Active Directory Synchronization for Office 365 and Azure has been a vital, but fairly straight forward, part of Office 365 migrations for almost 5 years now. DirSync was updated to Azure Active Directory Sync, and AAD Sync was updated to Azure Active Directory Connect. In this blog post, I’m going to cover everything you need to know about deploying the newest version of AAD Connect.
Consider the following scenario: you are about to implement directory synchronization for Office 365. You have multiple Active Directory sites across several, geographically dispersed, locations all over the world. Unsurprisingly, some of these locations have better connectivity than others and you might not want AAD Connect to connect to Domain Controllers in locations with a slow or high latency connection at the risk of slowing down the entire process.
On December 3, Microsoft had an outage that affected their Office 365 service for customers in most of Europe. More precisely, the outage was actually in Azure Active Directory.
The good people at ENow asked me to do a webinar on Identity and Authentication Management for Office 365, which I presented live on November 18. I’m adding this blog post as a companion piece to that webinar, the video for which can be found at this link.
Welcome to the fifth part of this article series about Azure AD Connect. In the previous article, we've taken a look at some of the optional features you can enable for directory synchronization. In this article, we'll cover a few more features -- more specifically the User and Group write-back capabilities.
Welcome to the fourth part of this article series about Azure AD Connect. In the previous article, I discussed permissions for a custom installation, and we dived a little deeper into the upgrade capabilities. Before jumping into the 'advanced' customization options such the filtering abilities, I wanted to take a look at some of the additional (preview) features that Azure AD Connect offers to date.
Welcome to the third part of this article series about Azure AD Connect. In the previous article, I discussed the various custom installation options and the implications of using a separate SQL database.
Following that article, I received a few interesting questions that warranted some follow-up. More specifically, I had a few people call out that documentation regarding the required permissions for Azure AD Connect is scarce.
In the previous part of this article series, we've taken a first look at Azure AD Connect and reviewed what a default installation looks like using the express settings. In this part, we'll dive deeper into the advanced options of the installation wizard. The express settings option likely meets the needs for most organizations looking into deploying directory synchronization alone. However, if you are looking at a more complex synchronization scenario, like a multi-forest environment or if you would like to deploy and configure Active Directory Federation Services, the advanced options are what you are looking for!
Microsoft released Azure AD Connect to the public on June 24. The long-anticipated tool is the successor to Azure AD Sync and DirSync. But it’s much more than that.
Although a large part of Azure AD Connect still revolves around directory synchronization, I like to look at it more as a "Cloud Identity Enablement" — a solution rather than just a synchronization component. This is because Azure AD Connect not only allows you to deploy directory synchronization for almost every possible identity scenario you can dream of, but it also enables you to set up and configure identity federation through Active Directory Federation Services from within the same wizard.
Yesterday, Microsoft announced the General Availability (GA) of Azure AD Connect. Azure AD Connect is considered to be the successor to DirSync/AADSync. However, it is much more than just a synchronization engine. The tool allows customers to use a single wizard to configure various aspects of identity synchronization and authentication with Microsoft's Online Services.
