SharePoint development has been around for quite a long time offering organizations all over the globe with features like document sharing, record management, enterprise search and etc. However, in the past few years, SharePoint has come up with the latest features and the Hybrid environment offers great flexibility for businesses that are unable to move their existing content to SharePoint Online.
Hybrid Environments means integrated deployment of SharePoint Online and SharePoint On-Premises. The SharePoint on premises can be either SharePoint server 2013 or server 2016 and that SharePoint Online is built in with Office 365. The server can be hosted either in a cloud hosting service or on one’s own data center.
SharePoint Development Capabilities That Help Resolve Various Issues
The hybrid environment helps businesses migrate the content that can move or want to move to SharePoint Online while keeping the rest on premises. The user experience is seamless and unified. The environment can also be useful for various scenarios which include business connectivity services, gradual migration, business to business extranets and etc.
Many organizations cannot completely move to SharePoint Online at one time and the reason is because of Regulatory or compliance restrictions that prevent the business from storing the content in a multitenant environment. It is with the use of a hybrid environment that organizations can now easily comply with the standards and store sensitive data in their SharePoint on premises and save the rest of it on SharePoint Online.
SharePoint development in Hybrid environment is highly essential for customizations that are not supported by SharePoint Online. Custom code workflows that drive external business processes, in house software integrations that needs to be expensively rebuilt to support cloud and etc, can be handled in long term hybrid deployment. The online platform may not have high capabilities that allow the customers to easily secure and migrate the application into SharePoint Online.
The most common usage of Hybrid Environment is the search mechanism. The common search types include Cloud Hybrid search and hybrid federated search. The hybrid environment is useful to an organization for various reasons like tying the SharePoint Online content together with On-premises content, content metadata enrichment with custom content processing and parsing and indexing the content behind the firewalls.
Reasons Not to Use SharePoint Folders
SharePoint hybrid environment also enables the users to save cost on high availability, storage and scalability. It helps to eliminate the need for any third party tools having similar functionalities with the Microsoft Office 365 application. Taking a hybrid approach helps the users to manage the hybrid links, navigation experiences, shared searches and common user identities. This has the advantage of ensuring and sharing between platforms with minimal business impact.
Organizations planning to set up extranets for their partners may find that setting up additional infrastructure, maintenance and configuration to be costly. For them, SharePoint hybrid environment can be a perfect fit. Since extranet needs consideration and care from auditing, security and infrastructure, support and maintenance, the cost needed to set-up the extranet can he very high. With SharePoint hybrid search, business’s internal users can easily search between both the intranets and extranet which will help in driving up the user productivity.
Summary:
If your business organization wants to move to SharePoint online gradually and want to implement the custom processing rules, then the SharePoint Hybrid environment can be a great and cost effective solution for them.
