Welcome Back!!
In this multi-series Article, we are going to how we can integrate Global Office365 Tenant with 21V Operated Office365 Tenant.
What is 21V Operated Office365?
Microsoft Operates Global Office 365 which is used by the public for companies and Countries those doesn’t have any limitations for the country-wise and continental level. But also Microsoft operates separate Office 365 services for governments as well as for Specific countries that have regularities and data retention policies and push Companies to maintain their within It’s country’s data centers. Office 365 Services for Chinese Country operated by 21Vianet. For more details on Office 365 operated by 21Vianet, Please refer to the article.
For different types of Office 365 Services, Please refer to the article. In this article different types of Office 365 Services and how it is been operated, and what are services hosted and available for usage. It is just fantastic.
Let me bring you a scenario, You are working for an MNC Company and they have already On-premises Exchange and expanded Hybrid with Global Office 365, including Skype for Business, SharePoint Services, and other services. Consider you have the current setup as shown below,
In the current Setup,
1. Domain controller installed with ADDS,ADFS Services and configured with ADFS for STS/SSO
2. One AADConnect Servers configured to sync from On-premises to Global Office 365 Tenant Services.
3. One Exchange Server installed with Exchange Version 2016 – Enabled already Hybrid with Global Office 365 Tenant.
Consider you already have a full-fledged Office 365 Hybrid Setup and everything works perfectly without any issues.
Now your company expanding its business in China and as per the Chinese Government, Data for Chinese users should be hosted within Chinese Data Centers. To achieve it, you can set up a complete Exchange On-Premises setup in China Office and retain the within the Chinese country or else you can expand with Office 365 to retain data/host from China which is 21V Operated Office 365. In this case, you want to pick up 21V Operated Office 365 and migrate users to 21V Exchange Online and other services too.
Let’s believe you would like to achieve as follows safely without any issues or without disturbing existing Global Office 365.
Since a lot of service limitations are being hosted by the 21V Operated Office 365, You will not be able to achieve all the features/services like Global Office 365. Though, there are some limitations still we will be able to achieve below collaborations between all three different platforms.
Free / Busy Sharing from 21V EXO <–> Global EXO
Mail Flow Routing from 21V EXO <–> Global EXO <–> On-premises Exchange
Sync Users to both different tenants and make single GAL / Address books.
To make this happen you need to setup as follows,
Select another Subdomain(Different and not used in Global Tenant)for China users as UPN: chinauser@cn.southtunes.in. In this case, the global user UPN is Globalusers@southtunes.in
Configure accepted domain cn.southtunes.in for the 21V Users, added domains of Global tenants custom domains.it allows to sync Email addresses of Global Tenant 365.
Install another AADConnect for 21V Operated Office 365 to sync users from On-Premises.
Create Custom sync rules in both 21V AADConnect and Global AADConnect Servers required for Exchange Services. (Why Custom Rule?. since the Exchange mailboxes of Global Users should be synced with all the information like Mail User, Proxy Addresses, Target address details)
Create Availability Address Space in 21V EXO / Global Tenant. Why AAS,? why not MFG?.. Yes. AAS we need to use to share free/busy sharing between the tenants.. We can’t use MFG since both are operated separately.
You should notice one thing you are not going to set up Hybrid with 21V Operated Office 365 since you already have Hybrid with Global Office 365 and you can’t make it with 21V Office 365 which will remove all the Global Tenant configurations. We are going to use Email address policies to add 21V Addresses On-Premises, Exchange Web Services for Exchange Mailboxes Migrations, and Availability Services for Free / Busy Sharing.
What are you not going to achieve with explained solution,
Free / Busy sharing between 21V EXO <–> On-Premises Exchange.( it is not that I have tested right now.., will post any progress I made in this scope later)
Let’s get into the topic of enabling it one by one. okay. let’s get started.
1. Adding accepted domain in 21V Operated Office365
Login to https://portal.partner.microsoftonline.cn using Global Administrator Account, Click Setup –> Domains
Click on Add domains
Enter the domain name Southtunes.in
Create TXT records and make the domain as Verified domain
Once the primary domain is added as the verified domain in the custom domain list, let’s add the domain that we are going to make as UPN for the 21V Users.
Click on Add domain
Try to add a subdomain using the portal, But you will end up with the below report because subdomains should be using the PowerShell
Using the PowerShell, log in to AAD of 21V using the PowerShell Module, You can refer the article to learn how to login in to the 21V Operated Azure Active Directory.
Run the command,
New-MsolDomain -Name cn.southtunes.in -Authentication Federated 
Now you can see the subdomain in the Portal as well,
Everything looks perfect so far, cn.southtunes.in showing up with the status Setup in progress, We will create the DNS records for Exchange Online, and Skype for Business later.