Hello,
Many of my SBS clients are migrating to Office 365 Exchange Online and getting rid of their on-premises Exchange server that comes bundled in SBS 2011 Standard. I have one client who has migrated to Office 365 Exchange online and federated their A/D with ADFS and DirSync.
I have followed the Microsoft whitepapers and KBs for migration to Office 365. The KBs say to remove the on-premises Exchange server if your end result is not a hybrid Exchange configuration. However, I have read where the best-practice for SBS customers is to leave Exchange installed on the SBS server and instead just disable the Exchange services because SBS updates may break if Exchange is not there. This is all fine and nice except that disabling the Exchange services breaks functionality in the SBS console, specifically the add a new user wizard. If I leave the Exchange services running, the Wizard creates an on-premises Exchange user mailbox that I then have to migrate to Office 365 Exchange online.
What is the office response from Microsoft concerning adding and maintaining users in SBS 2011 Standard federated with Office365 when Exchange has been migrated to Office 365 and is no longer needed? Do I tell the client to stop using the SBS console and use ADUC instead? What additional steps are needed if I establish the policy to use ADUC for user maintenance? Will I break functionality in SBS?
I've messed around with different ways of doing this, but I would like an official response from the Microsoft SBS and Office 365 product groups. I'm sure I am not the first customer to have this question.
Thank you.
- Randy