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The all new Cloud Search service application coming to SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2016

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The all new Cloud Search service application coming to SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint 2016

We would like to make an announcement regarding the new hybrid capability being delivered as an update by the end of the year for SharePoint Server 2013 and natively in SharePoint Server 2016. The new feature is the Cloud Search service application and it enables the crawling of on-premises content sources to feed the Office 365 search index. This creates a truly unified search experience for users in a hybrid environment.

The new Cloud Search service application allows organizations to leverage the unified index approach and reduce the size of their on-premises search deployment. Take a look at the session below to learn about considerations when configuring hybrid search as well as deployment guidelines. Keep an eye on this space for our post on best practices and scaling guidelines

Below is a quick summary of the features that are part of the pre-release version that is being validated in a limited TAP program today.

1. The Cloud Search service application will support crawling of on-premises content to build one unified index in the cloud.

2. All existing content sources that are supported in SharePoint Server 2013 will be supported for crawling by the Cloud Search service application.

3 The unified index will enable authenticated users to search from SharePoint Online and return results that include items from both on-premises content and online content without the need for implementing query federation.

4. Authenticated users will also be able to query from SharePoint Server 2010, 2013 or 2016 on-premises for content from the SharePoint Online unified search index. This can be done by publishing the SharePoint Cloud Search service application and consuming it from a SharePoint Server 2010 farm. In addition you configure Hybrid Query federation from the Cloud Search service application to SharePoint Online. As a result, both site search and the enterprise search center works and users can see results from the unified search index in SharePoint Online.

5. Query federation continues to be supported in SharePoint Server 2013 for both the inbound and outbound model

Posted Created By : Manas Biswas [MSFT] , Neil Hodgkinson [MSFT] Kathrine Hammervold [MSFT]

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 10, 2015
    Hi! I've set up a SP2016 farm and connected it to my O365 tenant. "Standard" hybrid search works fine, but I want this cloud search. I want to see Office Graph in action! In this session at Ignite you mention an onboarding script that should configure my SSA to use SPO. Where can I find this script? Best regards Joakim

  • Anonymous
    September 10, 2015
    Hi Joel. You will find all you need in the Microsoft Connect Cloud search service application project. See here for more details and to join the project. connect.microsoft.com/.../SelfNomination.aspx We are posting a blog later today with more technical implementation details for the hybrid cloud search service.

  • Anonymous
    September 10, 2015
    Thanks Neil! Worked almost like a charm! When running the onboarding script, I get "push tenant onboarding is disabled in this farm". Can you or someone else give a a hint? I would really like to explore this awesome potential!

  • Anonymous
    September 14, 2015
    Joakim Please go ahead and try again. We were performing some maintenance activities on the preview platform but as of today you can continue to onboard.

  • Anonymous
    September 14, 2015
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 14, 2015
    Sudeep, Have you already created a new SSA with the mandatory parameters of CloudIndex set to true as documented in the Connect guidelines. You cannot use the same SSA that you had created before August CU and implemented Hybrid search with Query federation. Can you confirm that you are still getting the error while working with the new SSA? We are posting an blog later today with detailed implementation guidelines , you may want to double check the configuration once.

  • Anonymous
    September 14, 2015
    Technical implementation details for Cloud Hybrid Search Service Application that we promised below is now live .Check it out at blogs.msdn.com/.../cloud-hybrid-search-service-application.aspx

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2015
    Thank you for the quick reply Manas. Yes, I have created a new Cloud SSA. I have used the -Identity parameter for Get-SPEnterpriseSearchServiceApplication  in the Onboard-HybridSearch script to specify the new Cloud SSA I created. However, let me try with the new implementation details you provided and see if I get past that error. I think the problem in my case is I have already configured SharePoint Hybrid for search last year. Since I am trying to implement the new Cloud SSA on top of it, New-SPTrustedSecurityTokenIssuer command fails as the trusted provider certificate already exists on the cloud farm (from my last year's hybrid configuration).

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2015
    Thanks very much for your help! I tried the scripts it yesterday and it worked fine. Also got the error regarding "certificate already exists" (since I already have a trust) and "ExequteQuery with 0 arguments" (succeeded the next time), but it worked anyway. Searching from SPO and on-prem works fine. Is Office Graph supposed to pick up activities from the indexed content? Because it doesn't in my case.

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2015
    Good to know Joakim,that the configuration went fine and you are able to see results.We have updated the Delve experience at blogs.msdn.com/.../cloud-hybrid-search-service-application.aspx