Upgrading your On Premises Exchange in an Office 365 Hybrid Environment.

As more and more companies upgrade their Exchange infrastructure , it is common to come across an environment with an Exchange 2010 SP3 on premises setup with an Office 365 Hybrid.

In this instance, when you attempt to upgrade your schema for the new 2013 Upgrade, you will receive this error:

     A hybrid deployment with Office 365 has been detected.  Please ensure that

you are running setup with the /TenantOrganizationConfig switch.  To use the Ten

antOrganizationConfig switch you must first connect to your Exchange Online tena

nt via PowerShell and execute the following command: “Get-OrganizationConfig | E

xport-Clixml -Path MyTenantOrganizationConfig.XML”.  Once the XML file has been

generated, run setup with the TenantOrganizationConfig switch as follows “/Tenan

tOrganizationConfig MyTenantOrganizationConfig.XML”.

In order to correctly apply the schema updates, you will need to connect to your Office365 Tenant using Exchange Online Powershell:

$UserCredential = Get-Credential

<enter your tenant admin credentials>

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri # -Credential $UserCredential -Authentication Basic –AllowRedirection

Import-PsSession $session

You are now ready to export your tenant config to xml:

Get-OrganizationConfig | Export-Clixml -Path MyTenantOrganizationConfig.XML

From here you can go back to your administrative command prompt to issue the PrepareSchema command:

Setup /PrepareAD /IAcceptExchangeServerLicenseTerms /TenantOrganizationConfig:C:TempMyTenantOrganizationConfig.XML

You can now continue Exchange 2013 setup as normal

Josef Hanning, PEI