Migration from local Exchange Server to 365

[EdFred]

Anyone been through this?

I have one user that has not and will not delete any emails. Has nearly 200,000 emails in the sent and received folders and I've got 10 years worth of emails (you'd be surprised how often you might have to go back 5 years and say "oh, nope here's where you said x") myself.

Anyway, I've done a exchange ==> exchange migration, which was dirt simple, but has anyone done one from local to Redmond, WA?

I don't have a 365 account yet, so I can't ask M$ any questions on migration until I have one.

 

[DaleB]

Can’t help you there. I’ve done Google to 365, which was clunky but in the end it worked. I just figured out partway through that the documented Microsoft way to do it was a terrible way to do it… no surprise there.

Mailbox migrations were pretty painless, if a bit slow.

 

[Cap'n Jack]

Anyone been through this?

I have one user that has not and will not delete any emails. Has nearly 200,000 emails in the sent and received folders and I've got 10 years worth of emails (you'd be surprised how often you might have to go back 5 years and say "oh, nope here's where you said x") myself.

Anyway, I've done a exchange ==> exchange migration, which was dirt simple, but has anyone done one from local to Redmond, WA?

I don't have a 365 account yet, so I can't ask M$ any questions on migration until I have one.

You found Hilary's missing e-mails?

 

[Albany Tom]

I haven't done it myself, but outfit I work for did the transfer years ago. A significant advantage is that there are archival backups that should protect you from ransomware on local systems affecting the cloud email. You probably have different options, maybe depending on the size of the company, in terms of agreements of service, and the compliance domains they'll meet. Also different between government and commercial. There are different options for multi-factor auth. You really really want multi-factor for cloud based email these days. You don't have to use their MFA, or at least you don't if you're big enough, you can use something like RSA if you want.

The pain point could be if they have a bunch of custom apps written around microsoft O365 like things - sharepoint for example.

They will absolutely want to charge you extra for all sorts of add-ons. DLP is one. Advanced anti-virus is another. I'm sure there are more. If the customer has to meet specific industry compliance regulations - HIPPA high tech, etc, do some extra homework.

Overall, I'd be temped to look at switching to Google. Bet they have a way to import everything. They have consultants that they work with that are pretty good, much friendlier than the MS crowd.

 

[EdFred]

Evidently a difficult question.

Where did I ask about migrating to Google?

We use the office suite and integrate the entire suite.

 

[Albany Tom]

Free info sometimes comes with extra free info...

 

[weilke]

I have migrated from a email system provided by a web hosting company to 365. You go through a migration wizard, tell it where the emails are and give it the imap login credentials. It creates a 'batch' and tells you how it is progressing. After a few days it tells you that it sucked all the emails over. 365 basically pretends to be an email client and just continually queries and requests the download of messages. Apparently some email systems interpret the kind of continuous downloading of emails as an attack and disable credentials, if that happens, the 'batch' will tell you.

I just went into my exchange admin center, and it looks like what you want to do is called a 'cutover migration' or a 'staged migration':

NOTE: This option migrates the contents of mailboxes from an on-premises Exchange to Exchange Online. You can migrate batches of mailboxes until all mailboxes are migrated to the cloud.

This migration is supported by Exchange Server 2003 and later versions.

To complete the cutover migration:

• Check Outlook Anywhere configurations on your on-premises Exchange server
• Use a certificate issued by a trusted certification authority with your Outlook Anywhere configuration
• Optional: Verify that you can connect to your Exchange organization using Outlook Anywhere
• The on-premises user account that you use to connect to your on-premises Exchange organization (the migration administrator) must have the necessary permissions to access the on-premises mailboxes that you want to migrate to Microsoft 365
• Disable Unified Messaging (UM)
• Create security groups and clean up delegates

 

[IK04]

My OWA only account will be shut down in a few days and I will be manually forwarding the last 6,000+ emails to my 365 account. I have a few thousand moved now as attachments 20-50 at a time.

My only other choice was to blow away my 365 account and migrate the last 21 years of mail and lose all email access for 48 hours. I chose no...

It will be good to only have one account (for work) and I'll look forward to all the fun limitations and suckage of O365 mail. It is already working at about 75% uptime. Great...

 

[EdFred]

I have migrated from a email system provided by a web hosting company to 365. You go through a migration wizard, tell it where the emails are and give it the imap login credentials. It creates a 'batch' and tells you how it is progressing. After a few days it tells you that it sucked all the emails over. 365 basically pretends to be an email client and just continually queries and requests the download of messages. Apparently some email systems interpret the kind of continuous downloading of emails as an attack and disable credentials, if that happens, the 'batch' will tell you.

I just went into my exchange admin center, and it looks like what you want to do is called a 'cutover migration' or a 'staged migration':

NOTE: This option migrates the contents of mailboxes from an on-premises Exchange to Exchange Online. You can migrate batches of mailboxes until all mailboxes are migrated to the cloud.

This migration is supported by Exchange Server 2003 and later versions.

To complete the cutover migration:

• Check Outlook Anywhere configurations on your on-premises Exchange server
• Use a certificate issued by a trusted certification authority with your Outlook Anywhere configuration
• Optional: Verify that you can connect to your Exchange organization using Outlook Anywhere
• The on-premises user account that you use to connect to your on-premises Exchange organization (the migration administrator) must have the necessary permissions to access the on-premises mailboxes that you want to migrate to Microsoft 365
• Disable Unified Messaging (UM)
• Create security groups and clean up delegates

Thanks for the info. Seems rather straightforward. But since it is MS, I am sure there will be glitches.