Forum Discussion
Decommissioning Exchange 2013 Server in a Hybrid Deployment with AD Connect
The short answer is no i'm afraid. What it boils down to is that if your are synchronising your AD to O365 and are using Exchange Online - then you need to have an Exchange server to remain in a supported position, and manage on-premises attributes and SMTP relay.
That is not to say that it doesn't work without the Exchange Server. It certainly does and I've had a few customers make that choice. The Exchange Management Server is purely there to make your life easier and keep you supported.
I tend to put in an Exchange 2016 server for this and decommission older Exchange servers.
Hello, I am being asked to decommission our exchange 2016 server. I get conflicting information, so it sounds like its do-able but not supported. Correct?
I do have all mailboxes off on prem. We just use Ad Connect, so I guess I need to find step by step directions on how to do it if we did go that route. My one question I have and I don't know if you know the answer. I read somewhere that you have to create the users in AD on prem and then create it in the cloud for email. How do you sync them? Maybe I need to post this as its own question? Thanks