SMTP soft matching

M AService Manager
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O365, Exchange Server,Windows Server, Active Directory, Virtualization, Teams and Email Migration Expert.
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Edited by: Andrew Leniart
This article will help you to perform a soft match of an AD user with a cloud user.
Soft matching.
In some cases, we need to change the source of authority of a user when the user was initially created in the cloud, and we want to manage the account on-premise. I.e. Change the source of the authority to an on-premise AD so that cloud user can be managed from an on-premise AD using directory synchronization.

Soft matching can only be used when a user is initially created in the cloud. Once soft matching is done, the cloud user is bound to AD with an immutable ID instead of a primary email (SMTP) address.

A cloud user’s primary email (SMTP) address cannot update at the time of a soft matching process as the primary email (SMTP) address is the attribute used to link the on-premise AD user to the cloud user.

Start soft matching 
User created. testsoftmatch@....us.group in cloud.

Now get the primary SMTP address from the cloud.

Double click on the mailbox, or click on the mailbox and then on the pencil icon.

Click on the email addresses and copy the email address with caps SMTP.
I.e. testsoftmatch@....sh.group in our case.

Now let's create the same user in the on-premise AD.

Then run a delta sync from your ADSync/ADConnect server using the following command.

Start-ADSyncSyncCycle -PolicyType Delta

You can now see the new user testsoftmatch@....ush.com is synced from on-premise.


You are done with soft matching.

Thanks for reading my article. Below are my other articles which may help you.
Please find the hard matching article url below.
SMTP hard matching 

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M AService Manager
CERTIFIED EXPERT
Most Valuable Expert2017 and 2020.
O365, Exchange Server,Windows Server, Active Directory, Virtualization, Teams and Email Migration Expert.

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