Office 365: Directory Sync not syncing distribution groups

I've been having an issue with Office 365 Active Directory
Synchronisation Tool
 recently.  The requirement was to create a new
distribution group within Active Directory and have that
automatically sync across to Office 365. The issue is that we do not
run an on-premis exchange server.  This means that the required
attributes that the Directory Synchronisation tool was looking for
are not populated when creating the distribution group.  After a call to
Microsoft support I was informed that the following tags need to populated manually through AdsiEdit before the sync tool will work
pick it up correctly.  Lets assume I want to create the distribution
group
[email protected], then the required attributes would be
as follows:

  • proxyAddress: This needs to contain the following: SMTP:[email protected]
    • Obviously replace the email address with the appropriate one that you are trying to create.
    • Importantly the SMTP must be upper case.  The primary address in the "proxyAddress" attribute must have an upper case "SMTP".  Secondary addresses, must be lower case.
  • name: this needs to contain the first part of the email address before the @ sign. maintenance
  • mail: this needs to be the full required email address. [email protected]
  • displayName: This needs to be the display name that you want to appear. Maintenance
I would like to add that the Google Apps Sync tool was a lot simpler than this and I hope that MS can take a look at simplifying the process for environments that don't have an on-site Exchange Server.