Creating Office 365 Mailboxes in a Hybrid Setup

In this article I will show you how to create Exchange Online mailboxes in a hybrid environment such that the maiboxes also show up on the on-premises Exchange server management console.

The most logical way of creating an Exchange Online mailbox (you’d think) is to let AD users DirSync across to 365, assign them licenses and be done with it. However doing it this way doesn’t create a link between Exchange Online and your On-Premises Exchange server which means you can’t do things like manage the user’s mailbox from EMC or migrate the mailbox between on-premises and Exchange Online.

The correct way to create (or script) your new 365 users is to run the following command:

Enable-RemoteMailbox $userName -RemoteRoutingAddress [email protected]

It’s really that easy. The command above will create the mailbox on Exchange Online and create the link between 365 and your hybrid environment. You still need to license users afterwards though but that is also easy. Check out my other blog post for more 365 goodness.