Forum Discussion
Exchange Online and Azure AD Connect
Yeap, create a user in AD, add SMTP entry with main email address to ProxyAddresses attribute. Wait or force AD Connect sync, then find the user in Office 365 admin center and apply a license. Mailbox is created in a few minutes usually.
It is different with shared mailboxes though. We create them in Office 365. It shows an error that it can't save changes to AD (we don't have Azure AD Premium and writeback enabled). But mailbox is created and works correctly. There is just no information about it in local AD. Same for rooms.
I've created shared and resource mailboxes in AD as regular users and gave them Exchange license in Office 365. After the mailbox is created, I converted the mailbox to shared and removed the license. This way I can manage them (i.e. emailaddresses) from on-prem AD. Send As etc. needs to be managed in Office 365 unless you have the Exchange schema.
- Seems sketchy 😉. I’d rather just keep a VM around to stay supported hehe. It’s not that much work ;)
Well, it's debatable. I just can't force myself thinking it is normal to have to keep an Exchange server (and keep it up to date) just to administer users. MS should really do something about it (like making a slim tool instead of having to install Exchange). But they won't, as they hope everyone will eventually move fully to the cloud :) I had a number of Exchange related tickets during the year (one dealing with some rogue entry from our local AD which ended up having address, but no mailbox attached somehow) and support never asked how we manage mailboxes. MS partners helping us with migration to Office 365 also didn't warn us strongly about this. It's a common practice as i understood (maybe in small-mid size orgs).
- Agree. Makes sense. I need to see if they had any exchange sessions going over if they made progress in this st ignite. Cause I want to say last year was when I sat in on one when they were talking about working on letting us decommission onprem exchange in a supported manner.
