It’s hard to say why, and it might possibly because Azure Active Directory Basic makes a bigger splash, but Microsoft has been mum on the release of a significant tool that released on Monday. The tool, Microsoft Azure Active Directory Sync Services (or, AAD Sync), is an installable service that runs on-premises to provide synching services for Azure Active Directory and Office 365 with both a single and multi-forest locally stored Active Directory implementation.
Here’s what the tool is intended to accomplish:
- Synchronize multi-forest Active Directory environments without needing the full blow features of Forefront Identity Manager 2010 R2.
- Advanced provisioning, mapping and filtering rules for objects and attributes, including support for syncing a very minimal set of user attributes.
- Configuring multiple on-premises Exchange organizations to map to a single AAD tenant
It’s interesting that the tool released along with Azure Active Directory Basic, and really is an extension that works for AADB, but didn’t catch the same fanfare.
You can download the tool from here: Microsoft Azure Active Directory Sync Services
And, dig into the specifics and technical pieces here: Azure Active Directory Synchronization Services (AAD Sync)
