Tag Archives: userprincipalname

Office 365: Migrating DirSync to new AD domain

Disclaimer
This blog post was written for older versions of Office 365 and Azure AD, and has not been tested in the latest version. Always make sure that you have a valid backup before making any changes to your system.

In a migration scenario you might need to replace the Active Directory domain used to sync your users to Office 365. I will go through the steps you need to change AD domain.

In this scenario I assume that ADFS is not used. If it is, you first have to disable federation. I suggest looking at my previous post where I described how to switch from ADFS to Password Sync.

The steps we have to go through are:

  1. Disable DirSync in old domain
  2. Populate new AD domain with users and attributes
  3. Prepare Office 365 users for new domain
  4. Install DirSync in the new domain.
  5. Verify Sync

First, disabling DirSync is very easy. Just go to the Office 365 admin center and click the Deativate link under users and groups.

dirsync-change-domain-1This will take up to 72 hours. When this process is over all user accounts are managed in the Office 365 portal, and there is no connection to your old domain. This change will not cause any service interruption, all users will be able to use their services as normal.

In the meantime you can uninstall the Azure Active Directory Sync tool on the old DirSync server.

The second step is to populate your new AD domain with all user accounts. It is now important that you copy all information from the old domain, (i.e. phone numbers, titles etc), and for Exchange Online it is especially important that these attributes are copied:

  • userPrincipalName
  • proxyAddresses
  • legacyExchangeDN

UserPrincipalName is your login name to Office 365. I don’t think I have to explain why this attribute is important 🙂 . ProxyAddresses are all your email addresses, both primary and alias. The last attribute, legacyExchangeDN, is used if you previously have migrated from an Exchange on-premises to Office 365. It is used for internal addressing in Exchange. If it is removed you will not be able to reply to old emails, meeting invitations, and your Suggested Contacts will also fail.

I will not go through here how to migrate these attributes here, check out our post on how to sync attributes from cloud identities to active directory.

The third step is where the magic happens. Office 365 uses the ObjectGUID attribute to keep track of the user accounts in in your on-premises Active Directory. It is translated to an ImmutableID in Azure Active Directory. If you rename your users, the ObjectGUID is untouched. Hence the name ImmutableID.

dirsync-change-domain-2The problem is that when you move to a new domain, all ObjectGUIDs are changed, and we need to generate a new ImmutableID.

Office 365 generates these IDs for us, we just have to clear the attribute on all users in Office 365. This is easily done with PowerShell:

Set-MsolUser -UserPrincipalName "aaron.beverly@365lab.net" -ImmutableId "$null"

The next step is to activate DirSync in the Office 365 portal again, and then reinstall the Azure Active Directory Sync tool on a server in the new domain. I strongly recommend using a new server for this step. Re-using the old server (after joining it to the new domain) might break your sync.

After the installation a full sync is done. The Sync tool will identify and match the users in Office 365 and Active Directory by the primary email address. If a match is found a new ImmutableID is created and written to Azure Active Directory.

Finally, after the initial sync is done we can look in Synchronization Service Manager to check that all users were matched and that we don’t have any sync errors.

/ Andreas

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Office 365 PowerShell Tip – Keeping EmailAddress and UPN in Sync

UPN’s are a nice way for our users to remember their usernames.  A UPN essentially has the same format as an email address.  Rather than having users login to their workstations or intranet resources as CLOUD\Username, they can login as user.lastname@cloud.com which can be the same as their email address.

Problem
When moving to Office 365 and are using DirSync with or without ADFS, your users need to have a UPN with a public routable domain in it. The easiest and most logical way to do that for your users sake is to keep UPN and primary email address the same.

Solution(s)
There are of course a lot of different solutions out there for achieveing the above, many of them include PowerShell and csv-files. My solution is based on PowerShell and are utilizing either Exchange Powershell cmdlets or Active Directory cmdlets.

Solution 1 (Exchange 2007 and above)
The below example is a very quick one that you run in Exchange Management Shell in Exchange 2007 and above. It simply copies the “WindowsPrimaryEmailAddress” for all your user mailboxes to the userPrincipalName attribute, without any question.

