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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.
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.
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.
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.
