modifies the SharePoint 2019 app launcher to be more in sync with the app launcher in Office 365. The hybrid app launcher, seen on the right side of the figure below, shows Office 365 only apps such as Delve and Office 365 video, as well as any custom apps you pin to your Office 365 app launcher such as “Testing Tile”. The All apps button will direct the user to Office 365 to see all the apps they have access to. This will allow users to access all their apps, whether On-Premises or Online from both SharePoint 2019 and Office 365 environments.



Hybrid Sites


The Hybrid Sites functionality in SharePoint 2019 and SharePoint Online allows a user’s Followed Sites from both On-Premises and Online to display in a single location; their SharePoint Home in Office 365. In the figure below, I have followed the site called “Communication Site”, and it shows up in my SharePoint Online Home page. This allows users to be able to quickly access all of their favourite sites from the SharePoint Home, whether those sites are hosted Online or On-Premises.


Hybrid OneDrive for Business

Once enabled, Hybrid OneDrive for Business will create user’s OneDrive for Business in SharePoint Online instead of SharePoint On-Premises. With Office 365 , every user get’s between 1TB or unlimited storage , so you won’t have to worry about hosting this content on our SQL Server anymore, or worry about (and pay) the backup tapes for it. From an integration point of view, the OneDrive icon inside SharePoint On-Premises app launcher will now redirect users to their OneDrive inside Office 365. In the figure below, you can see the OneDrive icon in the SharePoint 2019 app launcher redirecting me to my SharePoint Online OneDrive for Business site.

Hybrid Business to Business (B2B) sites

While you will see this feature in the hybrid configuration wizard and on many Microsoft Docs pages, this feature does not really create any integrations between your SharePoint On-Premises farm and Office 365 tenant. It’s only there as a reminder of the extranet features in SharePoint Online and how you can benefit from hosting your external collaboration sites in Office 365 rather than On-Premises.
You can learn more about using SharePoint Online as a business-to-business (B2B) extranet solution on Microsoft Docs at the following link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepoint/create-b2b-extranet

 

Hybrid self-service site creation


Hybrid self-service site creation allows you to redirect the default self-service site creation page in SharePoint Server (if you have it enabled) to SharePoint Online. By enabling this feature, you can make sure all newly created sites are in SharePoint Online, therefore having less content to migrate in an eventual migration to Office 365.


Hybrid taxonomy and content types


The hybrid taxonomy and content types feature allow you to have a shared taxonomy and set of Content Types between your SharePoint Online tenant and SharePoint On-premises farm. After the initial term store migration is done by an admin via PowerShell, users will be able to create all of their content types, as well as taxonomy in SharePoint Online, and a timer job will automatically replicate it to SharePoint On-Premises on a schedule set by your administrator. Both Content Types and your Managed Metadata terms will keep the same IDs, allowing developers to create custom solutions using the SharePoint Framework that would work both On-Premises and Online.


Hybrid Business Connectivity Services


Hybrid Business Connectivity Services allows you to securely display data from external system, such as a SQL Server Database, as a SharePoint list in Office 365. Users can then view and edit the data from wherever they are in the world, without needing to be connected to their on-premises infrastructure. In the screenshot below, you can see information from a SQL Server database being displayed in a SharePoint Online list.


PowerApps and Flow


Microsoft Flow is the recommended way of doing workflows and PowerApps is the recommended tool to create business applications in Office 365 and hybrid SharePoint Deployments. By leveraging the Data Gateway, we can create Flows and PowerApps in Office 365, that connect to our On-Premises content. After creating the on-prem SharePoint connector in Microsoft Flow, you can enter an On-premises Site Collection URL, and you will be able to use most triggers On-Premises!


In the screenshot blow, you can see that the Flow successfully launched when I added an item in my On-Premises Inventory list!
Same thing for PowerApps, once the connection is created, you can use On-Premises lists as data sources for your Business Apps!


Even if the integration with Microsoft Flow and On-Premises SharePoint is great, something that is missing from SharePoint 2019 in comparison to SharePoint Online is the ability to manually trigger Flows from On-Premises. There is no Flow button in SharePoint On-premises lists and Document Libraries, so triggers such as On Selected Item are available in Flow but cannot be used with SharePoint On-Premises.





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