Special Considerations for Office 365 Environments
Because Microsoft Office 365 is a multi-tenant hosted Exchange environment, there can be differences in the functionality available to AMS customers as compared to an on-premises only environment. The component differences are described below.
| Feature | Considerations |
|---|---|
| Email Continuity |
Email continuity is supported for cloud mailboxes. In the event of a partial activation, only on-premise mailboxes can be activated. In the event of a full activation cloud mailboxes as well as on-premise are included. Depending on the nature and scope of the outage as well as the mail routing configuration in use in your environment, there may be limitations to activation scenarios that are not present in a standard on-premises deployment. For example, if the on-premises SMTP gateway and connector to Office 365 is offline as part of a partial activation, on-premises mail sent by non-active users may still be able to route to the AMS data center for active Continuity users, but mail dependent on the inbound gateway from Office 365 cannot dynamically be routed in the Office 365 system for the active users. In the event of a full activation, if unresolved mail is configured to be forwarded from AMS to Office 365, then Office 365 cannot also be configured to forward unresolved mail to AMS, otherwise mail for public folders and other objects without a mailbox may be looped. It is highly recommended that, during an outage window, activation scenarios be tested to determine if the configuration of mail routing and connectors can support the intended activation scenarios. This testing may require the stopping of the hub transport server acting as the connector between the on-premises organization as well as testing MX record failover, depending on the environment. |
| SyncManager |
Directory: Synchronization of Office 365 users as directory objects is not supported with SyncManager versions prior to AMS Client 6.14. If support for Office 365 is enabled after the latest version of SyncManager is already installed, to take advantage of the new capabilities, stop and restart the SyncManager service, then open the SyncManager and perform a manual directory sync. Contact & Calendar: Synchronization of Contact and Calendar items are supported for Office 365 mailboxes. |
| RecoveryManager |
Recovery of continuity, time-based and discovery archives using AMS Recovery Manager support an Office 365 mailbox as the target mailbox. See Use RecoveryManager to Restore Archives. |
| Storage Management | Storage Management is supported for Office 365 mailboxes. For more information refer to Storage Management. |
| Outlook Extension |
Outlook Extension’s Storage Management operations (Keep Attachments with Messages and Move Attachments toContinuity Archive) are supported for cloud mailboxes. Messages marked to be stubbed (Move Attachments toContinuity Archive) are stubbed by the AMSHarvester Service. Messages which are already stubbed may be accessible via the Outlook Extension. Configuration of the Outlook Extension for cloud mailboxes using PrepareOutlookAuth is fully supported. |
| Harvester | Bulk import of messages using the Harvester Service is supported for Office 365 mailboxes. For more information refer to Harvester Operation and Data Logging . |
|
Import Manager |
Import of historical mail from cloud mailboxes or cloud Exchange archives is currently supported. For more information refer to Import Manager. |
| PrepareOutlookAuth | PrepareOutlookAuth is fully supported for all kinds of mailboxes. For more information refer to Enabling Outlook Extension Authentication Through Command Line. |
| AMS Email Archival | User classification policies are not yet supported for Office 365 mailboxes. |