Redirect targeted users to Office 365 with OneDrive for Business and MySite from SharePoint On Premises

When you install Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2013, you can redirect users to OneDrive for Business in Office 365 when they click OneDrive or Sites in the navigation bar. This way, no matter where they are, they can quickly access their documents and any information that they choose to sync from their SharePoint sites. This best-of-both-worlds approach lets you keep your key business information in your own environment while allowing users the flexibility to access their documents from anywhere. In additional, you could redirect only targeted audience who could have the redirect available. Microsoft has a good illustration shows how it works for your users.

There are several things have to happen in order to redirect targeted users to OneDrive for Business in Office 365. This illustration from Microsoft shows the steps involved.

The majors steps will be in both Office 365 and SharePoint 2013 on-premises. We will focus on SharePoint 2013 on-premises configurations in this blog under the assumption you have already configured Office 365. Here are the steps in details.

1. In your on-premises SharePoint Server 2013 environment, install Service Pack 1 for SharePoint Server 2013. This adds settings to the SharePoint Central Administration website to control Office 365 integration features.
2. Configure a specific audience if you are doing this for a pilot group and don’t already have an audience for that group. You can also use an audience that is already defined, or you can redirect everyone in your organization.
3. Configure settings in the Central Administration website to enable hybrid mode.

• In your on-premises SharePoint environment, specify the URL for your Office 365 tenant.
• Specify the audience to redirect.
• (Optional) You can set up a redirect for the Sites page, so that when users choose Sites in their personal site (My Site) navigation bar, it also goes to OneDrive for Business in Office 365.

We will discuss the configure a specific audience in different session and focus on the step #3. Here are detailed procedures and tips for your reference.

1. On the Central Administration website, choose Office 365 > Configure OneDrive and Sites links.

2.  On the Configure OneDrive and Sites links page, in the My Site URL box, type the My Site URL that you got from Office 365 portal administration.

3. Specify an audience. Choose Everyone if you want all of your users to be redirected, or choose Use a specific audience, and type the audience name for the audience that contains your Office 365 users. You should verify from "Click here to test" link.

4. If you also want to redirect the Sites page in users’ personal sites, select the Redirect the Sites page check box as in the previous screenshot. Click "OK" when your are done.

5. Reset IRSon ALL SharePoint on-premise WFEs (IRSRESET) to clean up cached pages on servers.

6. Verify using user account from the audience group to click OneDrive or Sites, user should be redirect to Office 365.

7. If users are not redirect to Office 365, Ctrl+F5 and/or clean up browser cache and reopen the browser to test again.

These are all steps to redirect targeted users to Office 365 with OneDrive for Business and MySite from SharePoint On Premise. We will discuss the tips and procedure to configure the audience targeting and search in details.

See Ultimate procedure to display SharePoint online hybrid search results in SharePoint Server 2013 for other steps to configure hybrid search.