[ms office - 2016] Staff accounts in O365 with Onsite Exchange

[timbo343]

Bear with me on this, it may sound a little muddled.

 

We have an onsite exchange which I'm planning on keeping for a while whilst i get O365 setup. We have teacher contacts setup for student use so they can email staff without having the excuse of "i didnt know their email address". When i import staff accounts into O365 i get an error of "An object with the same proxy address already exists in Azure Active Directory but is of an incompatible object type (object classes: contact, group, or user). Correct this issue in the local directory services or in Azure Active Directory and try again."

 

I know why this error is displaying, it's to do with the same staff email address being used twice, one as a contact and one as an account. If i remove a teacher contact from O365, the staff account gets created without any errors but students are unable to see staff email contacts / email addresses as ive removed the specific staff member from the contacts list. Also, i dont have online exchange enabled so stutdents cannot see staff email contacts that are setup in O365.

 

I guess i would need to setup my on-premise exchange to be in hybrid mode so exchange and O365 can be in sync. Is there any other way of doing this?

[karldenton]

When we did the migration from exchange 2010 to office 365, we didn't run hybrid mode. We just set it in the O365 admin to sync with the old mail server. It tells you how many its imported. (Yes you'll have to remove the staff contacts from O365 initially.)

 

Just a thought - and I would do it this way if I was doing it again. We don't run any sync between AD and Office 365. Yes staff have to have a different password that they can change it they want but it means we have no syncing issues at all mate. Staff can setup outlook / phones as long as the correct autodiscover records are in place. Took us a while of testing as we had 12 domains from Godaddy and 1and1 to setup but works great now.