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How to move distribution groups fully to the cloud?

Steel Contributor

We have about 500 distribution groups in our on-premise Active Directory. They are synced via AD Connect.

 

Is there a way to make AzureAD the authoritative source, without having to recreate the groups in the cloud only? Basically cutting the ties to our on-premise AD, so we can delete the groups in our local AD without it affecting them in AzureAD?

 

The alternative (that I rather don't do) would be to delete them from on-premise, sync the deletion and then recreate them in the cloud. But that way we risk that our users get NDR messages until they delete their Outlook cache, which is quite a problem with 700 users.

5 Replies

I know that script, but that's exactly what I'm trying to avoid.

The only way to make Azure AD the SOA is to disable DirSync. With user objects we have some other options/workarounds, but for groups we cannot play with the anchor/immutableID.

Ugh... why it is not possible to change the SOA via Powershell ist beyond me.

@adam deltinger 

 

Has anyone actually tried this? I'm wondering if the members of the groups are replicated as well or is it just the distribution group?