Connectors in Exchange online

welcome to it pro tv i'm your host john live from san francisco you're watching it pro tv hello and welcome to another great episode here at it pro tv i'm your host wes bryan and in today's episode we are moving through well microsoft exchange online and joining us back in the studios is adam gordon adam how are we doing today sir doing well how about you doing good looking forward to our next topic here yeah so i thought we'd continue our conversation in the mail flow feature area we're wrapping up and just coming off our conversation around rules and we set up transport rules remember that cool little demo we walk through around auto populating and accepting a meeting request so essentially forcing the acceptance on the user so they don't have to opt in so we've been through all that i'm going to jump to the opposite end of the spectrum now and actually bracket our conversation around mail mail flow features by jumping to connectors so join me here i thought we'd take care of this option and get this out of the way we'll just zoom in while we're talking so you can see where we are on the connectors tab because this is going to be an area that a lot of times people don't realize is going to be sitting there you often don't have a need to go in and deal with connectors as i kind of hinted at in the first episode is we just previewed all the different tabs talk quickly about how we would deal with them by grouping message and url trace and accepted remote domains together and we said connectors will kind of sit out on its own and we're going to deal with it separately we don't often have a need for connectors when we're working with exchange in the exchange online office 365 solution the way we are here and i say that because coming out of the on-prem environment for so many years we were probably fairly used to having to deal with connectors in one form or another we had to have a male rule uh and a transport solution as we've talked about already for a variety of things we had to have an accepted domain solution set up where we would have our name space perhaps partner name spaces configured and we dealt with connectors in a variety of ways though we don't always identify them as such and we usually uh would certainly if we had trust relationships with other uh entities partner organizations perhaps have connections uh to them but it depended on the version of exchange that we were working with and where we would set connectors up in what they were called it would move around early on uh from version of version we didn't know we see it as being called the connector but as we get into more modern versions of exchange 13 16 19 certainly the last three major version releases and we are moving into most likely hybrid coexistence environments and maybe even now exclusively exchange online the need for connectors may certainly change perhaps even go away and so what we see here in office 365 in this environment is our old friend the mr or mrs plus sign take your preference and we think okay hey we know we start adding connectors but we don't actually hear what we see here instead is the ability to leverage a little business case scenario wizard we're going to make some choices and i mentioned microsoft makes it a lot easier for us to figure out connectors in this instance because most of the scenarios either don't require a connector out right from office 365 in our tenant here to send mail to the internet do i need a connector no i don't it's already set up and ready to go i don't have to worry about doing that and there's no need for me to go in and try to set one up and microsoft will show me that if i make the appropriate choices in the wizard what about a hybrid coexistence scenario where i want to be able to send and receive to and from the on-prem environment right right back here behind me let's say into office 365. well i do need connectors for that but when i run the hybrid configuration wizard which we talked about early on in some of the very first episodes as we looked at coexistence and what a hybrid scenario would be like i even showed you the beginning of what the hybrid configuration wizard would look like i showed you where to download it and we ran in the sense that we activated it and showed you the setup screen we talked through the logic of what it would be to run through and set that up when we do that successfully assuming we have an on-prem environment to connect from and or linked to office 365 our connectors binding those two environments are created automatically they will show up here in other words and if you're looking at your tenant going let's odd i have connectors and adam doesn't why why is that the case it's not because i didn't create them well actually it is if you think about it but not because i didn't create them here but because i'm not set up in a hybrid coexistence scenario where i've run the hybrid configuration wizard and have those connectors set for me automatically because the wizard pre-populates them so if you have those there it's because you've done that and you're obviously already set up and ready to go now i'll show you one of the online help uh web pages that document some of this in a moment we'll take a look at a screen capture you kind of see what they look like because we're not going to reproduce them here we're not setting up a hybrid configuration but in just strictly the on-prem environment we do need connectors for almost everything we do in the hybrid environment we need connectors to go into and connect to the office 365 environment in the strictly online environment unless we're connecting to a partner organization and setting up tls based security on the connectors and using either the partner name space the domain let's say you know west.com if wes is my partner that i want to set up and connect to or maybe the ip range that identifies the west.com namespace unless i'm using that kind of a scenario i don't typically need to set up connectors myself because that in that scenario i would have to manually go in and configure them but other than that they're either auto populated for me or i don't need them at all so it's again maybe one third of the time in most and it's a very rare scenario that we're doing partner based configuration out of an online environment like office 365 exclusively and exclusive of the hybrid coexistence environment so it's not as likely that we would see that so i thought we'd spend a couple minutes just looking at the wizard walking through a couple of the different business case scenarios i've just described and then i want to show you what the connectors would look like if you had a hybrid configuration wizard run and kind of see that coexistence that connection back to the hybrid environment uh in the on-prem area i want to show you a nice little picture of graphic microsoft has it really illustrates why the connectors are important and how they are positioned uh from the online environment into our on-prem environment kind of what they do creating these dedicated tunnels these pathways that