SharePoint On-Premises enables the creation of Site Collections, for example as a Team Site. Users will find functions like OneDrive, MySites, the Newsfeed, Search and several other business applications such as Microsoft Project , User Profile Service, Managed Metadata and more.
SharePoint Online delivers a pretty much identical portfolio. Site Collections can also be provided. And there’s the new Video Portal feature as well.
If we speak of ‘hybrid’, we mean everything shown inside the red frame in the diagram above, including OneDrive, MySite and Search. These are the most important elements that you encounter first when investigating a hybrid deployment of SharePoint. In just a few weeks even Managed Metadata will be available in a hybrid scenario.
It’s up to you to decide whether to host OneDrive On-Premises, or if you’d prefer it provided in SharePoint Online. The same applies to MySite, where SharePoint Online flows into Delve. You’re spoilt for choice with Search as well, regardless of whether you search the cloud for data On-Premises, or you search On-Premises for data in the cloud. Search features can even be used entirely in the cloud, ensuring a uniform presentation of results.
A hybrid scenario provides the significant advantage that all other features of Office 365 (new ones as well) are available and that they are gradually coming together to offer the user just one uniform screen. The diagram above took Outlook, Skype for Business and the PowerApps as examples. But there are plenty of other applications, and new ones are arriving all the time, most recently Microsoft Teams.