SharePoint Online Features Could Diverge from On-Premises

SharePoint Online is a hosted Office 365 service that delivers team collaboration, corporate portal hosting, enterprise search, and content management. It has established a pattern of introducing new features and updating existing features with newer technologies that rely on other Office 365 services. This strategy benefits online customers but could render some of the service’s features incompatible with SharePoint Server, the on-premises version of the software, and could affect organizations’ migration plans.

Divergent SharePoint Products

SharePoint Server 2016, the latest version of the on-premises software, offered almost all SharePoint Online features when it was released in 2015.

However, since its release, Microsoft has introduced several new and updated services, called modern features, that usually depend on other Office 365 and hosted services to some extent. The services these features depend on, such as Flow, PowerApps, Microsoft Graph, and Office 365 Groups, might never become available as on-premises offerings. This means that SharePoint features based on these services will likely remain in SharePoint Online only, or they could require a hybrid connection to enable the features in SharePoint Server that rely on them. Features that require a hybrid connection will also require an organization to have licenses that cover both SharePoint Online and SharePoint Server.