Hybrid SharePoint 2013 Environment

The following section discusses specific integration preparation steps required for a SharePoint 2013 hybrid environment and K2 prior to the installation of K2 and deployment of K2 for SharePoint 2013.

It is increasingly common for organizations to have a mixture of SharePoint on-premises and SharePoint Online. A single K2 server can support both of these environments at the same time however there are some slight differences to the configuration if your SharePoint on-premises environment is setup in Hybrid mode. You can find more details on enabling Hybrid mode for SharePoint 2013 in the Hybrid for SharePoint 2013 TechNet article. Follow the steps in the SharePoint Server 2013 Hybrid section below if this applies to your environment. If you are not configured for Hybrid authentication then the requirements are simply a combination of the two sections listed above for SharePoint on-premised and SharePoint Online.

SharePoint Server 2013 Hybrid

In organizations with both SharePoint on-premises and SharePoint Online there is a configuration mode available to allow these two environments to work more closely together known as Hybrid mode. The excerpt below from the Hybrid for SharePoint 2013 TechNet article describes the high level features of enabling Hybrid mode.

“A SharePoint Server 2013 hybrid environment enables identity management and trusted communications between SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server 2013. When you have established this trust framework, you can configure integrated functionality between services and features such as Search, Microsoft Business Connectivity Services, and Duet Enterprise Online for Microsoft SharePoint and SAP.”

When K2 for SharePoint is deployed in a SharePoint Server 2013 hybrid environment, the deployment experience is a combination of on-premises and online experiences . The K2 for SharePoint app is deployed to the on-premises and online app catalogs. However, users across different labels (such as K2 and AAD), even if they are the same physical user, are not the same user from an identity management perspective. It is important to be aware of this limitation, as it typically means that you will have two distinct sets of users. Even if they are the same users in each set, K2 cannot equate them so it means that assigning tasks requires you to assign to the same users in each label, and users, when working with their worklists, see only the tasks for the identity they're currently logged in as. For more information see SharePoint Hybrid, Multiple Identity Providers & K2

Hybrid SharePoint environments cannot use the sync service. If you use SharePoint in a hybrid environment, in other words using both SharePoint online and on-premises, the sync service only syncs the most recently registered SharePoint. So, if you first registered SharePoint on-premises and then later registered SharePoint Online, only SharePoint Online will be synced.