It is now 2021 and SBS is well into the past and now Essentials as a role is going away and Microsoft is obviously steering all SMB's to the cloud, yet there is still not an elegant and easy solution to migrate to the cloud, retire exchange on-premise, and synchronize AD user accounts. Microsoft is blatantly telling SMB's and MSP's supporting them that they don't amount to a hill of beans unless they get rid of ALL of their servers completely and have a single point of failure that is the most common thing to fail, which is their internet connection. If it weren't for Outlook, OutlookAnywhere, and activesync for smartphones, I would be ditching Microsoft completely as an email solution. For all of my clients that like GMail over Outlook, it's a done deal at this point. What is the point of having Exchange Online if I still have to have to maintain Exchange on prem? How hard is it to develop a solution for companies with 75 or less user accounts so accounts can be seamless with exchange online? And here's a beautiful thought, the software beautifully migrates the data from exchange on prem to the cloud like an SBS migration wizard and can be installed on a DC and stay there to sync user accounts and attributes into the future so Exchange can be uninstalled.
At this point, for clients that have active directory, I'm back to recommending on prem exchange only or something else that isn't Microsoft.
Ok, rant over.