Azure AD Connect – Using AuthoritativeNull in a Sync Rule

1st of December, 2016 / / No Comments

There is a feature in Azure AD Connect that became available in the November 2015 build 1.0.9125.0 (listed here), which has not had much fanfare but can certainly come in handy in tricky situations. I happened to be working on a project that required the DNS domain linked to an old Office 365 tenant to be removed so that it could be used in a new tenant. Although the old tenant was no long used for Exchange Online services, it held onto the domain in question, and Azure AD Connect was being used to synchronise objects between the on-premise Active Directory and Azure Active Directory.… [Keep reading] “Azure AD Connect – Using AuthoritativeNull in a Sync Rule”

Active Directory – What are Linked Attributes?

26th of September, 2016 / / No Comments

A customer request to add some additional attributes to their Azure AD tenant via Directory Extensions feature in the Azure AD Connect tool, lead me into further investigation. My last blog here set out the customer request, but what I didn’t detail in that blog was one of the attributes they also wanted to extend into Azure AD was directReports, an attribute they had used in the past for their custom built on-premise applications to display the list of staff the user was a manager for.… [Keep reading] “Active Directory – What are Linked Attributes?”

Azure AD Connect – Multi-valued Directory Extensions

16th of September, 2016 / / No Comments

I happened to be at a customer site working on an Azure project when I was asked to cast a quick eye over an issue they had been battling with. They had an Azure AD Connect server synchronising user and group objects between their corporate Active Directory and their Azure AD, used for Office 365 services and other Azure-based applications. Their intention was to synchronise some additional attributes from their Active Directory to Azure AD so that they could be used by some of their custom built Azure applications.… [Keep reading] “Azure AD Connect – Multi-valued Directory Extensions”

Azure Active Directory Connect high-availability using ‘Staging Mode’

25th of June, 2015 / / 11 Comments

With the Azure Active Directory Connect product (AAD Connect) being announced as generally available to the market (more here, download here), there is a new feature available that will provide a greater speed of recovery of the AAD Sync component. This feature was not available with the previous AAD Sync or DirSync tools and there is little information about it available in the community, so hopefully this model can be considered for your synchronisation design.… [Keep reading] “Azure Active Directory Connect high-availability using ‘Staging Mode’”

AADSync – AD Service Account Delegated Permissions

18th of December, 2014 / / 26 Comments

Note: This applies to Azure AD Connect, previously referred to as AAD Sync or DirSync.

***UPDATED (04/07/2016): Includes Exchange Hybrid Object ‘msDS-ExternalDirectoryObjectID’ for Exchange 2016 environments. Thanks Dave Young.

***UPDATED (29/10/2015): Included two lines for Password Write-back as per Chris Lehr Comment

When you configure Azure AD Sync (AADSync), you need to provide credentials of an account that is used by AADSync’s AD DS Management Agent to connect to your on-premises Active Directory. In previous versions of DirSync this was achieved via running the configuration wizard as a ‘Enterprise Admin’ and thus allowing the installer to create a service account and apply permissions to the Directory on your behalf.… [Keep reading] “AADSync – AD Service Account Delegated Permissions”

ADSync Cmdlets

23rd of October, 2014 / / 1 Comment

I really enjoyed the later versions of DirSync which included a native PowerShell Module to execute sync engine tasks and show some global configuration settings. Now that we are looking at moving over to the new tool AADSync there is a new module installed but with very little reference to it available on the web at time of writing this blog. I’ve outlined the name of the cmdlets below but the ‘Get-Help’ doesn’t offer any description or examples as yet so I’ve included some in this post.… [Keep reading] “ADSync Cmdlets”