Azure AD Connect: Correct Or Remove Duplicate Values

KB ID 0001588

Problem

I was doing some work for a School recently, their staff were already using Office 365 and their tenancy was all setup. Now they wanted to roll Office 365 out to the pupils, and sync to their on premise Active Directory.

Now we could have simply excluded the staff from the Azure AD Connect Sync, but they want to manage their passwords etc. on-premise. Microsoft will tell you if you DON’T have an on-premise Exchange (they didn’t), then you simply need to enter the correct email address on the user object and the correct accounts will match up and sync, however they did not, this happened instead;

Unable to update this object because the following attributes associated with this object have values that may already be associated with another object in your local directory services: [ProxyAddresses SMTP:username@domain-name.com;]. Correct or remove the duplicate values in your local directory. Please refer to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2647098 for more information on identifying objects with duplicate attribute values.
Tracking Id: 2b68528a-695a-4c5e-9b4f-7ec471e5f38c
ExtraErrorDetails:
[{“Key”:”ObjectId”,”Value”:[“6ef8d8d0-2893-4d46-83e3-bf819ea607d2”]},{“Key”:”ObjectIdInConflict”,”Value”:[“56a72044-de5b-43ce-82b1-edb82c80395e”]},{“Key”:”AttributeConflictName”,”Value”:[“ProxyAddresses”]},{“Key”:”AttributeConflictValues”,”Value”:[“SMTP:username@domain-name.com“]}]

OK, I’ve worked A LOT with Exchange and I know that ProxyAddress and Email address are related, but not the same AD attribute. But changing that didn’t fix the problem either?

Solution

Well we are syncing on-premise Active Directory and Azure Active Directory, and we DON’T want to change anything on site. So logically wherever the ‘fix’ is, it will be in Azure. (If you only ever use the Office 365 portal then buckle up)

Within Office 365 Admin > Admin Centers > Azure Active Directory.