Connecting to Exchange Online (Office 365) using the Exchange 2010 Management Console

So as many of you already know we can manage multiple Exchange 2010 forests from one Exchange Management console. This is because Exchange 2010 utilize the remoting features in Windows PowerShell 2.0. Although Exchange 2010 also includes support for connecting to Exchange Online (cloud based Exchange), it isn’t possible to connect to the Exchange Online version that is included with BPOS. This makes sense since this version is based on Exchange 2007, which doesn’t support the remoting features in PowerShell 2.0.

As most of you would have guessed the Exchange Online version included with Office 365 (currently in beta) is based on Exchange 2010 SP1, which means that we now can connect to Exchange Online using an Exchange Management console installed on a domain-joined server in an on-premise environment. By doing so we can manage a good portion of the things that can be managed for Exchange 2010 servers located in the on-premise environment.

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Some of the things that cannot be manages are server level settings. We don’t even have a “Server Configuration” work center in the navigation pane as you can see in the above figure. Not a surprise really since Exchange 2010 is all about multi-tenancy where all tenants share’s the same set of Exchange 2010 servers.

However we can manage many of the options available in the “Organization Configuration” and “Recipient Configuration” work centers.

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And then we have the option of moving mailboxes back and forth between on-premise and Exchange Online.

From Exchange On-Premise environment to Exchange Online:

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From Exchange Online to On-Premise environment:

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I’m currently writing a multi-part article similar to the one I did around BPOS a few years ago. Yes I’ll promise it’s ready before Office 365 RTMs…

Until later,

Henrik Walther
Technology Architect/Writer
MCM: Exchange 2007 | MVP: Exchange Architecture

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