So I am minding my own business doing worky things and I hear a ding on my phone. I look at the Summary Siri gave me and I am like WHAT DID THAT SAY????
“A step to last exchange server retirement”
WHAT? WHAT? WHHHHAAAAT??
So I opened this post and immediately started to feel calm and joy.
How does this work?
A new mailbox property called IsExchangeCloudManaged is being introduced in Exchange Online and Entra ID. It indicates whether Exchange attributes for a synced user have Source of Authority (SOA) in the cloud or on-premises. By default, for all directory-synced users today, this is False (meaning Exchange attributes are mastered on-premises and are synced to cloud). When you set IsExchangeCloudManaged to True for a particular user, you transfer the “source of authority” for that users Exchange attributes to the cloud. From that point on:
- Exchange attributes (properties related to the remote mailbox) become editable in Exchange Online (and no longer get overwritten by on-prem sync).
- Identity attributes (core user object properties like name, department, etc.) remain mastered in on-prem AD and cannot be changed from the cloud (same as before).
- The feature only supports Exchange attribute SOA transfer of user mailboxes; for Groups and Contacts, you will need to use object level SOA transfer (more on this below).
More details on enabling this feature, and which attributes’ SOA will be transferred to cloud using isExchangeCloudManaged is available in documentation: Cloud-based management of Exchange attributes for Remote Mailboxes in hybrid environments.
When this becomes available, and you aren’t running any SMTP services on your exchange boxes, you can move all your mailboxes to the cloud and retire this server. All mailbox management will be done in the EAC portal in the cloud. Changing the name, etc will be done in AD.
This is a huge move by Microsoft.
