Does DirSync work in reverse ?

Question

Hello,

I'm new to Office 365. I have a customer that has an old SBS 2008 box on-premises, and we plan to migrate exchange but we purchased a new physical server anyway because they work on heavy files so we'll have Exchange on O365 and AD and File Server on-premises.

I'd like to start from scratch, re-create a domain and users on the new DC. The only thing we need to migrate from SBS is the exchange mailboxes, we're going with a cutover migration (10 users) and from what I read that will create the users in Office 365.

My question is, can I sync the existing O365 users with my new AD server so they get created ? And even if the creation isn't automatic it's ok but how can I tell O365 that my local AD users and the existing users are the same ? Is DirSync capable to work in "reverse" ?

Thank you in advance !

Answer 1

No, dirsync is one-way process. Only very few attributes are synced back to on-prem. Best thing to do is to export the Azure AD users and their attributes via PowerShell or the Graph API, then use the exported data to create the accounts in the new AD.

Once you have recreated the users, you can use the so-called soft-match process to "link" them to the O365 accounts: support.microsoft.com/.../2641663