We're happy to announce that we've enhanced Exchange Server Deployment Assistant to include support for configuring rich coexistence (also known as “hybrid deployment”) for organizations interested in maintaining some users on-premises with Exchange 2010 and some users hosted in the cloud by Microsoft Office 365 for enterprises. This scenario is in addition to the existing support for configuring rich coexistence between on-premises Exchange 2003 and Exchange 2007 organizations and Office 365.
The new coexistence information for the Exchange 2010 environment is only available in English at this time and requires that your existing Exchange 2010 servers are updated to Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1 (SP1).
Rich coexistence (“hybrid deployment”) offers organizations the ability to extend the feature-rich experience and administrative control they have with their existing on-premises Microsoft Exchange organization to the cloud. It provides the seamless look and feel of a single Exchange organization between an on-premises organization and a cloud-based organization. In addition, coexistence can serve as an intermediate step to moving completely to a cloud-based Exchange organization. This approach is different than the simple Exchange migration (aka cutover migration) and staged Exchange migration options currently offered by Office 365 outlined in Email Migration Overview in Exchange Online help.
If you're not already familiar with the Exchange Deployment Assistant, it allows you to create Exchange Server 2010 on-premises configuration and deployment instructions that are customized to your environment. It asks you a small set of simple questions and it provides a checklist with instructions that are designed to deploy or configure Exchange 2010 based on your answers. In addition to the online checklist, you can even print a PDF of your checklist.
Figure 1: The Exchange Server Deployment Assistant (ExDeploy) is a web-based tool that helps you upgrade to Exchange 2010 on-premises, deploy a hybrid on-premises and Exchange Online organization or migrate to Exchange Online
Your feedback is very important for the continued improvement of this tool. We would love your feedback on this new scenario and any other area of the Deployment Assistant. Feel free to either post comments on this blog post, provide feedback in the Office 365 community migration and coexistence forum, or send an email to edafdbk@microsoft.com via the 'Feedback' link located in the header of every page of the Deployment Assistant. Thanks!