During the beta of Office 365 for Enterprises, we received great feedback from our customers and wanted to vastly simplify the process for configuring Exchange in a hybrid deployment with Office 365. We are introducing the Hybrid Configuration Wizard in Exchange 2010 Service Pack 2 to refine the deployment process as a result of that feedback.

What is the Hybrid Configuration Wizard?

The Hybrid Configuration Wizard consists of:

  1. A new Exchange Management Console (EMC) wizard that guides you through the end-to-end process for configuring a hybrid deployment.
  2. A set of Exchange Management Shell (EMS) cmdlets that orchestrate the configuration process (as always, the EMC executes these Shell cmdlets).
  3. Improvements to the manageability of some of the underlying hybrid features (no more exchangedelegation.contoso.com or service.contoso.com domains – Yay!)

What does it do?

The hybrid configuration cmdlets take inputs from the wizard, analyze the state of your existing on-premises and cloud organizations, and calculate the required steps to correctly configure both organizations correctly. You can learn more about this process here.

This friendly wizard replaces approximately 50 manual steps with just a few inputs and several clicks of your mouse. Here are some of the top tasks that the Hybrid Configuration Wizard will automatically verify and configure for you:

  1. Verifies that your on-premises and Office 365 organizations meet the prerequisites for a hybrid deployment.
  2. Provisions your on-premises Exchange federation trust.
  3. Creates mutual organization relationships between your on-premises and Exchange Online organizations.
  4. Modifies e-mail address policies to ensure that mailboxes can be moved successfully to Exchange Online in Office 365.
  5. Enables and configures free/busy calendar sharing, message tracking and MailTips for both your on-premises and Exchange Online organizations.
  6. Configures secure mail flow between your on-premises and Exchange Online organizations. You can even choose to have the wizard automatically configure Exchange Online organization to route mail through your on-premises Exchange organization to meet any additional business or compliance requirements.
  7. Enables support for Exchange Online Archiving for on-premises mailboxes for those customers that have chosen to include archiving in their Office 365 service plan.

Once the hybrid deployment configuration process is complete, the following features are available between your on-premises Exchange organization and Exchange Online:

FeatureDescription
Native mailbox move Online mailbox moves with automatic Outlook reconfiguration
Free/busy and calendar sharing Free/busy and calendar sharing between on-premises and Exchange Online mailboxes
Secure mail TLS-encrypted and authenticated mail flow between your on-premises and Exchange Online organizations
Exchange Online Archiving Provide unlimited cloud-based archive storage for your on-premises mailboxes
Message tracking Integrated message tracking logs across on-your on-premises and Exchange Online organizations
Multi-mailbox search Create a single search request that automatically queries both on-premises and Exchange Online mailboxes
Outlook Web App redirection Redirect OWA logons for users that have been moved to Exchange Online
Mailtips Ensures that MailTips are available for both your on-premises and Exchange Online organizations

If you've used the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant to configure a previous hybrid deployment, please note that we’re busy updating the current scenarios to provide guidance based on the automatic configuration process using the Hybrid Configuration Wizard. Watch this blog for announcements when the Deployment Assistant is updated.

With that in mind, we'll be retiring the manual hybrid deployment configuration guidance provided with SP1 and we strongly encourage you use the wizard wherever possible. Although we'll continue to support manually configured hybrid deployments, we believe that using the new wizard is the easiest, most reliable way of getting deployed and staying correctly configured.

Where can I learn more?

Interested in learning more about this great new tool? Check out Hybrid Deployments with the Hybrid Configuration Wizard on TechNet.

Download Exchange 2010 SP2 and check out the Hybrid Configuration Wizard for yourself.

Ben Appleby
Senior Program Manager