Need to add the hybrid EMC to an existing 365/Azure AD Connect environment.

Copper Contributor

I inherited the following setup that I would like to fix. Customer has migrated ALL MB's to 365 and decommissioned the on-prem exchange servers. Azure AD Connect is running and the optional feature "Exchange Hybrid Deployment" is not selected. I would like to add the EMC on-prem so I can manage MB properties in 365 instead of using the AD Attribute Editor. What is the best way to approach this. Should I Install the EMC on-prem, configure Hybrid and then reconfigure Az AD Connect. Is it that simple?

2 Replies

That wont help you, you will still have to manage the mailbox/user properties on-premises. As in general for every configuration involving AAD Connect. If you want to manage them directly in O365, you have to disable DirSync.

 

Also, you don't need the Hybrid option, that's only intended for actual Hybrid setups.

@tmarshall66 yes that is a right mess, the previous team put you in an unsupported configuration. Since you have AD and AD connect, you do indeed need to reintroduce Exchange. I think you should be OK just installing it in the normal way, you may find that new users created after Exchange was removed do not have all the required attributes (and so do not show up in the EAC as cloud mailboxes you can manage), but most of them should do if they were migrated using hybrid mailbox move requests.

I would stand up a test environment and test the re-introduction of Exchange before doing this in live, you could do this on Azure fairly easily with a test O365 tenant, although quite a bit of work to configure everything of course.