Friday, June 13, 2014

Directory Synchronization Test Lab Guide

Setting up Directory Synchronization is vital part with Office 365, Microsoft team continue to do major changes with the Identity and Authentication platform where the traditional Dirsync Tool ( Down sized version of FIM) used to sync Objects from your On premises AD to Office 365 has gone through a drastic change in the recent days, if you look at the Road-map over this tool from Microsoft,  you can notice it was enhanced with great features like "password hash" a new feature that provides ability for users to use same password to access Office 365 resources with out the need of ADFS, where now major Organizations are switching from ADFS SSO to Password Hash post this feature, then its further enhanced to support password write back feature where passwords are written back to On premises once they are reset in cloud with Azure AD premium, further more now it acts as a backup for ADFS SSO in a Disaster Recovery scenario.


Microsoft team published a test lab guide with clear instructions for setting up Dirsync Server in lab and test its ability to have hands on experience on the tool, this post is a reference to the tool for readers to utilize this guide and setup Dirsync server on their lab to see how it really setup and works along with few other vital information over this tool in a nutshell.


Download here: Test Lab Guide: Set Up a Directory Synchronization Server to Sync Users with Office 365 


Final Thoughts...

Microsoft team is planning to retire this Tool in the mere future and introduce their new Azure Active Directory Sync Services Tool  which performs the same role as Dirsync server with some advance capabilities that support complex Multi-forest topologies along with other set of enhanced features and serves as a single robust tool, which still under evaluation and development to add few new capabilities before it reaches final availability and soon you can receive an global announcement on the replacement of the Dirsync Tool in the upcoming days.


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