move information back and forth through the corporate firewall and in and out of our secure environment so it brings it all really together for us it makes it very nice so let's do the following i'm going to click on the plus sign here remember we're not adding connectors normally that's what we think would happen but we're not we're just getting access to the select your mail flow scenario wizard essentially the little pull down menus here to make choices about where we're starting where we want to go and if as a result of those choices we need a connector we'll then be given some information about our options right so we see we have two options here i'll just quickly zoom in to let you see them before i start making some choices but i have to through the pull-down menu select where i want to start from so if the from is office 365 i'll choose that out of my list where i want to go to my on-prem exchange server partner area the internet and then i'll see what my options are and all the options i see in the pull-down menu here are going to be detailed and detailed when i say detail what i mean is just simply defined off to the right on the nice little very long dialog box it's kind of hanging out there with a slider and if i'm not sure what partner organization means i can go over and read up on it really quickly as you can see right here so i'm going to select that we're starting from office 365 so i'm going to go ahead and i'm going to grab that and as i said if i want to go to the internet and i put that in there don't need a connector it's already set up functionality is there i enable the tenant set it up pay my money microsoft sets me up says you're ready to go and that's it they're managing everything i'm good i don't need to do anything else and that's the most common scenario believe it or not most people have with office 365 if they're all in it's all online that's already done it's seamless painless i don't ever need to set up a connector if i'm all in and just doing cloud-based hosting and that's it because i'm already able to transit in and out and microsoft manages all the infrastructure that's going to support and maintain that for me so i'm good remember on the front end of this i would have created my dns mx records as part of my onboarding of the office 36510 or the exchange online tenant and had all that set up and pointed in to the office 365 environment with my namespace and showing microsoft that i'm authoritative and giving them rights to then co-manage and all that's done so as a result of all that this scenario is now just on autopilot i don't have to do anything so i did all the heavy lift work when i bought in set up the tenant and once microsoft said we're good validated my dns information and told me hey wait 30 minutes your tenants being spun up and then i get my emails saying yep you're good everything is finished i don't have to worry about anything else at all so that part is good and that's not everybody but that's some people right not the majority people in office 365 but a small number but certainly a lot of them the most common scenario today is probably a hybrid scenario where we do have on-prem as well as cloud-based environments so let's go there let's change the two and let's make that the organization's email server the top choice right right at the top there under select an item because that's what most of my customers are doing it's what many of you are probably doing and you'll see that microsoft says oh yeah we need connectors for this mail flow scenario goes on talks a little bit about the mx records that i just mentioned we would have created and pointed to uh the information that microsoft gives us as we onboard through the onboarding wizard and it says hey you want to learn more about it click there i'm going to show you where that link takes us to in a minute but the reality is although it doesn't say it here where it says complete scenario you may need to configure email server to accept messages delivered by office 365 yes you do but the way you do that is by running the hybrid configuration wizard right so although it doesn't say it right here we know our requirement was setting this up and actually getting this to work based on conversations in earlier episodes was that we do really need to run that hybrid configuration wizard to properly instantiate the on-prem environment and get it working the right way right get our blinking lights to blink along with microsoft in sync right do all that and so harmonious blinking right comes from the hybrid configuration wizard and when we run that as i indicated all the connections are going to be set up for me as part of that process assuming it runs successfully so put a big check mark next to that because we would have already done that to get to this point in a coexistence environment and if you haven't done it we've talked about how to do it in other episodes go take a look but assuming you ran that wizard was successful i'm just being told and verifying yeah i do need them but the reality is they actually would already be here right i mean i can go in and create the connectors if i need to here by saying in this scenario yeah let me click next and let me go through and do it right so there was a button at the bottom that was able i was able to click next on you'll see here give this a name right this connector lets a 365 deliver messages to our orgs email server but the reality is it should already be there if i ran the hybrid configuration wizard i'm going to show you what they'll look like in a screen capture in the help document in a minutes remember we don't really have a server to connect to so i'm going to go off into space here in a minute and nothing's going to work i'll try it but you'll see that i would start by saying what do you want to do after the connector is saved turn it on retain uh internal email exchange headers right so i can basically set this up if i need to once i identify the business scenario that most likely requires one but i don't really have a need because they should be there and so normally what will happen is we'll come in here we'll actually see several connectors listed here if we have a hybrid environment because they've already been pre-configured for us so let's go take a look at what those are going to look like if i want to set up connectors moving between office 365 and on-prem email servers right essentially what's going on behind me here in theory then what i would be doing is this and this is that little graphic that i said i wanted to show you so i thought it would just really in my mind anyway it solidifies everything and hopefully in yours parker we go full screen for a moment while i'm doing this thank you sir so what we'll see is we have the internet over there on the far right of the diagram the on-prem environment right here on the extreme left in blue the office 365 environment is sitting in the middle now it's a little misleading because office 365 is the internet right i mean it is on the internet what they mean is you're essentially carved out office 365 tenant