This is the first part of a multi-part series about successfully configuring SharePoint Cloud Hybrid Search on a SharePoint 2016 onPremises farm.
Those are the chapters we will cover in this series:
- The first part is all about which considerations you should take prior to the setup.
- Architectural aspects and network requirements
- Which roadmaps should I follow before installing Cloud Hybrid Search?
- Then we talk about setting up a new search service application, that crawles onPremises content and feeds it to the search service application in O365.
- Next we tackle the challenge of migrating the search schema to the cloud. Refiners will be a big topic in this post.
- When those things are set up we can finally configure our search center in the cloud.
So what is this Cloud Hybrid Search exactly?
The Cloud Hybrid Search lets you crawl onPremises and Cloud content both together. This means you’ll have one unified search index in the cloud with all your content in it – regardless of its location. File share content can still be crawled onPremises and feeded to the cloud index. Your users will be able to search the cloud search center and find all content that matters to them. The search results are security trimmed and ranked.
Where to start?
Technet provides a neat roadmap, that shows all the steps necessary to successfully configuring the Cloud Hybrid Search.
I configured Cloud Hybrid Search with the help of the mentioned roadmap. The roadmap helps a lot but doesn’t cover some aspects:
- How do I keep my staging concept in place (TEST, INT, PROD)?
- How do I enforce a naming concept for the Cloud Hybrid Search Service Application name and databases?
- What are the network requirements to successfully configuring Cloud Hybrid Search?
- What other configuration roadmaps should I follow prior configuring Cloud Hybrid Search?
Let’s get on it
Enough talking about why we want to have Cloud Hybrid Search. Let’s dig deeper!
In the next article, I will show which considerations you should take before installing the Cloud Hybrid Search.