Hybrid Office 365: new cloud users are missing from the hybrid / on-premises address book

Hi everyone,

Like many other people, I’m in the process of retiring an on-premises Exchange 2007 platform to Office 365. We’re using DirSync+ADFS, but not in rich coexistence mode.

I ran into a situation today where a net-new user had been created in Active Directory Users & Computers, and then subsequently had Exchange licenses assigned manually in the 365 admin portal. This is in contrast to using the EMC or PowerShell to create a “remote mailbox” proceedure. All was well for the user, except for the fact they were not being included in the on-premises address book.

I did some research and comparisons, and it came down to adding this attribute with ADSIedit. Now keep in mind, these are just an example. Make sure you look at a user in YOUR organization to come up with the right DN’s to add!

CN=All Users,CN=All Address Lists,CN=Address Lists Container,CN=Example Company,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=exampledomain,DC=local

CN=Default Global Address List,CN=All Global Address Lists,CN=Address Lists Container,CN=Example Company,CN=Microsoft Exchange,CN=Services,CN=Configuration,DC=exampledomain,DC=local

After adding those to the user, I forced an address book update and they magically appeared! I found a few threads on the Office 365 support forum on how to fix this, but this method I came up with was by FAR the easiest. I saw some people proposing dumping the whole DirSync’d user list to a csv and doing all sorts of crazy kung fu on it. I guess if you had made this mistake on a wide scale that is the proper way to think about it.

I’m also told that if we were in rich coexistence mode and moved the OAB to the hybrid Exchange 2010 box, this would also solve any issues.

Til next time…