University of Colorado Boulder
- If you are reading this line, this document is still incomplete!
Office 365/Exchange
Overview
University of Colorado Boulder presented a lightning talk at 2015 Internet2 Technology Exchange on Grouper and Exchange / Office 365. See slides here (PDF format)
CU Boulder migrated from on-premise Exchange to Office 365 (O365) in June 2015. Here is a quick overview of the Active Directory environment relevant to Exchange and groups:
- The Office of Information Technology's (OIT) Identity and Access Management (IAM) team has the Active Directory (AD) domain and enterprise admin rights
- IAM creates top level OU's for the departments, schools, and colleges and delegates the full administration of these OU's to personnel (OU Admins) within these departments, schools and colleges.
- OIT's Messaging and Collaboration team (M&C) managed the on-premise Exchange infrastructure and the creation of the mail distribution lists.
- Many of the mail distribution lists were being used as security/access groups in AD
- DirSync was going to be used to sync accounts and distribution lists from our AD to the Azure Active Directory which introduced mainly the following issue:
- Because it is a one-way sync, end users lose the ability to manage their distribution lists using Microsoft's Outlook or Outlook Web Access .
Problem
- Come up with a way to allow end users to continue managing their mail distribution lists without breaking the existing secondary functionality of the distribution lists as security/access groups in AD.
- Membership of the distributions lists could be individual accounts, other distributions lists, or security/access groups within AD. Any solution implementation had to maintain this structure and allow for it to be carried forward in the future.
Solution
- At that time, the IAM team has been looking into Grouper and what it could offer in terms of access management solutions for our users.
- The decision was made to deploy Grouper in a phased approach with Phase 1 addressing the Office 365/Exchange mail distribution lists at hand.
Grouper Setup
For an overview of our Grouper setup, please refer to slides 3-4 of this presentation