u/fazzy84

I passed my az-104 back in 2021 and forgot to renew it as the renewal email was landing in my spam folder. Long story short… i am considering to re take the exam and keep my certification valid. What has change in the past 5 years in terms of exam. For me many things will remain the same. But from the certification and exam preparation in 2026 what has changed ? Any leads where to start my journey, which youtube or udemy training video i need to check or practice questions ?

Thanks in advance

We are now stuck with a dilemma of migrating mail enable security groups. We have around 800+ mail enabled security groups, around 600 coming from EAC which we are planning to strip away the exchange attributes. Yea, we are a big organization with stupid people who made these mail enabled security groups in the first place. Couple of these are being used for emails which we figured out using mail trace option, for that we will recreate it as a EXO DL, rest of them can just be stripped away and preserve it as security groups in AD. Now, we did couple of testing with some test groups and here is my understanding so far…

1. Stripping away the exchange attributes using the disable command removes only the domain email address, it still hold the tenant onmicrosoft.com address. However, it disappears from EAC but still valid in AD.
2. Since the group is synced from AD to azure, it still shows up on EXO with a valid onmicrosoft.com address.
3. Now, the only way to completely strip the exchange attributes and just keep it as security groups in AD, we must move it to a non sync OU for it to disappear from azure. Then moving back to the previous OU will mark this group as only security group in azure. This workaround was mentioned in couple of Microsoft and private blogs.
4. Now my question, if this groups which is being synced from AD to azure has some permission like file share or anything in AD which is also being used as a permission group in azure or is an approved sender for any DL or added as a permission for any shared mailbox, moving it to a non sync OU will break it from azure. How can we over come this ? Deleting and recreating it will break AD permissions as well.

What can be the best option to strip the exchange part and keep it synced between AD and azure without any breakage, so that the ones are being used we can recreate it on EXO as DL others can rest in peace in AD. I plan to do this and go home peacefully without working and fixing this mess all night long.

Advises please…. Thank you !!

Some of our shared mailboxes are managed on perm, around 500 of them. However, i can see the space quota information on 365, but it’s not using space on on perm databases. Need to move it completely to 365 so the management of the mailbox can be done from 365.
Any advise ?

How you guys handled the mail enabled security groups migration from exchange on perm to 365 ? We are in process to decom our exchange 2016 servers and need a way to get these groups totally cloud. Now, we do want to keep the group on AD cause of resources connected to it like fileshare/firewall group etc. , but we also need the mail part. If removing the SMTP from the group and recreating it on 365 as DL, how can we sync that group to AD ? Sync back via AD connect/cloud connect ? Sorry i am kinda lost on this...

Suggestion and advise please...

We are in process to completely remove out exchange 2019 servers. Everything is hosted on 365 as hybrid, moved DL’s, mail enabled groups etc, mailbox storage on 365, but the source of auth is still on exchange/AD. To make changes we have to log onto our exchange on perm and make changes. How can i completely remove the dependency from exchange on perm so that we can be total cloud. 365 will be only authority for changes to shared mailbox, user mailbox, DL’s, mail enabled groups etc. other than that any other things i need to consider before i shut down my exchange on perm environment ?

Suggestions/advice please 🙏
Thnx