Azure Active Directory Sync Services goes Beta

Microsoft Azure Active Directory Sync Services (AADSync) has been announced as Customer Technology Preview (CTP) and is available through the Connect site.

AADSync, which is the next iteration of FIM2010 and DirSync, is used to onboard an on-premises environment to Windows Azure Active Directory and Office 365 and continue to synchronize changes. This new version allows for more advanced scenarios where DirSync, targeted at organizations with a single-forest, does not provide support for. Although FIM addresses scenarios that DirSync does not, it is often too complex for most IT admins to configure. With AADSync Microsoft is making this configuration a lot easier and more predictive.

One example of such scenario is the “Fully mesh with optional GALSync”, which allows users and resources to be located in any forest (commonly there would be two-way trusts between the forests). If Exchange is present in more than one forest, there could optionally be a GALSync solution representing a user in one forest as a contact in each other forest.

 

In this picture, AADSync would join on the mail attribute so a user with a mailbox in one forest is joined with the contacts in the other forests. Distribution and security groups can be found in each forest and can contain a mix of users, contacts, and FSPs (Foreign Security Principals).

For more information, please visit www.aadsync.com. Note that the content on this site will be moved to TechNet once AADSync has been released.

Stay tuned for further details on AADSync!