Microsoft today have announced the latest release of the Hybrid Configuration Wizard (HCW), which now supports Exchange Online REST-based APIs. They said in a previous announcement, Remote PowerShell (RPS) is being deprecated in Exchange Online starting this month. To accommodate this deprecation, the new version of the HCW no longer uses RPS and instead uses REST-based APIs.

There are no changes in HCW UI, which works the same way as previous versions. Behind the scenes, the HCW now uses REST-based APIs instead of RPS to connect to Exchange Online. These changes affect the worldwide cloud; customers in other cloud instances like US Gov clouds and 21Vianet will get these changes in the upcoming months, though they can still use this updated version (which for those cloud instances will continue to use RPS).

HCW Diagnostic Tools

When you press F12 in the HCW, several Diagnostic Tools appear, including an option to connect to Exchange Online PowerShell. This is an old option that uses RPS, but it has not yet been removed from the HCW. Microsoft are planning on removing it in a later update.

Customers that have RPS disabled should use the Exchange Online v3 cmdlets instead of this Diagnostic Tools option. Steps to connect to Exchange Online PowerShell are provided here.

All customers running HCW should download the latest version of HCW from https://aka.ms/hybridwizard. Customers who already ran HCW and have already established their hybrid organization do not need to re-run HCW for this update, but if you need to re-run HCW for any reason in the future, you should update it at that point.

Exchange Hybrid Team