Introducing the hybrid add-on

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Like other Product Line Architectures (PLA), the SharePoint PLA is continually evolved to address the needs of customers. In last month’s post, we discussed what we’re doing in 2015 and that includes working on common hybrid scenarios that leverage OneDrive in the cloud for file sharing and synchronization. To that end, we’ve developed some materials to accelerate this scenario we’re calling the “hybrid add-on”.

Why OneDrive?

OneDrive for Business offers one of the most compelling values for cloud storage. In most organizations, it’s used for personal work-related documents, drafts, or for simple ad-hoc collaboration where a typical SharePoint Team Site isn’t necessarily warranted. This, and similar use cases are a perfect fit for cloud storage.

Organizations have different reasons why they prefer to keep SharePoint on-premises. Some examples are:

  • Existing software and other capital investments
  • Custom code which cannot be quickly transformed for the cloud
  • Regulatory or company policies preventing use of the cloud

In most cases, these reasons are not blockers for the use cases for which OneDrive for Business is suited. Most organizations can easily use a hybrid model where some content remains on-premises and other content (such as personal work-related documents) can be stored in the cloud.

Hybrid add-on

An add-on in the SharePoint PLA is a component which is optional, usually an enhancement or a variation of the default architecture. There are existing add-ons, for example, for deployments in Microsoft Azure and for advanced Business Intelligence features.

The hybrid add-on enables scenarios in an existing SharePoint PLA deployment for:

  • moving OneDrive for Business workloads to the cloud
  • redirecting all users or a subset of users to the cloud for their OneDrive
  • powerful search capabilities including search results from SharePoint Online to be displayed in your PLA farm
  • OneDrive for Business Sync client (for Windows; OS X version in development)

Because the SharePoint PLA is already cloud-aligned, combining OneDrive for Business with your on-premises PLA farm is a great fit. It is also one way to ease into the cloud. Over time, you could enable Office 365 with SharePoint Online and start moving team sites to the cloud.

Microsoft Services has unique expertise to help deploy a hybrid architecture while assisting organizations to develop a comprehensive governance strategy.

The SharePoint PLA is only available through Microsoft Services or an approved Microsoft partner. Contact your Microsoft Services representative for more information and to get started.

This post was authored by Wahid Saleemi.