With the arrival of Office 365, the ability to extend corporate SharePoint infrastructures to the cloud became reality. SharePoint 2010 provided basic federation between on-premise Active Directory and cloud authentication, but provided no further service connectivity.
SharePoint 2013 integration
SharePoint 2013 and the newest version of Office 365 now provide three levels of integration: domain federation, server-to-server (S2S) trust and identity management, and service integration.
■■ As with SharePoint 2010, federated authentication and account synchronization is available between on-premise Active Directory and Windows Azure Active Directory. Besides providing authentication services, Windows Azure also acts as a trusted token issuer between the two environments.
■■ Using the OAuth 2.0 protocol, a trusted communication channel is established between a SharePoint Online installation and SharePoint Server 2013. Additionally, federated users can be authenticated using this functionality.
■■ Services such as Search, BCS, and Duet Enterprise Online can now be integrated between SharePoint Server 2013 and SharePoint Online.
SharePoint hybrid topologies
There are three hybrid topologies that can be used to configure the relationship between onpremise and cloud installations of SharePoint. The authentication topology you choose will then determine the services you can support:
■■ One-way outbound supports SharePoint Server 2013 queries of online site collections, returning the federated results to the on-premise SharePoint Server 2013 search.
■■ One-way inbound supports SharePoint Online queries of on-premise SharePoint Server 2013 site collections, returning the federated results to SharePoint Online search. It also supports SharePoint Online BCS connectivity to an on-premise SharePoint BCS installation.
■■ Two-way (bidirectional) topology supports SharePoint Server 2013 Search, BCS, and Duet Enterprise Online connections between on-premise and cloud-based installations of SharePoint.
MORE INFO IMPLEMENTATION PHASES FOR SHAREPOINT HYBRIDIZATION
Configuring a hybrid on-premise and cloud-based installation of SharePoint requires a significant amount of planning and configuration effort. This effort is broken into three phases: configuration of the basic environment, identity management infrastructure, and service configuration. The hybridization of SharePoint is covered in the TechNet article “Hybrid for SharePoint Server 2013” at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj838715.
aspx.
Thought experiment
Deploying the office client
In the following thought experiment, apply what you’ve learned about this objective. You can find answers to these questions in the “Answers” section at the back of this chapter.
Your organization is planning to move its core infrastructure to Office 365. Core services such as SharePoint and Exchange are required going forward. Management wants to absorb the cost of purchasing and deploying Office 2013 as part of the solution you propose. Which subscription of Office 365 would you select?
