Announcing Hybrid Search availability for Office 365 Government community cloud (GCC); GCC High; Office365 operated by 21Vianet

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Hybrid search has been widely adopted by SharePoint Online customers. Hybrid search makes finding content easy, wherever the content lives be it in On-premises SharePoint or in SharePoint Online. You can read more about the configuration of cloud Search service application here. Office365 customers had been leveraging the benefits of this service for some time, however it was not possible to configure cloud Search service application for Office 365 US Government community cloud or in Office 365 operated by 21Vianet. SharePoint engineering has just enabled this capability which means that the cloud Search service application can now be configured for both US Government community cloud (GCC) Office 365 tenants as well as in Office 365 tenants operated by 21Vianet.

The overall configuration guidelines remain the same as documented in Office.com or in our blog , except that you have to leverage the newest version of the onboarding script, and for US Government tenants the parameter and value “-IsPortalForUSGovernment $true” must be added when running the script (also described in the overall configuration guidelines now). Latest onboarding script can be downloaded from https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=51490.  Please remember to upgrade your Azure Active Directory powershell module which supports modern authentication Active Directory Authentication Library (ADAL) and device management before you execute the script.

Example usage of the scripts:

.\CreateCloudSSA.ps1 -SearchServerName <OnPremSharePointServerName> -SearchServiceAccount <OnPremSharePointAdminAccount> -SearchServiceAppName <CloudSSAName> -DatabaseServerName <OnPremSharePointDatabaseServerName>

#For US Government environment

Import-Module MSOnline

.\OnBoard-CloudHybridSearch.ps1 -PortalUrl <SPOTenantPortalUrl> -CloudSsaId <CloudSSANameCreatd> -IsPortalForUSGovernment $true

#For environments other than US Government

Import-Module MSOnline

.\OnBoard-CloudHybridSearch.ps1 -PortalUrl <SPOTenantPortalUrl> -CloudSsaId <CloudSSAName>

 

*****SharePoint engineering has enabled cloud Search service application configuration capability for GCC High tenants as well.*****

This was a functionality that has been requested for quite some time and it’s so amazing to see it going live.