Date
05/04/2019

Author
Anita

Working with Hybrid Email and Document Stores in Office 365 and SharePoint

A Hybrid document store is usually one that contains both on on-premises SharePoint Server and an Office 365 tenant. The SharePoint Online areas and the OneDrive for Business personal sites in the Office 365 tenant are shown separately, so that the personal sites do not get mixed up with corporate site collections.

If your organization is using on-premises SharePoint but looking to move into Office 365 then a hybrid document store is very relevant.

Possible applications of hybrid document stored include:

  • Stage the migration from on-premises SharePoint to Office 365 SharePoint Online
  • Use Office 365 SharePoint Online for secure collaboration with clients and service partners, while continuing to use on-premises SharePoint Server as your main document store.
  • Implement personal sites for staff members in the OneDrive for Business area of your Office 365 tenant, while continuing to use on-premises SharePoint Server to store your corporate documents and emails.

MacroView DMF, MacroView Message and MacroView Case and Matter support hybrid document stores. The base licenses for these products allow up to two on-premises SharePoint Server Farms and one Office 365 tenant. You can license additional on-premises Server Farms and additional tenants by contacting MacroView Services.

The screen shot below shows a hybrid document store displayed in the Browse tab of MacroView Explorer. That hybrid document store comprises:

  • The SharePoint Online areas in an Office 365 tenant
  • The OneDrive for Business areas in the same Office 365 tenant
  • An on-premises SharePoint Server web application

MacroView pane in Outlook shows a Hybrid document store with Office 365 / SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business areas and an on-premises SharePoint Server.

When you click on any document library, document set or folder in the tree-view, the MacroView software will display the default view of that area, so that you can see a list of the files (documents and emails) that are stored in the that area. Clicking the entry for a document or email in that file list can display a formatted preview of that document or email.

In addition, the MacroView software lets you move or copy files between the various areas, e.g. from a document library in on-premises SharePoint to a document library, document set or folder in SharePoint Online or OneDrive for Business, or from OneDrive for Business library of folder to an area in SharePoint Online or on-premises SharePoint. To perform the move or copy you use standard Windows techniques: Copy (CTRL+C) and Paste (CTRL + V) to copy and drag and drop or Cut (CTRL + X) and Paste (CTRL + V) to move. This copying and moving is shown in the video below.

 

Multiple Office 365 Tenants

The MacroView software can also display the structure of multiple Office 365 tenants in its tree-view. This is enabled by MacroView DMF, MacroView DMF 365, MacroView Message, MacroView Message 365, MacroView Case and Matter and MacroView Case and Matter 365, though you will need to contact MacroView Services to license the additional tenants.

Again, for each of those tenants the SharePoint Online areas and the OneDrive for Business personal sites are shown separately.

The need for multiple Office 365 tenants can arise when:

  • An organization such as an IT integrator is supporting the use of Office 365 by multiple customer organizations.
  • An organization has established separate Office 365 tenants e.g. for TEST and PRODUCTION.
  • You have been assigned an account so that you can access the Office 365 tenant that is used by one of your customers or service partners.

The following screen shot shows two Office 365 tenants displayed in the MacroView pane of Microsoft Outlook.

MacroView pane in Outlook has two Office 365 tenants.

In line with Microsoft’s best practice recommendations, the MacroView software uses Modern Authentication (oAUTH2) to enable you to access any of the Office 365 tenants. The advantage of Modern Authentication is that your authentication token is re-used and refreshed every time you access the tenant. If you access regularly you should not need to re-enter your password until it expires.

 

For More Information

For more information on solutions for managing and generating documents and emails using Office, Office 365 and SharePoint, contact MacroView Services.

<Video – Working with Hybrid Document Sores>