Yesterday, Microsoft announced the Organization Config Transfer feature (OCT) in the Hybrid Configuration Wizard. The feature is expected to start showing up starting late June 2018. In an ongoing effort to improve the Wizard, I believe this is a step in the right direction. Ever since the HCW was first conceived, running the HCW resulted in a series of steps which you had to (manually) run through to ensure that the Exchange Online configuration matched the on-premises configuration.

For example, you had to recreate the retention policies and tags that existed in the on-premises organization if you wanted to continue to use them in Exchange Online (and not to lose them during a migration!). The same was true for other policies like the OWA Mailbox Policy or ActiveSync Policy.

With the OCT feature, the HCW will automatically take care of that and copy the settings of the following elements to Exchange online for you:

  • Retention Policy
  • Retention Policy Tags
  • OWA Mailbox Policy
  • Mobile Device Mailbox Policy
  • Active Sync Mailbox Policy

Note: in this version of the HCW, it will only copy “new” policies. These are policies that do not exist in Exchange Online. If a policy with the same name already exists in Exchange Online, or when you update the policy in the on-premises organization after it has been copied to Exchange Online, the OCT-feature will not “sync” the policy or updates thereof across. As per statement from Microsoft, this is something for the next version of the feature.

Some might say this is only a small addition to the HCW, and while it might not (yet) benefit existing Hybrid customers, it’s a welcome addition for any consultant working on getting customers across to Exchange Online as it makes life just a little easier!

I’m looking forward to what Microsoft has more for hybrid in the future. Remember BRK3155 at Ignite 2017? There was a ton of cool new stuff announced, but only little has been delivered so far… Let’s see what Microsoft might deliver for Ignite 2018 as, traditionally, there seems to be a sprint to get a lot of new features out of the door ahead of the annual conference of conferences.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

-Michael