Good news: customizing the Office 365 Directory Synchronization is now allowed for filtering of OU’s, Domains and Users!
This feature has been much requested in the field, so we’re pleased it’s finally now supported.
What Microsoft is specifically supporting is:
- Exclude OU’s from being synchronized
This allows for exlusions of OU’s (and underlying objects) and is done by specifying which OU’s to exclude in the Directory Partitions\Containers in the ILM configuration. - Exclude domains from being synchronized
This options is to exclude whole domains (not forests) from being synchronized. Configured trough the Directory Partitions configuration in ILM - Exclude specific users from being synchronized
This is done by filtering on AD object attributes. For example you could specify that all user objects that have “Netherlands” in their AD Country attribute will not be synchronized. You have freedom to select on which AD object attribute you want to filter. So if you want to make a very specific filter, you could opt to fill an ExtensionAttribute on specific user objects and use this to filter on in the Dirsync. Again, configuring the filters is done through the ILM management console.
If you already have Dirsync running, any configuration changes made will simply be applied after the next synchronization run (default=every 3 hours).
Here’s MS’ post on the O365 community:
