How to solve Failed to sync the ArchiveGuid in Office 365 (Manual)

Posted On October 8, 2019

Last few weeks I’ve been struggling with an very difficult Office 365 / Exchange Online case, that got escalated to multiple Microsoft departments to be fixed. I already found one part of the solution, but Microsoft found the second part. Today I would like to take you through all the steps to fix possible causes and resolutions. So the initial problem started with the following error in the Office 365 admin portal with the affected users:

Another symptom is the mailbox provisioning gets stuck, and hangs on “We are preparing a mailbox for this user”

You will only see this error with AD connect sync enabled environments. The problem occurs when the on-premise value mismatches with the Online Archive Guid. With just a few easy steps we can fix this issue.

Resolution

We will need to fill multiple Active Directory user attributes to resolve this issue.

STEP 1: First connect to Exchange Online with PowerShell using the following commands:

$Credential = Get-Credential

$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://outlook.office365.com/powershell-liveid/ -Credential $Credential -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection

Import-PSSession $Session

STEP 2: First it is important to find out all effected users. This can be done using a simple command:

Get-MsolUser -HasErrorsOnly 

STEP 3: Now we will need to get the ArchiveGuid and the ArchiveName from the affected user. So run the following command (Replace UserPrincipleName with the UserPrincipleName from the effected user in step 2):

Get-Mailbox  UserPrincipleName |FL Archive*

The output should look like this:

STEP 4: Copy the AchiveGuid and run the following command, replacing the ArchiveGuid with the value from step 3. This command will convert the Guid to Hexidecimal.

[system.guid]$guid = "ArchiveGuid"
 ($Guid.ToByteArray() | foreach { $_.ToString('x2') }) -Join ' '

The result should like this:

STEP 5: Now open your Active Directory and Users console. We will need to make 4 adjustments to each effected user. So open properties of the effected user and go to Attribute Editor (If you do not see that option, you will need to enable Advanced Features from the View menu in the console)

5.1: First step is to fill the mailNickName. Fill in the mailnickname from the user, this is usually the same as everything before the @ in the email-address.

IMPORTANT! If this attribute is empty, AD Connect will not synchronize the required values to solve this problem!

5.2: Now we will need to use the Value from step 4 to be filled in the msExchArchiveGUID.

5.3: Next we will need to grab the ArchiveName from step 3, and fill this into the msExchArchiveName without the brackets.

5.4: Last item to edit is msExchRemoteRecipientType to the value of 3.

STEP 6: Now we will need to synchronize the made changes to Office 365. From your AD Connect server force a Delta sync using the following command, or just wait 30 minutes.

Start-ADSyncSyncCycle -PolicyType Delta

This should resolve your problem. Please give the Office 365 systems 15-30 minutes to synchronize all settings internally.

What if this doesn’t resolve the issue?

Well, this happened to me, I couldn’t find anything on the internet to help me further, so I opened a case with Microsoft. And the gave me the following to go ahead with.

Verify AD Connect

When you don’t see any change in the error from the user, verify that all atributes are synchronized. Although from the logs it looks like everything is syncing, it can mean that it is actually not… I found out the hard way… So double check the rule in from AD – User Exchange and make sure that it is enabled (the button on the bottom should say Disable)

This also applies to the Outbound Direction for the rule Out to AAD – User ExchangeOnline

Force Office 365 background system sync.

Sometimes changes don’t get applied instantly in Office 365 because of background syncs. Microsoft has created a manual enforcement for users to be synchronized directly after an AAD sync. To do so, populate the following fields with the Microsoft name:

• Street
• Department
• Company

After you’ve applied the value to the 3 field, make sure to run 1 initial sync, en 2 delta syncs on AD Connect.