SharePoint How-To: Configuring Office 365 for Hybrid

So, you've decided on the trust approach for connecting your SharePoint on-premise and online systems? Next comes the core configuration.

You have to set up some basic integration between Office 365 for enterprises and SharePoint Server 2013 before you can configure a hybrid environment. The following steps are needed:

Hopefully you will have done the majority of this, just because you have an Office 365 Tenant already. If not, then you need to sign up. We will not run through getting an Office 365 subscription, but you can just visit the main site and sign up.

https://products.office.com/en-us/business/compare-more-office-365-for-business-plans

The next few steps are all about configuration and setup. The DNS configuration can be complete by reading the following link:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Work-with-domain-names-in-Office-365-4F1BD681-337A-4BD3-A7B7-CF77B18D0870?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

Now one of the core pieces of making this all work comes down to the authentication being used, too often Office 365 is deployed for an organization and then no single sign o or synchronize process is used to federate local accounts to the cloud service making it very hard to take full advantage of it. The first part of this process is to create User Principle Names (UPN) that matches the domain want to use in Office 365.

The following steps show how to manually do these tasks. To create the UPN suffix in your on-premises DNS

To manually assign a UPN domain suffix to users

Now we the right domains configured within the On-Premises Active Directory we can then start to Synchronize the accounts to the cloud.  Directory synchronization helps you mirror those accounts between your online and on-premises environments. With directory synchronization, your users don't have to remember new information for each environment, and you don't have to create or update accounts twice.

The two core approaches are using either Directory Synchronization or full Single Sign On.

More details can be found here: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Office-365-integration-with-on-premises-environments-263faf8d-aa21-428b-aed3-2021837a4b65?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US

Different user account management techniques provide different experiences for your users, as shown in the following table.

Historically “DirSync” was used for this process, now however Azure AD Connect replaces this. Once this has performed the Sync process you should have accounts that now reside within Office 365, tagged as such. The regular accounts you may have will be listed as “Cloud” accounts which means they are just available within Office 365 not On-Premises.

Now we have both, we can now use some sort of single sign on, simply by using the same accounts. This is not true SSO, but at least it allows me to use the same credentials in both locations, which is a start.

SharePoint Server 2013 hybrid configurations all require the following services to be running on your farm:

If you're setting up OneDrive for Business, these are the only services you need. If you're setting up a Search or BCS hybrid solution, there are some additional. As with other SharePoint services, you should choose an appropriate server in your farm where you want to run these services, keeping in mind the workloads that those servers are already handling. You can run the services on multiple servers for added reliability, but it's not a requirement. The following items need to be completed for the full Hybrid scenario:

As you can see there are quite a few more steps needs to get your entire system ready for a true Hybrid Environment. The core steps are to get the Authentication and User Synchronization setup, then work through preparing the environments as needed.