There is a lot to consider when migrating an existing mail service to the cloud, and fortunately the team at C2C Cloud Services have the resources and experience to manage the migration on your behalf.
Migrating users requires a comprehensive migration plan and a thorough communications plan pre and post migration. C2C has developed the plans required for a successful migration which we have implemeted across various customer engagaments.
We are able to migrate most current mail services including the following:
On-Premises: Exchange, Lotus, Domino, Groupwise, Generic PoP/IMAP.
Hosted Solutions: Premium Hosted Exchange, ISP (POP/IMAP), Hotmail, Gmail.
Each of the current mail solutions presents a different set of challenges required to perform a seemless end-user experience.
C2C provides a comprehensive workflow for Migration including the following:
Detailed Migration Plan
Detailed Communication Plan, including internal communication to the end users, ensuring they are abreast of the progress and any procedures they must follow leading up the migration date.
Before you can migrate your mailboxes, you must prepare your Microsoft Online environment for migration. The first three topics in this section describe this preparation. When you have completed these three steps, you can begin your migration work.
If your organization wants to use your registered Internet domain name with Exchange Online, you must add that domain to Exchange Online, verify your ownership of that domain, and then configure Exchange Online to use that domain.
You should also verify that your organization's network configuration allows access to the Microsoft Online features.
You can continue to use your local Exchange Server environment while evaluating Microsoft Online. During e-mail coexistence, some of your organization's mailboxes will be hosted on your local Exchange Server environment, and others will be hosted in Exchange Online. Verify that mailboxes on both systems can send and receive e-mail.
Establish Directory Synchronization.
Directory synchronization writes a copy of each user account and all e-mail-enabled contacts and groups from your local Active Directory® directory service to your organization's Microsoft Online directory and synchronizes any changes in those objects from your local Active Directory to Microsoft Online. Directory synchronization can also provide Global Address List synchronization between your local Exchange Server environment and Exchange Online. For more information, see the Migrate to Microsoft Online white paper.
The Migration team must gather information to pre-qualify the migration candidates identified in the previous step. The migration team should gather the information in the following table.
|
Information |
Considerations |
|
Mailbox size |
If the mailbox to be migrated is larger than 1 gigabyte (GB), some mailbox content will not be migrated and the user's mailbox may be full which will prevent them from sending or receiving e-mail until they have deleted or moved some items. |
|
Active Directory forest |
Do your migration administrators have the necessary permissions in this forest? |
|
Active Directory domain |
Do your migration administrators have the necessary permissions in this domain? |
|
Active Directory organizational unit (OU) |
Do your migration administrators have the necessary permissions in this OU? |
|
Mailbox forest |
Do your migration administrators have the necessary permissions in this forest? |
|
Mail-enabled applications |
Does your organization have any mail-enabled applications? If so, you must determine if they can be migrated to Exchange Online. |
|
Mailbox delegate access |
If users have delegated mailbox access to others, those people should be migrated at the same time. |
|
Mailbox folder access control |
If users have customized access to some of their mailbox folders, the people who have been granted access should be migrated at the same time. |
|
When to migrate? |
Does your organization work in shifts? Do you have mailbox blackout restrictions? Are there other possible job restrictions that would prevent someone from migrating? |
|
Others |
Are there any other limitations in your organization and e-mail environment that might prevent or postpone mailbox migration? |
We recommend that the team perform test migrations for every forest, domain, and OU configuration represented by the people in your migration list.
Before migrating your users' mailboxes, you must validate your plans and procedures. Begin validation by creating test mailboxes in your local Exchange Server environment and migrating the contents of those mailboxes to Exchange Online. As part of this validation, you should ensure that your Support team and the migration
project team are familiar with all phases of migration. The best way to do this is to migrate these people first. We recommend migrating your Support team first, so they can help troubleshoot any issues that you encounter.
When you are confident that your migration plans are complete and that your processes are correct and well understood, the final test is to migrate the members of your migration project team. It may be necessary to repeat these migrations a few times until you have a well-defined and understood migration process.
When you're ready to begin communicating with the people who will be migrated and with their managers, you can follow the processes that you defined in your communication plan. For more information, see the sample Migration Communication Plan and the E-Mail Templates.
Before migrating mailboxes, you must make sure that those mailboxes are able to be migrated.
Management Qualify
After the migration team has pre-qualified the mailboxes to be migrated, you should validate that list with management and notify them when you plan to migrate their people. Managers may not want to migrate certain people because of previous project commitments or some technical reasons. This is management's opportunity to approve migration of their people and perhaps reschedule some of the migrations.
Self Qualify
The communication sent to the people to be migrated asks them to complete the Before Migration Procedures. The last procedure on this list is to complete the User Qualification Survey, which will involve them in the qualification process and help them understand what is required of them.
After the previous qualifying steps, you will have the final list of people to be migrated. Use the migration tracking process that you defined in the Planning stage to track the information about the people to be migrated, to schedule their migrations, and to track their migration progress.
Migration Day
Directory synchronization has copied user accounts and e-mail enabled contacts and groups from your local Active Directory to Microsoft Online. You must now use the Microsoft Online Administration Center to activate the Microsoft Online accounts of the users whose mailboxes you plan to migrate.
Use the Microsoft Online Migration Tools to migrate mailbox content and establish e-mail forwarding from the local Exchange Server mailboxes of the selected users to their Exchange Online mailboxes. .
Post migration validation includes:
- Use the Microsoft Online Administration Center to validate that the selected accounts are active.
- Use your local Active Directory and Exchange tools to validate that mail forwards arecorrectly set.
- Review the migration logs generated by the Microsoft Online Migration Tools.
- Update the tracking spreadsheet with the migration status and open any Support requests that may be required.
