Azure AD not writing back email address...

[CyBeRkId2002]

This summer we have moved to Office 365 for our students (from local exchange) and everything seems to go well, except on first run Outlook was not auto-creating the Outlook account, after a bit of trial and error, some double-checking of autodiscover settings etc. it seems to be as simple as users not having the primary SMTP field populated within local AD.

 

Our process is:

 

Create users in local AD

This is synced with Office 365 using Azure AD Connect

Assign them a licence in Microsoft 365 (via script)

The above creates them their email account

 

I had presumed as we have Azure AD Connect the primary SMTP email would be written back to the local AD (which is where Outlook looks for the email address). Is this not the case? How do you manage this? Manually populate the email address field too when creating the account? Or should, as I suspect, it be syncing?

[TechMonkey]

I may be wrong, as I have never fully got my head around this, but I think unless you have a hybrid setup this will not work. You need to have an onsite Exchange instance to have the Exchange schema extensions and to allow AD to be updated locally.

 

Or something like that.

[snagrat]

You have to manually populate the email address in AD.

I’ve never known it to write back

[CyBeRkId2002]

ah, ok. I find that strange but that at least explains the problems I am getting.

 

Will look for a tool to auto-populate this. I am guessing it is just the AD email field I need.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

Also, we have hybrid fully setup and everything else is working. Just not this.

[jmak]

I found this issue too. Obviously there's a powershell solution, but since I don't speak powershell, I used the free Solarwinds tool:

 

https://www.solarwinds.com/free-tools/active-directory-admin-tools-bundle

[mukz]

I am sure you need to choose the additional attributes you want to be written back. In this case the SMTP address.

 

Just re read and saw you have hybrid exchange enabled.

My one definitely writes back the email to all new users.

 

Our process is the same as yours, except salamander provisions the mailbox using the same script as you would if you were to do it yourself.

Edited August 15, 2019 by mukz

[TechMonkey]

If you have hybrid then it should be written as long as you are creating users in AD first. We also use Salamander so rely on that.

[aicrd]

AFAIK Azure AD Connect does not write back to locally hosted AD without a hybrid deployment or SSPR configured.

 

Maybe it's worth checking to see if the hybrid deployment is functioning properly?

 

Otherwise you could have a powershell script that auto-populates the email field after assigning the licences. You should be able to use the PowerShell AD provider to do this.

[3s-gtech]

ADModify.NET will also allow you to bulk update the email address fields quickly if you want a GUI.