within the office 365 fabric which is yes technically part of the internet but it is a private cloud environment that you are using versus the public cloud internet which is where you go to find you know just anything as you can see so because i get that sometimes when i talk about this and i show people the picture they're like isn't it really just all the internet it is it's just a matter of what kind of functionality we want within the internet but the part we're gonna focus on is this part that's kind of in pink highlighted in the dialog box right there in the middle mail flow from office 365 to your email servers and it's got a little line going down to the orange arrow that's coming out of the connector the first of the two connector boxes in the middle pane under office 365 environment in orange there under bob at contoso there's bob again he gets around boy bob and alice they are busy people absolutely you can never get their attention because they're just off doing all sorts of crazy stuff we're just laughing as we often talk about bob and alice it's kind of our prototypical users when we uh demo things and they're always used when we talk about cryptography uh they're the just the randomly somehow everybody just settled on the fact we'll use bob and alice but you see bob for almost every demo uh he must have one heck of a good marketing agent i tell you because every good schedule management because he's everywhere absolutely every asymmetric key encryption demo i've seen has had those two his royalty they should be just very secure it must be highly that's right high high lots of zeros all right so you'll see there we do have our top connector box and we're shooting our our email over to our on-prem environment as you can see uh and we have the mail flow going that way so the connector one connector right is actually allowing us to send mail out and notice the other connector the one on the bottom in blue is allowing us to scroll down so you can see this is allowing us that mail flow coming from the on-prem environment going back the other way and so as a result we really have two sets of connections that are being created each one handles male flow in one direction right and so that's what we're seeing when we set these connectors up and so the logic of this hopefully makes sense in terms of the connectors and they show us right here they talk a bit about these connectors you want to read up on them but they show us right here the steps that would be involved it's good to read through that the prerequisites and it tells us as we get started here that let's get to the screen capture so you could see it and also the hybrid connector wizard reference that when we want to set up a connector from office 365 to our email server we can go in and we can look and it says before you set up the new connector check to see if any connectors already listed like i told you because it says for example if you run the hybrid configuration wizard the connectors will already be there and you could see there are two connectors on the screen capture in the background there that are being highlighted i know it's a little fuzzy it's a little hard to see even zoomed in they're a little vague and very hard to read but we basically have two connectors one that is going from the organization or the email server on prem the top one to office 365 it's not highlighted in gray and the one on the bottom just does the round trip going the other way from office 365 in the middle column there in gray on the bottom uh to the organization or email and those connectors get instantiated instead of me having to make them they get instantiated by running this hybrid configuration wizard so of the three scenarios that would require connectors right uh the idea of being able to set up the hybrid coexistence that's going to be done if we do it the right way through the hybrid configuration wizard the idea of needing a connector to get out to the internet is handled from by microsoft automatically we don't have to do anything so the two of the three already taken care of for us the only one that's really left is office 365 to our partner organization and we would set up those connectors ourself if we need them because they're highly specific to the configuration as i suggested of either the partners domain name space wes.com hypothetically or the email address associate address is the range associated with the west.com address space so of the three possibilities for connectors two-thirds of them are handled for us by microsoft and of the three the one that is most likely to be required the sending receiving over the internet which is mandatory is already taken care of the second most likely one the one that almost everybody falls into which is hybrid coexistence and i need the connectors is taken care of as you run the wizard so really unless you're connecting to partner organizations which is usual but not really very usual you're almost never going to have to create connectors and if you do have to create them it's a fairly straightforward process so i just wanted to walk you through the logic of this to give you just a quick idea in this episode really not much more to say about it than that because it's very unlikely you have to spend a lot of time there and if you do the connectors will already be there you can obviously click on them see them necessary some odd reason maybe make a change you could do that by editing them but normally you're just going to be on autopilot there with connectors more often than not so it's helpful just to get the context i think more than anything else in this case not a lot to do but certainly at least awareness of what may already be there and that way we have a better understanding of how mail is actually flowing in and out of the organization and perhaps to and from the on-prem environment into our cloud environment which makes us ultimately not only better administrators but more confident about what's going on so we can troubleshoot more effectively if necessary all right love it short and sweet giving you some of the information that you need to take into consideration and some of the scenarios that hopefully will make your deployment or your your hybrid deployment a little bit easier so adam thank you so much for being here as always and remember we appreciate you the viewer watching signing out for it pro tv i've been your host wes bryant i'm adam gordon we'll see you next time [Music] thank you for watching it pro tv

Channel: Intune Guru

Views: 5,704

Keywords: exchange online, exchange onlince connectors, configure exchange online connectors, #configure exchange online connectors, how to configure receive connector in exchange server 2019, connectors in exchange server, exchange server, create connectors in exchange server, microsoft exchange, receive connector in exchange 2019, manage connector in exchange server, configure send connector in exchange 2019, configuring receive connector in exchange 2019

Id: ebLRNEh7YYE

Length: 18min 42sec (1122 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021