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Cloud Hybrid Search (CHS) as per SharePoint 2016 IT preview

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Introduction

​Cloud hybrid search is wonderful feature for the business customers. This feature enables to index all the content from on-prem as well as from O365 environments. 

Cloud Hybrid Search will crawl the search content from on-prem and O365 in a single stretch. When user query search index in Office 365, they get search result from on-prem and office 365 content. How on-prem content is secure in this case? You no need to worry about it, because you on-prem is secure by encrypt the content meta data when we transfer the it to the index in office 365.

However as per current situation, the crawling setup has to be done in SharePoint server itself. 

Benefits on CHS

  • By this feature, you and your customer no need to worry about the size of the search index. The reason is search index will be in Office 365 environment. 
  • The newer version of SharePoint server supports crawling of existing MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010 and 2013 content farms. Hence you no need to upgrade any of the existing installation of SharePoint server. 
  • Business users will get newest SharePoint online search experience without your organization having to update your existing SP servers.
  • From all these you can say that, you no need to migrate the search index to newer version of the SP server since it happens by default in Office 365. 

The cloud Search Service Application (SSA) is the key element of CHS. To setup SSA in your farm just create SharePoint Server Preview build and create the SSA on this farm. However only one SSA will be supported by a farm. More than one SSA will not be supported by a farm. 

The below diagram explains how CHS works (Courtesy: Microsoft)

Based on the diagram, the on-prem content is crawled by the crawler in the cloud SSA and pushed to the search index in O365. 

Some of the familiar search features aren't supported by this CHS solution. 

Search feature Note
Custom security trimming The custom security trimming isn’t supported.
Removal of on-premises search results To remove a search result, you remove the URL to the item. This requires interaction with the crawler, and SharePoint Online can’t interact with the crawler in the cloud search farm.
Custom entity extraction SharePoint Online doesn’t support custom entity extraction.
Content enrichment web service The content enrichment web service call-out is not available in the Cloud SSA.
Thesaurus SharePoint Online doesn’t support a thesaurus.
Best bets Best bets is a SharePoint Server 2010 feature. You can achieve the same result in SharePoint Online by using query rules.
Custom search scopes Custom search scopes is a SharePoint Server 2010 feature. You can achieve the same result in SharePoint Online by using result sources.
Promotion/demotion of search results Promotion/demotion of search results is a SharePoint Server 2010 feature. You can achieve the same result in SharePoint Online by using result sources.