The Future of Exchange Hybrid Deployments

Fresh from Ignite, there has been a couple of announcements that may change the way we deploy Exchange Hybrid in the future:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/exchange/2018/09/26/announced-improvements-to-hybrid-publishing-and-organization-configuration-transfer/

 

In short:

  • Organisation Configuration Transfer 2.0
    • OCT v1.0 allow for the transfer of certain Mailbox Policies and Retention Policies and tags to Exchange Online. v2.0 will include DLP Policies, Malware Policies, Organisational Config and more. This is due out in October 2018.
  • Hybrid Publishing
    • A new connector is currently in private preview which will be used to publish your on-premises Exchange org to Exchange Online. This connector is based on the Azure AD Application Proxy technology and does not require any inbound connections to your Exchange environment! No GA data was given but it’s something I will be following closely.

An interesting future ahead for deployment Exchange Hybrid configurations. This should help conversations with organisations looking to move to the cloud but have been put off by publishing their Exchange environment to the Internet. I have not seen any information that states existing Exchange Hybrid configurations cannot adopt the new publishing technology, but I am assuming that you will be able to.

 

About the author