Office 365 Active Directory



Manage your Active Directory data in the Office 365 SharePoint contacts list. Now take a look at your list. All items are in there, after running the connection. Fig.: Sample data destination contact list in the Office 365 cloud. Please note: We have added a calculated column 'Letter' with text data type and set to Left(LastName,1). Using Active Directory Users and Computers on your Management instance, create a standard user named ADFSSVC in your AWS Microsoft AD directory. AD FS uses this user account later. Create an active Office 365 subscription. Add and verify your domain in Office 365. The idea is to create a user once in the Active Directory domain of your organization and synchronize Azure Cloud with on-premises Active Directory to provide SSO for Office 365 applications. One of the most important steps of configuration is generating a certificate for configuring Active Directory Federation Services.

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If your organization has a paid subscription to Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Enterprise Mobility Suite, or other Microsoft services, you have a free subscription to Microsoft Azure Active Directory. You and other admins can use Azure AD to create and manage user and group accounts. To use Azure AD, just go to the Azure portal and sign in to your account.

Open a private browsing session

Sync ad with o365

Office 365 Active Directory Login

Use a private browsing session (not a regular session) to access the Azure portal (in step 1 below). This prevents the credentials that you're currently logged on with from being passed to Azure. To open a private browsing session:

  • In Microsoft Edge (legacy version), Internet Explorer, or Mozilla FireFox, press CTRL+SHIFT+P.

  • In Microsoft Edge (newest version) or Google Chrome, press CTRL+SHIFT+N.

Access Azure Active Directory

  1. Go to portal.azure.com and sign in with your work or student account.

  2. In the left navigation pane in the Azure portal, click Azure Active Directory.

    The Azure Active Directory admin center is displayed.

More information

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  • A free Azure Active Directory subscription does not include the Sign-ins activity report. To record sign-in activity (which can be useful in a data breach), you need an Azure Active Directory Premium subscription. For more information, see How long does Azure AD store the data?.

  • You can also access the Azure Active Directory admin center from the Microsoft 365 admin center. In the left navigation pane of the Microsoft 365 admin center, click Admin centers > Azure Active Directory.

  • For information about managing users and groups and performing other directory management tasks, see Manage your Azure AD directory.

When migrating Office 365 tenancies for acquisitions, mergers, or divestitures; there needs to be a good amount of consideration given to the back-end identity infrastructure supporting each Office 365 tenant.

Active Directory Directory Services (AD DS) is generally the identity store that connects Enterprise to Office 365 Azure Active Directory. There can be various ways the on-premises Active Directory is connected to Azure Active Directory based on each customers’ individual configuration. There could also be a 3rd party Identity provider in the configuration such as Okta, Ping, etc.

  • How are accounts being provisioned today? And how do you integrate that process before, during, and after the migration?
  • How do we provide identity coexistence during the tenant to tenant migration?
  • How do we move computers and identities between domains and still provide a seamless transition for users?
  • Do you want to move your users to the target Active Directory before, during, or after the Office 365 migration?
  • Will the network connection structure affect the Active Directory migration?
  • How will the use of a 3rd party identity provider impact the migration of Active Directory?
Office 365 Active DirectoryIntegration

These are items that have to be thought about in addition to the tasks for Office 365 tenant migration. These will be important based on the business and technical requirements of the migration. Identity synchronization and merging of identities into the target Active Directory and Office 365 tenant will be considerations that need to be understood during the migration coexistence planning. Unless there are a small amount of accounts and services migrating to the target Office 365 tenancy, there will likely be a “coexistence” period during the migration.

Office 365 Active Directory Plan

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Another consideration is what migration tool will be used to migrate Active Directory objects? There are various tools to do computer and user migrations for Active Directory. We have used all the leading tool sets to perform migrations for Active Directory. Some work well as others have some issues. Those considerations would be planned for during migration design sessions.

The following steps are the basics of Active Directory migration. They are the high-level steps needed during a tenant to tenant migration.

  1. Network connectivity between source and target Active Directory forest/domains is established
  2. Forest or domain trusts in place for best experience with Active Directory migration
  3. Synchronize users as mail-enabled users and groups from source to target Active Directory via software migration tool or other solution (script, directory sync process, etc.)
  4. Update permissions for source servers with synchronized account information (usually done with a migration tool)
  5. Migrate users workstations to target Active Directory domain
  6. Migrate source servers to target Active Directory

Office 365 Active Directory Vs Azure

A high level diagram is shown below of a generic environment:

Active Directory Definition

We can see that there are many things to consider when migrating Active Directory along with a tenant to tenant Office 365 migration. We have experience with many different scenarios for tenant to tenant and Active Directory migrations. If you have questions or need help planning and executing a tenant to tenant and/or Active Directory migration, please connect with us to learn how Perficient can help you and your organization maximize these tools and solutions.