Creating Users in Office 365 Hybrid Setup

This walkthrough will describe how to create both mailboxes and mail contacts in Office 365.  Distribution groups can be created to forward emails to an external address.

Create a Mailbox:

• Create a new user within Active Directory
  • Edit all attributes (General, Profile, Organization, Member Of…)
• On the domain controller (one using AD Sync Tool), run the following PowerShell command to sync the newly created user to Office 365

Start-ADSyncSyncCycle -PolicyType Delta

• Go to Office 365 Admin Center
• Select Users > Active Users and search for the newly created user
  • Assign an Office 365 License.  This will automatically generate a mailbox for the user.  You can verify when you select the Mail tab under the user properties.  Should say something like “We are preparing a mailbox for the user”
• Go to Exchange Admin Center
• Select Recipients > Mailboxes and search for the newly created user
  • Enable In-Place Archiving

Create a Mail Contact in O365:  Use this if the user does not need access to an On-Prem distribution group.

If there is already a mail contact for a user, you can verify if there is an @rcri-inc.com domain attached to the user.

Get-MailContact -Identity “Test User” | Format-List

• Go to Exchange Admin Center
• Select Recipients > Contacts and select the plus icon to add a new “Mail Contact”
  • Enter the contact’s information and external email address
• Open PowerShell on local computer and connect to exchange online

$UserCredential = Get-Credential

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection

Import-PSSession $Session -DisableNameChecking

• Run the following PowerShell command to add an rcri-inc.com domain for the user

Set-MailContact –Identity "John Doe" –EmailAddresses SMTP:jdoe@rcri-inc.com,jdoe@hotmail.com

Create a Mail Contact in On-Prem: Use this if the user needs access to an On-Prem distribution group.

• In Exchange Management Console, select New Mail Contact and run through the setup of the user
• Run the Delta sync for Azure on the domain controller to sync the user to O365

Create Distribution Group:

There are currently two ways to make groups to forward emails to users.  In Office 365, under exchange admin center, the groups tab will create a group using new features of Office 365 (such as file sharing and other collaborative tools).  The other way is to create a distribution group that just forwards emails to external users without such features.

• Go to Exchange Admin Center
• Expand Groups and select Groups
• Select Add a group
• Make sure “Distribution List” is selected for the Type
• Type the name of the new distribution group
• Select the “Group email address” field to auto-generate the “Group email address”
• Give a description if needed
• Make sure “Allow people outside of my organization to send email to this distribution group.” Is set to On
• Add the group and wait up to 60 minutes for exchange online to populate the group in the groups list
• Once the group is visible, open the group
• Select “Edit” next to Members and add the users that needs emails to be forward to
  • Select “Add members” and select the users to add