New Local Active Directory Server for an Existing Office 365 Environment.
Greetings,
I'm looking for a bit help with a small office using Office 365. They have about 30 workstations but do not have a server onsite. They are using Office 365 for Exchange, SharePoint, etc. The problem is maintaining user accounts and network printers on all 30 workstations is getting very painful. So, I'd like to deploy a small server and create a local AD Domain and sync all of the user accounts from Office 365 to the new DC. I've read several articles and TechNet docs about syncing with Azure AD Sync but everything I've read deals with syncing current domains or migrating from local domains to O365 and not vice versa. Has anyone tried doing this or know of a process for it?
I'm looking for a bit help with a small office using Office 365. They have about 30 workstations but do not have a server onsite. They are using Office 365 for Exchange, SharePoint, etc. The problem is maintaining user accounts and network printers on all 30 workstations is getting very painful. So, I'd like to deploy a small server and create a local AD Domain and sync all of the user accounts from Office 365 to the new DC. I've read several articles and TechNet docs about syncing with Azure AD Sync but everything I've read deals with syncing current domains or migrating from local domains to O365 and not vice versa. Has anyone tried doing this or know of a process for it?
ASKER
Awesome, that sounds like a really good time. So, just to clarify: I create a new empty domain, create users based on the O365 accounts / email address property, and then go through the sync process to match the local and cloud accounts? Would it be wise to make the on-prem domain namespace a domain.local instead of the public namespace of domain.com?
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ASKER
Got it. Good info Cliff, thanks for the help!
So you'll be creating the on-prem domain accounts, not just pulling them down from AAD. Once created, as long as you ensure the SMTP address property matches their primary address in Office 365, then when you do set up syncing, Office 365 will soft-match using that address and future on-prem changes will properly sync to the exiting O365 account. But you do have some initial setup to do if you go that route.