Office365 and Active Directory Integration (and On-premise Exchange Disintegration)

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We used to have on premise exchange server which is integrated with active directory (the PDC and Exchange Server are all the same Windows 2008 small business server). We migrated our Exchange to Office 365 and everything works fine however, for the users whose machines are a member of the domain, anytime they want to add a new profile, they are automatically connected to the local on-premise exchange instead of Office365.

Our local auto discover is configured so that it points to Office 365's autodiscover (autodiscover.outlook.com) and still it connects to the local server.

Any thoughs on how to disintegrate our MS Exchange from Active Directory, at least for some users?

Best Answer

The recommended steps at the end of this post can help greatly: http://community.office365.com/en-us/f/156/t/176968.aspx I have not tested it yet as we have some other users that will use the old exchange for now, but it seems pretty promising. This can be done either per user or for the whole system.

To Recap:

  1. Decomissioning the Exchange Server as per MSFT migration instructions does the trick.

  2. Taking the following steps disables autodiscover:

    1. Open an elevated Exchange Management Shell and retrieve the current autodiscover virtual directory:

      Get-AutodiscoverVirtualDirectory | fl Name, Server, InternalUrl, Identity

      Copy the Identity value to the clipboard. Note the internal URL

    2. In the Exchange Management Shell, remove the autodiscover virtual directory:

      Remove-AutodiscoverVirtualDirectory -Identity ''

      You will have to confirm by typing a "A".

    3. Check that the autodiscover virtual directory is gone:

      Get-AutodiscoverVirtualDirectory | fl Name, Server, InternalUrl, Identity

      1. Internal mailbox records in AD and they may cause issues:

    Active Directory Users and Groups > View > Advanced Features

    Look at the properties for each user and on the attribute editor tab clear the homeMDB and homeMTA attributes. These are also cleared once the mailboxes are disabled.

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