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Week in brief

Cloud Sync group guidance adds explicit membership rules and five-member tests

The week’s Entra changes are chiefly a reorganization of Microsoft Entra Cloud Sync guidance around group provisioning to AD DS. A new tutorial and rewritten setup articles separate group workflows from older users-and-groups material; the planning page now documents which members and identifiers cloud-synced groups require, while on-demand testing guidance tells administrators to select a group and up to five members. Seven older pages were removed, including references for prerequisites, general provisioning behavior, and test-and-enable operations.

  • The new tutorial covers Entra-to-AD and AD-to-Entra scenarios and explains how source of authority and membership affect provisioning. It recommends Selected security groups as the default scoping filter to help prevent performance issues.

  • The guidance states that cloud-synced groups can contain only on-premises synchronized users and additional cloud-created security groups, and that all users must have `onPremisesObjectIdentifier`. The example link and diagram descriptions were also updated.

  • The revised procedure tells administrators to select a group and up to five members for testing. User-specific instructions and result-review details were removed, and provisioning-direction references now point to Microsoft Entra ID-to-Active Directory guidance.

  • The configure article was rewritten with setup steps, screenshots, scoping, attribute mapping, testing, and default settings for provisioning groups from Microsoft Entra ID to Active Directory. It removes the previous combined users-and-groups guidance and adds a deprecation notice.

  • The how-to page for testing and enabling Microsoft Entra ID-to-Active Directory provisioning was removed, including guidance on on-demand tests, default properties, enabling configurations, quarantines, restarting synchronization, and removing configurations.

For Entra administrators

Review group-provisioning designs and runbooks against the updated membership conditions and group-focused setup. For on-demand tests, select group members manually, up to five. Teams relying on deleted prerequisite or test-and-enable pages will need current Cloud Sync references; the supplied updates state no mandatory configuration change.

This period briefing was generated by AI from the tracked Microsoft Learn and Message Center changes.

Updates this week

11

Plan Cloud Sync Topologies

Feature update

The documentation now states that cloud-synced groups can contain only on-premises synchronized users and additional cloud-created security groups, and that all users must have `onPremisesObjectIdentifier`. The example link and diagram descriptions were also updated.

31 August 2026

Tutorial Users Groups Provisioning Walkthrough

Doc update

The 246-line tutorial for provisioning cloud-managed users and groups to Active Directory with Microsoft Entra Cloud Sync was deleted. It covered preview user provisioning for access to an on-premises Kerberos application.

31 August 2026

On Demand Provision

Doc update

The article’s introduction now describes on-demand provisioning from Microsoft Entra ID to Active Directory and links to related guidance.

31 August 2026

Prerequisites Provision Entra To Active Directory

Doc update

The article covering prerequisites and license requirements for provisioning users and groups from Microsoft Entra ID to on-premises Active Directory with Cloud Sync was deleted, along with its related links and next-step guidance.

31 August 2026

Test And Enable Provisioning Entra To Active Directory

Doc update

The how-to page for testing and enabling Microsoft Entra ID to Active Directory provisioning was deleted, including guidance on on-demand tests, default properties, enabling configurations, quarantines, restarting sync, and removing configurations.

31 August 2026
3

Group Source Of Authority Guidance

Doc update

The guidance now links to the group provisioning tutorial and its updated section on nested groups and membership references.

31 August 2026

Deployment Options Provision To Active Directory

Doc update

The article comparing group-only, user-only, and users-and-groups provisioning from Microsoft Entra ID to Active Directory was deleted, including guidance on scoping, configuration limits, and performance.

31 August 2026

Provision Entra Id To Active Directory

Doc update

The documentation page describing Microsoft Entra Cloud Sync provisioning of users, groups, and memberships from Entra ID to Active Directory was deleted.

31 August 2026
2

Group Source Of Authority Configure

Doc update

The documentation now points administrators to the Microsoft Entra Cloud Sync tutorial for provisioning groups to Active Directory Domain Services, replacing the previous provisioning overview and on-premises app governance links.

31 August 2026
1

Protect M365 From On Premises Attacks

Doc update

The Access guidance now points to an updated Microsoft Entra Cloud Sync documentation link for provisioning groups to Active Directory.

31 August 2026
1

Road To The Cloud Implement

Doc update

The documentation now links to the Microsoft Entra Cloud Sync group provisioning tutorial instead of the configuration guide.

31 August 2026
1

Source Of Authority Overview

Doc update

The guidance for recreating AD DS groups as cloud security groups, provisioning them as Universal groups, and updating applications to use their new security identifiers was revised.

31 August 2026
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