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Blue Tongue
Asked: 2019-02-16 04:53:56 +0800 CST

Powershell commands applicable to Exchange Online in O365 Hybrid Environment

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I have been happily using Powershell to automate a lot of admin task in an Exchange 2010 On-premises environment.

Recently, I found a new job which uses O365 in a hybrid environment. Just to explain a bit, the new environment has On-premises Active Directory plus an instance of On-premises Exchange Server (which actually has no user mailboxes inside). The On-premises Active Directory is synced to an Azure AD in the cloud and all user mailboxes are in Exchange Online in O365.

I tried to modify my Powershell script (based on On-premises Exchange 2010) to run in this new environment. I added commands to establish a MFA Powershell session to Exchange Online. Then, except replacing some On-premises Powershell commands with new cloud Powershell commands, I was able to "get-" most of the information I want.

However, when I tried to run the same Powershell commmands to update mailbox (for example to hide a mailbox), I encountered an error message saying that you cannot do so and must update via the On-premise instance. The funny thing is when I run the same old script to "add-mailboxfolderpermission" or "remove-mailboxfolderpermission", I was able to so.

Does anyone know why it is like that? If I cannot use "set-mailbox" to hide the mailbox, what commands should I use to hide the mailbox?

active-directory

1 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    The on-premise AD is synced to Azure AD to support Office 365/Exchange online. The sync is one-way (almost entirely), from on-premise to the cloud. The on-premise AD is authoritative and that is the only place you can make AD changes.

    Note that the mailboxes are all in the cloud. A mailbox is the data store for all of the Exchange data. If you want to change the mailbox, you do that in the cloud. If you want to change (almost) anything stored in AD, like mailbox visibility, you have to do that on-prem and then synchronize or wait for the next sync.

    To make changes to mailbox metadata and settings stored in AD, run the same old commands you used to run against the local domain controllers, instead of trying to run them against your EOL/Office 365 tenant account.

    Does that explain it or would you like more detail?

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