What is the best way to provide an interim search function of M365 content in SharePoint 2013 when you are migrating intranet from SP2013 to M365 in a phased approach

Question

We are migrating our Intranet site from SharePoint 2013 to Microsoft 365 in a phased approach and I want to know how to create a hybrid search or what is the best option to create a search of M365 content in Sharepoint 2013 while the migration phases are occuring. I have looked at Cloud Hybrid Search but given this option will be retired from June 30, 2025 this would only give us 2 months of cloud hybrid search function and we would need to upgrade to SharePoint 2016 for this to work....which is shall I say useless given we are fully migrating to M365 SharePoint. Does anyone have suggestions on how I can provide a search function on the Intranet Home page in SharePoint 2013 that will search the portions of M365 SharePoint content without having to upgrade our current intranet first?

Answer 1

Hi @Azure Admin Alison Slater ,

Welcome to Q&A forum!

According to your description, there is no OOTB way to achieve your needs, unless you use development methods to customize. Since you will eventually migrate to SharePoint Online, I suggest that during the transition period of migration, you can directly create M365 accounts for all users and give them appropriate permissions to SharePoint Online, so that they can also search for the migrated content in SharePoint Online, and try not to affect their work. Then you can complete the migration as soon as possible. This should help you get through the transition period of migration smoothly.

Please do let us know if you have any further queries.

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