Exchange Hybrid with o365 who's got it working?

[sister_annex]

So after many days of trying (and failing) to get a proper hybrid solution working with our on site exchange and O365 I'm at the point where I need help or I feel the entire project may grind to a halt.

 

So a bit of back story...

 

In the beginning I updated our aging exchange Infrastructure from 2003 to 2010 - upgrade and migration went smoothly. Now, we have 200 staff who use Exchange our 1500 pupils however, never had access and still dont. More recently we have had a new head who, rightly imo, wants the students to have access to email. In steps O365...

 

Now in terms of setting up O365 I got everything sorted that I can. Based on threads here and advice from other places we decided on a CSO option using dirsync. Our tenant has been successfully set up and verified and all our users will use [email protected] to login - this will also be their email address. At this point all is working as expected and once licensed, users can log in to O365 as normal.

 

In terms of the Exchange Hybrid Setup I have started the configuration with the help of the Exchange Deployment Tool and a few helpful blogs but for some strange reason it fails to complete. For the initial setup I would like to keep all of our staff on our On Premise Exchange with students using Office 365 with all email being routed through our Exchange.

 

I can imagine there is something that I have missed, something isn't configured right etc etc... but for the love of me I cannot fathom why the two services won't communicate properly.

 

Do any of you lovely people out there have any hints, tips, pointers that a slowly balding tech can have before he pulls all his hair out??

 

Cheers!

[FN-GM]

Whats the error when the Wizzard fails?

 

Does your exchange server access the internet via a proxy server? I have found the wizzard has issues when exchange goes via a proxy.

[sister_annex]

I'll post the errors later as I am currently tied up with something else, but yes we do go via a proxy and we also sit on our local GfL internet connection

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

I'll post the errors later as I am currently tied up with something else, but yes we do go via a proxy and we also sit on our local GfL internet connection

[Haptic]

I'm certain I can help with this.

 

If you'd like to call me I can discuss (free of course)

When we get you sorted we'll post our findings.

 

Andy Radcliffe - [email protected] - 01536 316878 - direct

[sister_annex]

Andy,

 

Thanks for your offer, I will drop you an email at some point - we're busy with other things at the moment so this has been put on the back burner for a day or two but will hopefully get in touch with you later in the week

 

Cheers

[Brightmike]

We are also setting up Office 365 for our students, which to my surprise initially went rather smoothly until we got to the email part.

 

I know your frustration, we too use an onsite exchange server and are now trying to either disable the Office 365 mail app (and use our existing web access as before) or integrate the Office 356 app with our own exchange, as we have policies restricting students form emailing outside of our address book.

 

We are registered on the free E1 agreement for online app access only, so I am not sure why it has given us access to cloud email anyway?

 

Any help on this topic would be very welcome.

[Haptic]

You can restrict email access to your Office 365 Users by removing their Exchange License. However if you do that you need to think about user experience and what the Office 365 service will then look like. What other bits of Office 365 have you implemented and are you using Student advantage?

 

You haven’t mentioned which version of exchange you are running so I can’t advise what configurations or migration options are possible. But I can tell you that if you did migrate locking your students email accounts down the a defined set of addresses and blocking email from external fqdn’s is quite straightforward. My contact details are in the post above if you need some more bespoke advice.