Office 365 is designed specifically to suit the business needs. Enterprises can make use of a variety of applications that come bundled with Office 365. For this reason, an administrator is willing to migrate Exchange Server mailboxes to Office 365. There are more compelling reasons why an organization might consider migrating to Office 365 from Exchange Server. These are elaborated in this article and also in this article. But it is not an easy process, if you particularly opt for the native method provided by Microsoft. Before migrating your Exchange Server to Office 365 you should have a proper plan and a time frame which reduces the risk and ensures a tension free migration process.
Depending upon the mailboxes in your organization, you can approach various migration types like cut-over, staged and hybrid migration. Please note that these native migrations when performed directly from the Microsoft interface without using any third part tool come with certain limitations as described in this blog post. Let us look at the steps to achieve this as guided in the Microsoft website.
Live Exchange Server to Office 365 Cut-over migration:
In cut-over migration you can migrate all your mailboxes in a single attempt. But it has some limits up to 150 mailboxes. Using Exchange Admin Center, you can migrate up to 2000 mailboxes. A detailed guide on how to perform Cut-over migration is exhaustively covered in this article.
General guidelines for Cut-over migration:
- First update your system and then download service packs.
- For proper migration enable the Outlook anywhere as it allows the remote connection to an on premises Exchange Server.
- You should check whether the administrator’s account will be used for migrating full access to all mailboxes.
- SSL certificate with Outlook Anywhere is added and Autodiscover services included.
- You must cross-verify whether outlook anywhere is connected to your Exchange server.
- Before migration, it is advisable to Disable Unified Messaging. Once migration is complete then it can be turned back on.
- You can create email migration service before migration, then you can migrate security groups.
- Then you create migration batch, it contains transfer every single mailbox.
- After all these steps, you should be ready to transfer within the next 24 hours or else 48 hours. When TTL passes, the DNS MX record needs to be changed so that mail is routed to Office 365 mailbox.
- Ensure that all the mails are synced to Exchange server.
- Finally, all the migrated accounts must hold the licenses within 30 days after migration.
For post-migration tasks, Autodiscover record must be created in DNS to connect to the respective Office 365 mailboxes for users.
Scalable and High performance Exchange migration
Exchange Server Migaration to any destination is with multi threading capability with throttling management can make your migration fast and high performance.
Exchange to Office 365 Staged migration:
In this migration, the stages are almost similar to cut-over migration. But the only difference is that the data in this process is migrated in batch files. Due to large number of mailboxes you need a proper list. It is wise to prepare a CSV file. You can use the export option in Exchange Control Panel to prepare this file. From here you can move mailboxes very easily. Detailed steps to perform Staged migration is outlined in this article.
Exchange to Office 365 Hybrid migration:
Hybrid Migration is an advanced approach, which is available for Exchange 2010, 2013 and 2016. Here it can provide both on premises and Office 365 and requires Active Directory synchronization between source and the target server. The hybrid migration has two options, full and minimum hybrid. Full hybrid is the most complex one. Minimum hybrid is available for Exchange 2007 servers and it is applied for small and medium organizations. This method is illustrated elaborately in this post.
Disadvantages of Exchange to Office 365 migration using native methods.
- If you use Microsoft migration, then one needs to have a good command over power-shell scripts. Otherwise the entire procedure might seem like a stony path.
- There are no filter options available to selectively filter e-mails. You have to migrate the whole mailbox.
- There are interruptions and down-times experienced while performing migration from the native methods.
Best solution to overcome the limitations of native Office 365 migration:
EdbMails is one of the leading Exchange migration solution that supports all the migration types as stated above. It doesn’t need the execution of any complicated PowerShell scripts or commands. Here you can migrate only selected files or folders without encountering data loss. There is no need to worry about server maintenance, security issues and system updates which is the case otherwise.
More information and features about this excellent tool can be found by visiting this link https://www.edbmails.com/pages/exchange-server-migration-tool.html