In the business world, Microsoft Office 365 software is not a surprising product because of its common use all over the globe. However, not all the admins show keen interest in Office 365 migration due to various issues involved in it. Here we list some types of migration, protection and compliance requirements, bandwidth concerns, hybrid prerequisites, legacy archive exports and even the retention policy. A complete guide for Office 365 migration is detailed out in this article.
Office 365 Migration scenarios and best practices:
There are three types of migration: Cut-over, Staged and Hybrid migration. Before migrating to Office 365 proper planning is required. And it depends on what environment you are currently running. From this base, we can choose the type of migration that is the most suitable. You can also use the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant which ascertains your current environment and offers you a suitable migration option. An overview of the different migrations is already explained in this article. For a quick check-list and important points for Office 365 migration, please refer this link.
IT administrators advise on making an inventory of all the essential items before you migrate to Office 365. Here is an article that cautions you about the common problems encountered during the migration process. It is also strongly advised to create a full backup of important data to make the entire process hassle free and also perform a test backup to get familiar with the migration environment. If there are any problems encountered at this junction, the full migration can be temporarily halted till the issues are sorted out.
Office 365 Migration types and challenges:
Cutover Migration: With Exchange version 2007, 2010, 2013 you can migrate all the mailbox data to Office 365 in a single migration. All these depend upon your mailboxes in your organization. You can migrate either with Setup wizard or Exchange Admin Center of Office 365. With setup wizard you can migrate 150 mailbox and with Exchange Admin Center you can migration more than 150 to 2000 mailboxes. This migration method is however recommended only for smaller number of mailboxes.
Staged Migration: This is also called as batch migration which means, migrate all mailbox database in batches. This is particularly useful for Exchange version 2007 and more than 2000 mailboxes can be migrated in staged migration.
Hybrid Migration: In this migration you can migrate large size mailboxes which means more than 150 mailboxes within a short time period. This method is available for Exchange versions 2007, 2010 and 2013.
Scalable and High performance Office 365 migration
EdbMails – Office 365 Migration can accomplish your existing Office 365 tenant to another Office 365 tenant migration project effortlessly.
Essentials of protections and consent:
When migrating data to Office 365, there are certain security implications to consider upfront. You may come across problems during migration such as multi-factor authentication, anti-spam, encryption and rights management or device management etc. Some security factors or options set by default in your previous environment might not automatically be turned on or vice versa. You must cross-check at least twice to ensure, whether the data is safe in your destination Office 365 account. And even in domains like finance and healthcare the data is so important that you cannot afford to lose it. It is therefore highly important to choose a safe and secure tool for migrating your mailboxes to Office 365.
Large files like public folders, archive data, or emails with attachments are not easily migrated to Office 365 using the native Microsoft migration methods. It is recommended to go for 3rd party tools when performing large file size migration to Office 365 to reduce greater risk.
Export archive mailbox:
As a general practice, old mails and data are kept as archive to save space. It is not linked to the main mailbox. Archive folders are configured with separate folder. They contains journal reports and other old important messages. In migration you can migrate archived folders and its data using a third-party tool. Ensure that during the migration, the data you are moving to the archive folders does not accidentally merge with main mailbox data.
Bandwidth issues:
Perhaps it almost takes a lot of bandwidth, but it depends upon what technology we use for migration. If you transfer very big files, for example in GB’s then it takes an unusually long time for migration. Exchange Web Services is a bandwidth consuming service and not all the data you migrate might end up in your Office 365 destination account. Third party tools avoid throttling and bandwidth issues altogether.
Limitations of Office 365 Retention policy:
If you want to retain your retention policy, there are some limitations in Office 365. You can store deleted messages for 14 days by default. This period can be increased by an administrator by changing the Messaging Recording Management policy. But this period is simply not enough for some organizations.
Office 365 Migration using EdbMails
If you are looking for a stress free method to perform migration to Office 365 account, we recommend using ‘EdbMails’ Office 365 migration tool. It is risk free easy to use and one of the best third-party tools. EdbMails utility migrates your data safely and securely without encountering connection errors, loss of data and so forth. Office 365 migration tool.