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Friday, August 22, 2014

Identity Sync between On-Premise Active Directory and SharePoint Online - Part 1

Businesses are in the process of moving services like SharePoint to cloud service providers like Office 365 or Azure. As part of this move, they’re considering whether they can move all current internal systems to the cloud, and many are finding that they can't.  I'm posting a series of artciles that will walk through the process step-by-step of configuring Directory Synchronization and Single Sign On between an on premise Active Directory and SharePoint Online
Often, the systems which manage an organization’s user accounts or identities are kept on premise, while other services like SharePoint are moved to the cloud. These are systems like Active Directory or other LDAP directories, and keeping them on premise can be due to several reasons.
 
To support these scenarios, Microsoft has provided businesses with the option of leaving Active Directory running on premise and synchronizing user accounts to the Office 365 cloud environments. They've even provided the capability to configure true single sign on between these systems through federation.  This type of deployment constitutes a hybrid cloud deployment - in fact the simplest kind of hybrid deployment - where part of the organization’s infrastructure remains on premise while services in the cloud can use those identities (like SharePoint, Exchange or Lync). 
 
You can read find Part 1 of my series on this topic here:  http://sharepoint.protiviti.com/blog/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=142.
 
Please let me know if you have any questions on this topic. 
 
In next part on this topic we'll get into the next important steps in this process:
  • Preparing and Verifying the Domain DNS
  • Activating Directory Synchronization
  • Installing and Configuring the Directory Synchronization Server
  • First Directory Synchronization

   -Antonio