Forum Discussion
Remove On Premises exchange Hybrid and go fully Online
This question rises every now and then. For short: you don't NEED an exchange server, attributes can be edited in ADUC as described in this message thread. After all, there are organizations which have never had an Exchange server and are running Office 365 (as I do).
AFAIK only thing you'll loose is email policies.
Nestori Syynimaa if you never had Exchange on-premises is something different because your AD objects don't have the exchange attributes and your AD doesn't have the exchange Schema.
If you had Exchange Server in your on-premises AD then your AD objects have exchange attributes. That means that you are going to have conflicts if you don't follow the best practices regarding a hybrid exchange environment.
Sure Spiros Karampinis, it is a bit different but in practice that is irrelevant. Basically all you need is proxyAddresses attribute, which is included "normal" AD schema.
Again, you do not NEED an on-prem Exchange server - although this is not "supported" by Microsoft.
Nestori Syynimaa thank you for your reply.
How can you guarantee that the additional proxyAddress doesn't already exist,
or if the mailNickname that you set isn't occupied by another user?
Worth for you the whole pre-check workload the time and your energy to avoid having one more virtual machine with 2 vCPU and 4GB vRAM and an Exchange instance installed?
- You should be able to use policy’s as usual!
As said, the caveat is when you use adconnect to sync objects - making it more troublesome to change attributes and settings related to mail, without an on premises exchange serverEmail policies (automatically assign addresses) is a feature only available in on-prem Exchange. I would like to see this feature also in EOL - at least for pure-cloud environment. Anyways, if you remove on-prem Exchange server, you will loose the email policies feature.
- Alright, was thinking about overal policy’s you can use
