Forum Discussion
StefanoC66
Jan 31, 2022Iron Contributor
AD Connect with an existing O365 Tenant
we're about to enable AD Connect for an active Office 365 tenant and need some clarifications.
The Tenant is hosting O365 users with exchange online for the organization mail domain company.org but at the moment is disconnected from the On-Prem AD.
So all the users have been defined on the tenant with smtp email address as Email address removed.
No Exchange Server is present onprem.
The question is about Soft Merge and exchange management after the AD Connect is installed.
- Am I correct that simply having the logon account UPN been equal to the Tenant's username will be enough to "match" the users and have them synchronized by AD as master ?
- What happens to exchange online mailboxes ? Will there be any impact ?
As far as I know when the users are "managed" by AD an on-prem exchange server should be present to manage the "email" properties.
thanks
SC
- Yes, UPN, Primary SMTP Address or "mail" are the fields used for "soft match", any should work. And yes on the management front, every scenario that involves directory synchronization requires you to have at least one Exchange box on premises, for management purposes. This is the only *supported* by Microsoft solution, although other configurations will still work. At the very least though, make sure you have the on premises AD schema extended with the Exchange attributes.
- StefanoC66Iron ContributorHello
what about possible impacts on exchange mailboxes when activating the sync ?
DO we have to manually modify the "exchange" properties of each AD users to reflect the Exchange Online users. before activating the sync ?- No, you don't. And you cannot, as you don't have the Exchange AD schema extensions available. The more important caveat here is that you will need to manage everything from on-premises once you "match" the objects, which includes the Exchange properties. This is the reason why Microsoft only "supports" configurations in which there is at least one Exchange server on premises, as the Exchange management tools are the only one supported for the task of managing Exchange objects and attributes.