Azure & Active Directory Center

The question "which federation protocol should I use" comes up frequently when talking to developers in my company. Fortunately MS has a PFE who has blogged on the subject.

The article is fantastic and technically accurate in the details. I highly recommend reading it. But I disagree at a higher level with the conclusions the author makes. I think I can explain that disagreement by examining the PFE’s situation. Firstly, he wrote this 5 months ago, and the situation changes quickly in federation. Secondly, he works for Microsoft and as a PFE the scenarios he encounters are likely more Microsoft focused than those of us in the “wild”. Thirdly, he is focused on ADFS as his technical area, it is the focus of his blog and he is quite clear on that.

Many companies have business relationships with SaaS partners that use SAML for authentication. ADFS works very well for many as a SAML WS-* federation infrastructure, although we have had some hiccups and incompatibilities along the way. One thing that comes up every now and then is applying business rules to the federation trust with a partner. Microsoft has done a very good job of explaining how to implement certain business rules for Office365 in some of their official blog posts by PFE’s. But what I have not seen is some of that practical help applied to non Microsoft services that we rely on.

As mentioned in my 2015 New Year in Review "Here We Are" blog article, the purpose of this article series is to explore 3rd-party federation solutions that work with Office 365 and which can be an alternative to a Windows’ built-in ADFS server role. In this first article however, I will be discussing a solution which is somewhat different from the others that I will be looking into.

Last year, Exchange Server MVP Mike Crowley wrote a script which would interactively report on the Office 365 Directory Synchronization tool. In the meantime –last September to be more exact – Microsoft released the new “Azure AD Sync Service” tool which seems deemed to replace DirSync at some point in the future. As I do see the tool being used in production from time to time, effectively already replacing DirSync, I thought it would be useful to “upgrade” Mike’s script to work with the new kid on the block.

In Exchange 2010 users can create distribution lists that are visible to the whole organization through Outlook Web App in the user Options.  By default these are created in the Users OU in Active Directory.

After preparing federation between Office 365 and the on-premise Active Directory and configuring the Office 365 tenant in the previous post, this article describes the installation of the Microsoft Online Services Directory Synchronization Setup (DirSync).

DirSync is required to synchronize your on-premise accounts and security groups to Office 365.

After preparing the AD FS requirements and installing the AD FS Server Role in part 1, this article describes the steps to configure the Active Directory Federation Services for further use and the eventual integration with Office 365.

To configure an Exchange Server 2013 hybrid deployment with Office 365 you need to have Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) configured properly in your on-premise environment. The short series of articles about AD FS show you the easy steps to configure your AD FS deployment.

In the previous two parts of this series I took you through building a Windows 2012 server on Hyper-V Server and then in the second part took you through the process of installing Active Directory Domain Services.

In this part of the series I would like to take you through the process of installing and configuring Microsoft Active Directory Certificate Services on your domain controller.

In the previous part of this series (Part 1), I took you through to the point where you now have a basic Hyper-V guest which can be used as the domain controller for your Exchange 2013 Test Lab. In this part I would like to take you through how you can install Active Directory on that guest machine.