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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 the 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 the governments as well as for Specific countries those are having regularities and data retention policies and pushing Companies to maintain their within It’s country’s data centers. Office 365 Services for Chinese Country operated by 21Vianet. For more details for the Office 365 operated by 21Vianet, Please refer the article

For different types of Office 365 Services, Please refer the article. In this articles different types of Office 365 Services and how it is been operated, what are services hosted and available for usage. It is just fantastic.

Let me bring you a scenario, You are working for MNC Company and they have already On-premises Exchange and expanded Hybrid with Global Office 365, It is including Skype for Business, SharePoint Services and other services too. 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 Servers installed with Exchange Version 2016 – Enabled already Hybrid with Global office 365 Tenant.

Consider you already have full fledged Office 365 Hybrid Setup and everything works perfectly without any issues.

Now your company expanding the business in China and as per the Chinese Government , Data for the Chinese users should be hosted within Chinese Data Centers. To achieve it, you can setup complete Exchange On-Premises setup in China Office and retain the within 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 pickup 21V Operated Office 365 and migrate users to 21V Exchange Online and other services too..

Let’s believe you would like achieve as follows safely without any issues or without disturbing existing Global Office 365.

Since there are lot services limitations which are being hosted by the 21V Operated Office 365, You will not be able to achieve all the features/services as like Global Office 365. Though, there are some limitations but still we will be able to achieve below collaborations between all three different platforms.

1. Free / Busy Sharing from 21V EXO <–> Global EXO
2. Mail Flow Routing from 21V EXO <–> Global EXO <–> On-premises Exchange
3. Sync Users to both different tenants and make single GAL / Address books.

To make this happen you need to setup as follows,

1. Select another Subdomain(Different and not used in Global Tenant)for China users as UPN : chinauser@cn.southtunes.in. In this case, global user UPN is Globalusers@southtunes.in
2. 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.
3. Install another AADConnect for 21V Operated Office 365 to sync users from On-Premises.
4. 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)
5. Create Availability Address Space in 21V EXO / Global Tenant. Why AAS,? why not MFG?.. Yes.. AAS we need use to share free/busy sharing between the tenants.. We can’t use MFG since both are operated separately.

You should notice one thing that you are not going to setup 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 polices to add 21V Addresses in On-Premises, Exchange Web Services for Exchange Mailboxes Migrations, Availability Services for the Free / Busy Sharing.

What you not going to acheive with explained solution,

1. 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 in to the topic on 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 primary domain as added as verified domain in the custom domain list, let’s add the domain which are going to make as UPN for the 21V Users.

Click on Add domain

Try to add sub domain using the portal, But you will end up with below report, because sub domains should be using the PowerShell

Using the PowerShell, Login to AAD of 21V using the PowerShell Module, You can refer the article to learn how to login in to 21V Operated Azure Active Directory.

Run the command,

New-MsolDomain -Name cn.southtunes.in -Authentication Federated

Now you can see the sub domain in the Portal as well,

Everything looks Perfect so for, cn.southtunes.in shown up with status Setup in progress , We will create the DNS records for Exchange Online, Skype for Business later.

21V Operated Office365 Integration with Global Office365-Part 2

21V Operated Office365 Integration with Global Office365-Part 3

21V Operated Office365 Integration with Global Office365-Part 4