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox | ForEach { Set-Mailbox -Identity $_.Guid.ToString() -UserPrincipalName $_.WindowsEmailAddress.ToString() } 

To verify that the change has been properly done, you can run the below command to list all mailboxes that have different primary email address and UPN:

Get-Mailbox -ResultSize Unlimited -RecipientTypeDetails UserMailbox | Where-Object {$_.UserPrincipalName -ne $_.WindowsEmailAddress.ToString() }

Solution 2 (Exchange 2003 and above)
I had a case where the customer was running Exchange 2003, but had 2008R2 domain controllers. The customer also wanted a log file with the old and the new UPN after the change had been done. The script utilizes the ActiveDirectory module for PowerShell and copies the primary email address from the proxyAddresses attribute.
Running the script without any switches makes it run in test mode and do the AD-changes with the -WhatIf, so no changes will be done here.

2014-01-01 16-09-06

Running the script with the switch -Production makes it do the actual changes.2014-01-01 16-09-22

For backup purposes, the script are also creating a log file with the old and new attribute in the same folder where you run the script.

<#  
.SYNOPSIS 
    Script that copies the primary emailaddress from proxyAddresses to the userPrincipalName attribute.  
    It runs in test mode and just logs the changes that would have bee done without any parameters.  
    It identifies an exchange user with the legacyExchangeDN-attribute.  
.PARAMETER Production 
    Runs the script in production mode and makes the actual changes. 
.NOTES 
    Author: Johan Dahlbom 
    Blog: 365lab.net 
    Email: johan[at]dahlbom.eu 
    The script are provided “AS IS” with no guarantees, no warranties, and they confer no rights.     
#>
param(
[parameter(Mandatory=$false)]
[switch]
$Production = $false
)
#Define variables
$PSScriptRoot = Split-Path -Parent -Path $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Definition
$DateStamp = Get-Date -Format "yyyy-MM-dd-HH-mm-ss"
$Logfile = $LogFile = ($PSScriptRoot + "\ProxyUPNSync-" + $DateStamp + ".log")
Function LogWrite
{
Param ([string]$logstring)
Add-content $Logfile -value $logstring
Write-Host $logstring
}
    try
    {
        Import-Module ActiveDirectory -ErrorAction Stop
    }
    catch
    {
        throw "Module ActiveDirectory not Installed"
    }

#For each AD-user with a legacyExchangeDN, look up primary SMTP: in proxyAddresses
#and use that as the UPN
$CollObjects=Get-ADObject -LDAPFilter "(&(legacyExchangeDN=*)(objectClass=user))" -Properties ProxyAddresses,distinguishedName,userPrincipalName

            foreach ($object in $CollObjects)
            {
                $Addresses = $object.proxyAddresses
                $DN=$object.distinguishedName
                    foreach ($Address In $Addresses)
                    {
                        $ProxyArray=($ProxyArray + "," + $Address)
                        If ($Address -cmatch "SMTP:")
                            {
                                $PrimarySMTP = $Address
                                $UserPrincipalName=$Address -replace ("SMTP:","")
                                    #Found the object validating UserPrincipalName
                                    If ($object.userPrincipalName -notmatch $UserPrincipalName) {
                                        #Run in production mode if the production switch has been used
                                        If ($Production) {
                                            LogWrite ($DN + ";" + $object.userPrincipalName + ";NEW:" + $UserPrincipalName)
                                            Set-ADObject -Identity $DN -Replace @{userPrincipalName = $UserPrincipalName}
                                        }
                                        #Runs in test mode if the production switch has not been used
                                        else {
                                            LogWrite ($DN + ";" + $object.userPrincipalName + ";NEW:" + $UserPrincipalName)
                                            Set-ADObject -Identity $DN -WhatIf -Replace @{userPrincipalName = $UserPrincipalName}
                                        }
                            }
                            else
                            {
                            Write-Host "Info: User $($object.UserPrincipalName) are already OK!"

                            }
                        }
                    }
            }

Hope the above was helpful to you, please let me know if you have any questions!

/Johan