Office 365 Hybrid Deployment With Exchange 2010 SP2 – Part 1

I am starting an article series which explains how to have a hybrid deployment of Exchange 2010 SP2 with Office 365. You can follow along if you have a test lab. As I have written before, there is no money involved in setting this up, as Microsoft is offering a 30 days trial for E3 plan, read here.

Hybrid deployment is the term used to have a combination of Office 365 & Exchange 2010, SharePoint 2010 & Lync 2010 on-premise. The company will have all user accounts in the on-premise AD & it gets sync’d with the cloud solution. Similarly, you can have some users (mailboxes) in the cloud & others on-premise. This is helpful for companies where they need to have some mailboxes onsite for compliance purpose, while other ones can be in the cloud. Another typical example is educational institutions, which can have all student mailboxes in the cloud & staff ones onsite.

My lab has the following servers.

• Windows 2008 R2 SP1 DC (Same server will be used to install & configure ADFS 2.0)
• Multi-role (Cas, Hub & Mbx) Exchange 2010 SP2 on 2008 R2 SP1
• Windows 2008 R2 Server for running directory synchronization tool.

The first step is to sign up for Office 365 trial here. Make sure you select the E3 package. Microsoft doesn’t take credit card details while signing up, so go ahead & signup. It’s completely free!

Part 2 to follow soon. Stay tuned!