(401) Unauthorized - Federated Search between SharePoint 2013 (Azure) and SharePoint Online

Question

I am facing issue in implementing Federated Search between SharePoint 2013 Azure and SharePoint online.

SharePoint 2013 Azure uses ADFS for authentication. Azure active directory and on-premise active directories are not in sync though.

I have followed all the steps that have been mentioned in following two links –

https://technet.microsoft.com/EN-US/library/dn607307.aspx

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn197169.aspx

However when I am trying to test the Federated result source, I are getting following error –

Web error: System.Net.WebException: The remote server returned an error: (401) Unauthorized.
   at System.Net.HttpWebRequest.GetResponse()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.SPWebRequestExecutor.Execute()
   at Microsoft.SharePoint.Client.ClientContext

I am not sure if we are missing something which is implied or not mentioned in the technet links.

Grateful if someone can help in resolving this issue.

Answer 1

Finally after a month of effort and taking help of Microsoft support, we have resolved the issue. The problem was the value of variable $spcn.

In the article, it was not very clear to which domain it has to be set.

**$spcn - The root domain name of your public domain. This value should not be in the form of a URL; it should be the domain name only, with no protocol.
An example is adventureworks.com.**

We were initially setting it to domain of SharePoint Online. Finally after lot of hit and trial, we found that we have to add domain of both SharePoint Online and SharePoint 2013. It worked after that.