Last Update: Sep 24, 2024 | Published: Aug 21, 2013
In the first part of this series on setting up AD directory synchronization with Office 365, I looked at some of the concepts involved and basic preparation of your onsite AD. In this article, I’ll describe how to activate synchronization for your Office 365 subscription, and how to install and configure the onsite Directory Synchronization tool.
Before activating Active Directory synchronization, Microsoft recommends that you add your own custom domain to Office 365 to provide users with a better experience. Chances are that if you are using Office 365 for email or SharePoint, you will already be using your own domain name. If that is not the case, it’s recommended (though not a requirement) to add a custom domain name to Office 365 before activating AD synchronization.
Before you install your Directory Synchronization server, you should activate AD synchronization in Office 365 in the administration center:
Don’t try to install the Directory Synchronization tool until AD synchronization has been successfully activated in Office 365. Additionally, make sure that you’ve read part one of this series and have understood the requirements for installing the Directory Synchronization tool.
The configuration wizard allows you to set the basic parameters for synchronization and user credentials for connecting to your local AD and Office 365. The wizard can be run again at any time using the shortcut installed on the desktop.
On the following screen, you get the option to enable hybrid deployment, allowing some Active Directory object attributes that are modified in Office 365 to be written back to your local AD. This is a requirement for some Office 365 functionality, such as email. If you don’t want or need to enable a hybrid deployment right now, you can run the configuration wizard again to enable it. Note that if you don’t have Exchange in your local environment, this option will be greyed out.
If there are any errors during synchronization, an email notification will be sent to the address registered as the cloud service technical contact when you signed up for Office 365. If an account is successfully synchronizing to Office 365, you will not be able to edit the account’s properties in the online administration portal. The status of the account in the online portal will also show Synched with Active Directory.
Additionally, you could either create a new local AD account and check that it gets synchronized to Office 365, or modify an attribute of an existing local AD account, such as Job Title.
Remember that synchronization occurs once every three hours, so if you don’t want to wait that long to verify synchronization is working, you can force synchronization on the Directory Synchronization server:
Once your AD accounts are being successfully synchronized to Office 365, you should bear in mind that you will still need to manually assign licenses to new accounts.
Now that the Directory Synchronization tool synchronizes passwords to Office 365, it gives organizations that don’t want to manage Active Directory Federation Services a more convenience option and the ability to manage passwords between the corporate intranet and public cloud more effectively. Importantly, users won’t need to worry about either remembering two separate passwords for the same username on different systems, which can be confusing, or having to reset their Office 365 password when their local AD password expires.