Tuesday, March 18, 2014

How to setup Multiple Office 365 Tenants in a Single Active Directory with Steve Goodman!!!

I recently read this excellent post from our renowned MVP Steve Goodman on Search Exchange Forum in TechTarget on Using multiple Office 365 tenants with a single Active Directory and this reading puts you one step beyond the traditional reading we do for managing and implementing Office 365. I would call this is a good and a must read for every Office 365 Administrators to know things out of the box when we face new challenges during a complex design requirement of a customer per his current Infrastructure setup and to know what needs to be looked out first to complete his requirement through adequate knowledge and successfully implement a solution which meet their current standards and also pay way for future upgrades.



let's get in to our topic, one more key feature with Office 365 now is the support for Multiple Tenants with Single Active Directory, there are scenarios where customer Organization is split across different regions and they required to manage different locations separately and have seamless experience without any network overload and do not interested in changing their present setup for new implementations. In this scenario, some customers still prefer to have multiple Office 365 Tenants and ready to deploy additional servers if needed and spend some additional cost but their end motive is we should not re-architect their current setup and should not cause any impact to the End user and Business Experience. Though this is possible there are some caveats to look for and Steve wrote this excellent blog post to show you how things will work when you go for such model and what you should do as an Administrator when working on such projects.

Check the article here : Is a single Office 365 tenant better than using multiple tenants?

Additional Bytes:

You need to know one more key feature which is made possible with Office 365 Hybrid deployment for customers using Multiple SMTP domains using the right version of On premises Exchange Server 2010/2013 products on their environment for Autodiscover, which is an add-on read and I missed to blog about this on time and sharing this here.

Microsoft team made a recent innovation with Exchange Server 2013 and Exchange Server 2010 SP3 RU1 or later, wherein you have the new Autodiscover domain feature, which typically assist Hybrid customers who are using multiple SMTP domains in their environment to save cost by removing the requirement for having all the SMTP domains on the SSL cert which was previously a  mandate requirement and with this releases you can utilize the feature and setup one of your Primary SMTP domain as the Autodiscover domain name and the rest of the domains will be added automatically and configured to use the Primary SMTP domain for autodiscover settings when you run the HCW and this really a great deal for most of the Hybrid Customers.

I got this update from our renowned Office 365 MVP Sean McNeill on his blog. 

Refer the post here to know more: Office 365 Hybrid Configuration with Multiple SMTP Domains

Also read the below ExitCodeZero blog post on this feature with additional information,

Using the Autodiscover Domain feature to enable multiple SMTP domains in your hybrid configuration

Finally, With the latest release of Exchange Server 2013 SP1 we have now support for Multiple Active Directory Forest with Office 365 Hybrid deployment, check my earlier blog post on the same.

Review this TechNet blog post below to know more on these topics and get your Q & A addressed.

Multi-Forest and Multi-Tenant scenarios with Office 365

Update:

Steve started to write another Excellent series on Setting up a multi-forest hybrid Exchange deployment this year 2015, review this series to know more.

Access here : Setting up a multi-forest hybrid Exchange deployment

These are great Innovations with Office 365 for now and we can expect more in the upcoming days.

Update:

If you are looking to know how to Migrate mailboxes and service settings from one Office 365 tenant to another, the below blog post will be the best source to begin.

Access here: How to migrate mailboxes from one Office 365 tenant to another

Stay tuned for more updates...

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