Guys

I have following questions related to Hybrid Env

After configuring Cloud Hybrid Search Service, if user did people search in OnPrem/Online Will user's pictures comes from Online user profile store or on prem user profile store ? Can we control this behavior ?

1. What is the role of UserProfile Sync service now? I see TechNet that this service has to be configured-mandatorily as part of Hybrid configuration for SharePoint. Do we still need to?

---What does this synch service exactly do ?

Thanks

Kris

Hi Kris

The answer to your first question is it depends.

The O365 profile store is crawled by default and so the people index content and pictures will come from there initially.

If you configure the cloud SSA to crawl people on premises also then you will additionally get duplicate results in the people search results page. You can filter these using the IsExternalContent managed property to differentiate between online and on premises people but this duplication is something you should consider and engineering is also looking at options to simplify this experience.

You should continue to sync user profile data especially if you are going to be crawling people on premises. ADImport will work just as well for this capability unless you have a need for augmented or rich UPA profiles on premises.

People crawl/search is a work in progress and right now if it is appropriate for you we would recommend that you use just online people search. More to follow on this as we move forward with hybrid experiences.

Hope that helps a little.

Neil

Thank you Neil, this helps, the main reason asking for this question is we are deploying SP 2013 Hybrid, we want to maintain photos only in one place which is Office 365. we don't want users to upload pics in onprem user profile store.

Solution( that we are planning) PFB design of profile photo attribute synchronization.

We will redirect the OneDrive Business link to Office 365 OneDrive For Business, So that users can upload pictures only in ODFB,

Since Cloud Search Service application does crawling, if user does any search (onprem or online) it returns same results. and it returns peoples/pictures from office 365 profiles.

Above solution works only if Cloud search service returns people results from only Office 365 index.

Questions:

1. Does my solutions works( I am completely depending on Cloud Search Service application approach) ?
2. How to configure cloud SSA not to crawl onprem user profiles ?

To answer your questions.

To automate photo sync from on prem AD to SPO you must also be using O365 Exchange. If you are happy for users to upload their own then that's fine so the solution will work.

You one scenario you could run into is when searching from on premises for people, user profile photos will only appear if the user is already authenticated to the -my site collection. There are ways to get around this, one such is to add a content editor webpart containing a call to the -my site. This way if the user is not authenticated they will get one prompt and after that no prompts for the duration of their session. I'm sure there are other ways to do it too.

To stop the on prem crawler from crawling on premises UPA make sure you remove the SPS3:// location from the content sources in the on premises cloud ssa admin centre.

To answer your questions.

To automate photo sync from on prem AD to SPO you must also be using O365 Exchange. If you are happy for users to upload their own then that's fine so the solution will work.

You one scenario you could run into is when searching from on premises for people, user profile photos will only appear if the user is already authenticated to the -my site collection. There are ways to get around this, one such is to add a content editor webpart containing a call to the -my site. This way if the user is not authenticated they will get one prompt and after that no prompts for the duration of their session. I'm sure there are other ways to do it too.

To stop the on prem crawler from crawling on premises UPA make sure you remove the SPS3:// location from the content sources in the on premises cloud ssa admin centre.