What this guide holds to
SharePoint Server Subscription Edition is an on-premises product, and a hybrid feature does not make it SharePoint Online. Each hybrid feature is configured on its own, needs its own prerequisites and leaves the farm, its updates and its certificates where they were. This guide says, feature by feature, what Microsoft documents as supported, what depends on an update level, what is deprecated, and what the documentation does not establish.
Every technical claim links the page of Microsoft's documentation it comes from and gives the day it was checked. Where the documentation is silent or contradicts itself, the chapter says so in those words.
Assess a farm against it
SharePoint Server hybrid with Microsoft 365: the architecture advisor asks about the farm, its identity, its network and the hybrid features wanted, and generates the assessment, the matrices and the registers this guide describes, as Word and Excel files, in the browser. What was not answered stays unknown in every file.
The chapters
- 01Decide hybrid feature by feature, on a supported Subscription Edition farm, before the wizard runs
Hybrid is a trust and a short list of features. The trust is made once, for the whole farm, and no wizard takes it away again.
Chapter 1 as PDF - 02Match the identities first, then build one trust and give every part of it an owner
Hybrid has one trust and two directories. The trust proves which server is calling; only matching identities decide what the person behind the call may see.
Chapter 2 as PDF - 03Decide where the index lives, then prove that search on your own farm
Cloud hybrid search puts one index in Microsoft 365 and feeds it from the farm. Federated search keeps two indexes and asks both. They share a name and almost nothing else.
Chapter 3 as PDF - 04Switch on each OneDrive and sites redirect for a named audience, and plan the content behind it separately
A redirect changes where a link goes. It moves no file, no profile and no followed site, and the farm's own pages keep answering behind it.
Chapter 4 as PDF - 05Copy each term group once, then edit it only in Microsoft 365
The copy goes up once and cannot be repeated. After it, changes come down once a day and nothing goes back up.
Chapter 5 as PDF - 06Write down what each hybrid feature sends across the boundary, as whom, and who checks it
The trust says which farm is calling. It gives no person anything: what a user gets back is decided by permissions on the side that answers.
Chapter 6 as PDF - 07Run hybrid as a farm you patch, watch by hand and test on a schedule, with a rehearsed way back
Microsoft 365 updates itself. The farm, the trust and the synchronisation that connect to it are yours, and nothing in the product tells you when one of them stops.
Chapter 7 as PDF - 08Record each hybrid feature as an end state or a transition, and rehearse its removal before you depend on it
No hybrid feature moves a document, and none removes itself. The migration and the exit are both separate work, with their own tools and their own evidence.
Chapter 8 as PDF
Where the other guide begins
Whether an estate should keep a farm at all is a different decision, and the SharePoint Migration Field Guide is the book for it: its Chapter 25 decides which hybrid features an estate keeps, each with an owner and an exit date. This guide starts after that decision, for the features that were kept.
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