Forum Discussion
Remove On Premises exchange Hybrid and go fully Online
Gentlemen,
Thank you for this valuable info first of all. Secondly, I am with the school of thought that you can keep managing attributes in AD especially the mail ones like proxyAddress and targetAddress attributes. Having your last Exchange server around is unnecessary to me personally as the simple process of create accounts and syncing attributes is simple enough to provision mailboxes in Exch Online.
However, I can assume why Microsoft has given us a blanket answer for keeping ONE last Exch server around. The answer being that while MS goes around updating exchange server versions behind the scenes for all the client tenants. They may introduce new attributes (perhaps?) that only Active Directory may not house. I am talking about msExch attributes which is a big deal. Having a gap say between customers decommissioning from an Exchange 2013 hybrid while Exch Online will be running 2019 for a customer tenant. This is a dangerous gap to have... wouldn't you all agree? With having one exch server around, the onus will be on the customer to eventually upgrade the AD schema and employ such newer attributes to take advantage of features in Exch online. I hope I make sense in my assumption. What are your thoughts?
Everything you say makes sense, but it all comes down to running an environment supported by Microsoft. This may or may not matter in some scenarios but for me anyway I'd rather be managing a supported setup.
I'd highly recommend having a look for Hybrid related sessions coming out of Ignite 2018 as the story may have changed somewhat.
Ian
I am just now looking into doing a O365 migration and when you look at the MS documentation they really push the Hybrid path for any site over 150 users, but it doesn't talk in the migration planing guides about the issues with decommissioning. Only because I am doing a lab setup and I am getting to the decommissioning faze with that, that I running across this.
It seems like if this is the migration scenario they are going to push they need to do some more work on getting it so you can really do a clean cut at the end.