Office 365: What happens when you disable AD Connect?

Posted By Ian@SlashAdmin in Office 365 | 9 comments

Sometimes you just wonder what happens when you do something in a system. I wasn’t entirely sure what would if I disabled Active Directory synchronisation so I did it in my lab environment just to see.

Why would you want to do this?

More and more small businesses are decommissioning their old Small Business Servers and replacing them with a NAS box or micro server and SharePoint in 365.  A business of ten PC’s or less may not require Active Directory and as such don’t need a server anymore. In this case you will have to disable any existing synchronisation.

Just one thing to note: If you have an Exchange hybrid configuration, you must home all exchange mailboxes in the cloud and disable the hybrid before starting. If a user has a mailbox in Exchange it WILL NOT AUTOMATICALLY MIGRATE TO 365!

In the 365 portal click Users then Active Users and you will see your accounts have a status of ‘Synched with Active Directory’. To disable this synchronisation click Manage.

Click Deactivate to start the process.

Here we get warned that the process will take up to 72 hours and during that time we cant make any changes. Click Deactivate Now if you are happy to continue.

Now we just wait until this deactivation message disappears.

Haray, we have now disabled Active Directory synchronisation, nothing too exciting huh? This is confirmed by checking that the status of all user accounts now show ‘In Cloud’ meaning the accounts are now fully cloud managed.

At this point you will want to go through and delete all of the system accounts and other clutter you don’t need anymore. From here you essentially you have an account which is standalone and no longer knows anything about your on-premises environment.

I hope someone finds this useful or even just a little bit interesting!