Forum Discussion
Exchange Online and Azure AD Connect
I have often read that the on-prem Exchange server is required but we have been using Office 365 for about 3 years and decommissioned our on-prem Exchange server about 2 years ago.
Apparently there are things we can't do without an on-prem Exchange server but we haven't found them yet.
Thank you for the feedback everyone - getting clearer. We have never used Exchange (migrated from Lotus Notes) and I want to avoid installing unless totally necessary. I will create a test domain and O365 tenant with Azure AD Connect to confirm a few things, but expect we'll avoid Exchange and just manage additional SMTP addresses using the suggestions in this thread.
One more question if anyone happens to know. The source anchor for things will now change to be on-prem Active Directory. Does this include user profile images? Azure AD Connect documentation states if the on-prem value is currently null (which it is for images), Azure AD values will not be 'wiped'. But I assume users can still update their avatar using O365? On further inspection, it appears the avatar value comes from Exchange which, as we have never used, would not even be in our AD attributes?
Thank you again.
We have on-prem SharePoint 2010 which works with local AD users. I can set avatar in there, but it doesn't overlap with O365 avatar, which is indeed set through Exchange.
Same here, decommisioned on-prem Exchange more than a year ago. So far not missing anything. Although i know this is not a supported setup. But it works and we don't have to manage another on-prem server. SMTP can be set via Attribute Editor in AD card of a user (need to turn on Advanced settings). Send As and Full Access can be set through Office 365 Admin Center or Exchange Online Admin Center. They are not synced back, so it doesn't complain about AD being read-only and the setting stick.
Oh, but as we already had on-prem Exchange, our schema is already modified, so i don't know if ProxyAddress attribute and some other didn't come from that. Maybe orgs using on-prem AD and going to Exchange Online still have to update schema to have needed attributes.
- Yeah that is true, since all of Exchange is basically ran via AD. So how do you guys create mailboxes then on new users? Just create the user in AD then add exchange online license and mailbox gets created since the attribute isn't there to prevent it?
