Empower discovery in SharePoint 2013/2016 with Hybrid Search, Delve and the Office Graph #BRK3034

I’m reading Search, Search and Search in the description of the session by Neil Hodgkinson (@Nellymo) – so what could go wrong? 🙂

Why hybrid?

Everything in one search index is a great solution for global spanning enterprises. No more spinning up VPNs to connect and search for company data is of great value.

Line of Business (LOB) data can be indexed, too  - and you dont have to migrate the entire application to make the data available.

Challenges

Datatypes, Enable access, Compliance, Availabilty.

Fact is that data is created on a massive scale and the business have very high expectations (mobile!) while respecting corporate regulations. Demand for hardware in classic environments is very high, too.

Hybrid Search

Unified search index is awesome. Access to all your onPrem data no matter where in the world it is stored (hidden) once indexed can save so much money and creates measurable values.

The next picture pretty much sums that up:

Refiners work across onPrem and online results.

You can have multiple search service applications and mix cloud and classic search service applications depending on your requirements.

Its distinguishable where the item is coming from by its url – actually I do not care where its stored – but you could change it with a simple display template and refiner or group them in  verticals.

Hybrid Search, I can’t stress it enough, is a great way to start every hybrid engagement. If you want to read more, you might like my full article about hybrid search experiences here.

Flow

Neil created a simple flow to collect tweets from twitter and persist them in a sharepoint list onPrem. After that he started a crawl in the cloud search service application. One or two minutes later the tweets were searchable via the SharePoint Online Search Center and through Delve

Roadmap

Things that are planned and might come in regards to hybrid:

Summary

Solid show, good insights by Neil – room was almost full, so there is definitely a hugh interest about hybrid scenarios!

Search all the things!