Complex Mail Routing in Exchange Online Staged Migration Scenario

15th of October, 2016 / Shane Fisher / No Comments

Notes From the Field:

I was recently asked to assist an ongoing project with understanding some complex mail routing and identity scenario’s which had been identified during planning for an upcoming mail migration from an external system into Exchange Online.
New User accounts were created in Active Directory for the external staff who are about to be migrated. If we were to assign the target state, production email attributes now, and create the exchange online mailboxes, we would have a problem nearing migration.… [Keep reading] “Complex Mail Routing in Exchange Online Staged Migration Scenario”

WPAD and Proxy Auth Cause Exchange HCW to Fail

4th of May, 2016 / Joel Neff / No Comments

A recent conversation with a colleague reminded me of an issue I’ve faced a number of times (and forgotten to blog about) when running the Exchange Hybrid Configuration Wizard (HCW) on Exchange 2010 or 2013 in an environment where Web Proxy Autodiscovery Protocol (WPAD) is used.

The Problem

The most common scenario where I’ve seen this come into play is along the lines of this:

WPAD is used to distribute Proxy.PAC to client machines
Customer permits direct connection from Exchange servers to Internet
From an elevated command prompt, run “netsh winhttp reset proxy” to ensure a direct connection
Change Internet Options settings from “Automatically detect settings” to “Disabled”
Browse to a site restricted by the proxy to confirm proxy bypass is working
Can connect to Exchange Online using Remote PowerShell
Run the HCW but it fails with the following error in the logs:
ERROR : System.Management.Automation.RemoteException:

… [Keep reading]

Exchange Server hybrid “edition” myths and misunderstandings

28th of April, 2016 / Lucian Franghiu / 35 Comments

There’s a common misunderstanding that Exchange Server hybrid (whichever version you may be running) is needed to be kept on-premises forever if you have Azure AD Connect. AADC syncs on-premises Active Directory with Azure AD. When AADC and federated identity is enabled, MOST of the cloud attributes in Azure AD are READ ONLY. From that statement it’s been understood that hybrid is needed to be maintained to do all that Exchange Online remote management goodness. Wrong!

I hate to burst the bubble here, but, I’m going to burst the bubble.

Exchange Server Hybrid

Being a consultant, I’m going to do that frustrating thing and say those famous words: “it depends on the situation”. I love being ambiguous sometimes as it affords room for different options and ideas which is great for brainstorming and architecting.

Looking at Exchange Server hybrid functionality independently of thinking about the common tech phrase “hybrid”, what does Exchange Server hybrid do? Put simply, which isn’t very clear on TechNet or other publications, hybrid creates send and receive connectors between on-premises and Office 365 EXO. It’s now just a wizard / setup application that completes a few commands that can be achieved manually through powershell. It’s not even an Exchange Server role anymore.

Exchange Server 2016 Hybrid upgrade considerations

7th of March, 2016 / Lucian Franghiu / 9 Comments

Exchange Server 2016, RTM as of October 2015, is still very much freshly baked having just come out of the oven from Redmond. Two recent projects that I’ve worked on have required me to consider deploying it as the “Hybrid” server (not an actual role- I’ll get to that later) for integration and coexistence with Office 365 Exchange Online.

With anything new there is a learning curve as to how the new product now works (not that dissimilar from previous versions of Exchange Server) and what will work with the existing environment to not compromise service.

There is an unwritten assumption that is made in our hybrid guidance that you have already properly deployed and completed the coexistence process with the current versions of Exchange in your on-premises environment.

– The Exchange Team