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Hide User from GAL

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The following ONLY applies to the Cloud Hybrid environment type. For Clients with any other environment type, this article is not applicable.

You may on a rare occurrence see the error message below displayed in the Pia Chatbot when Pia attempts to hide the user from the Global Address List:

This typically means that the Exchange Schema is not present on the On-Premise Active Directory. To hide a user from the Global Address List(GAL), we set the attribute "msExchHideFromAddressLists" property to a boolean value of True.

This attribute only exists in the Active Directory Schema if the Exchange Schema is added to the Active Directory Forest. To verify this is the case, you can follow the steps on this article:

Find the current Active Directory Schema version | Microsoft Learn

If the three methods of finding the Exchange Schema Version show that the Exchange Schema is not present in the Active Directory, you have two options:

Option 1: Prepare Active Directory for Exchange Server (You do not need to Install Exchange Server as a part of this).

Option 2: Configure a custom attribute mapping between On-Prem AD and Azure (Entra).

Step 1: Follow the steps in this Microsoft Article to add the Exchange Schema.

Step 2: Re-test offboarding a user and confirm that the user is now hidden from the Global Address List