We have a client with, what seems to me, an odd request regarding their exchange topology. They are a small college and have their mail split between on-premise and O365. Their on-premise Exchange 2013 has email setup for domain.com, used by the faculty. Their O365 is setup for students.domain.com and is sync'd with AD using MSO Dirsync. Currently, the two do not interact at all and is causing issues with staff emailing students. Since they are educational, we have advised them to move the faculty over to O365, however they throw that option out every time we bring it up. They want to keep their faculty email on premise and leave the students in the cloud. They want these separate, but still want the features of a single exchange forest. They want the students to be in the address-book, and be able to use distribution lists between the two.
What I'm wondering is if hybrid deployment will allow this to happen. Based off my limited exchange experience, hybrid is used for the same domain across on-premise and O365, not for 2 separate domains. I feel like two separate domains doesn't really matter, since they are all AD mailboxes anyway.
What I'm asking is if hybrid deployment would be the way to go for this, and if there would be any documentation as the how to this exactly. What I'm finding is documentation on the same domain split between the two, not 1 domain on exchange and 1 domain on O365.
Any help is appreciated, thank you!